Miss Anthropecene is the latest album by Canadian singer/song-writer Grimes. It is very much not my genre but when I heard about it on NPR the concept peaked my interest.

The name combines “misanthrope” (someone who hates humankind) with “anthropecene”  (the current geological age of the Earth in which climate change is dominant). Miss Anthropecene uses the anthropomorphic personification common in ancient mythology to capture the “person” of climate change. (See both the NPR and Gaytimes articles linked in this post).

This idea really struck me. Though I wasn’t able to find any more examples of the personification of climate change, the idea led me to think about how we can depict and explain climate change in various ways. I think one common vehicle is the illness of a personified earth or nature. But I also found a very cool thread about useful climate change metaphors.

As for Grime’s album, there are both sf and mythology fantasy tie ins and though the art style in her music videos capture both, I’ve had a hard time seeing a unified theme of climate change in the songs. One song (“We Appreciate Power”) actually takes the tone of fake pro-AI propaganda to describe an AI take over. (You can learn more about that in this Gaytimes article).