by brennan biemann

The third and final panel of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights shows humanity being brutally punished for its sins. Up and down the rightmost rectangle, people are being slaughtered, tortured, and mutilated in grotesque ways. At the top of this panel, Bach painted a city engulfed in flames while armies march through its smoke-filled streets. Humanity is facing the consequences of its sins from the middle panel, and all it has built is crashing down. This symbolic end of the world shows Bosch's belief that humankind would be punished for indulgence.
   Currently, humanity is facing a threat that Bosch may well have considered the divine punishment that was destined to come, climate change. Across the world effects of our planet's warming are being felt in significant and small ways. Entire countries are burning, sinking, and melting. Of course, this tremendous shift in the exact place we call home has raised the attention of many. Politicians, activists, and even many corporations have been eager to speak out, calling for action and encouraging the world's citizens to band together to stop our collective destruction. However, although speeches and messages against climate change have been as plentiful as the plastic in the ocean, meaningful action by these same people has yet to follow. Despite misinformation, awareness about the current disaster has risen in recent years, yet global temperatures also have. Thousands of articles, books, documentaries, studies, and more have been produced on the topic. Agreements have been signed, promises have been made, and yet conditions worsen. This is not a problem of awareness. It is a problem of apathy. Despite knowing it all too well, most of humanity continues to march into the fire.
   Timothy Morton explained humanity's inability to take meaningful action to combat climate change by labeling it as a hyper object. Hyper-objects are so all-encompassing that we cannot comprehend them completely, just their effects, and thus, humans do not have the appropriate response to the level of threat that global warming poses. Assuming Boch's envisioned end of days is similarly a hyper-object would not be a stretch. People suffer unimaginably random and grotesque punishments seemingly unrelated yet somehow tied together as this grand punishment. "Against a backdrop of blackness, prison-like city walls are etched in inky silhouette against areas of flame and everywhere human bodies huddle in groups, amass in armies or are subject to strange tortures at the hands of oddly-clad executioners and animal-demons," (Sally Hickson). Most of this hellscape's victims are focused on its direct impact on them and cannot comprehend the broader catastrophe. This may be why there is seemingly little resistance to the end of the world in the third panel from those with the most to lose. 
The collage I interpolated into this disastrous landscape reflects this theme of inaction and obliviousness. Animated figures from Breaking Boundaries, a stereotypical "call-to-action" documentary, march out into the danger zone and towards the flames of a blazing forest fire. Above, the United Nations, a hopeful depiction of the future of diplomacy created in 1952, has been covered over by contemporary politicians. All three individuals present have made significant claims about actions to reverse climate change and yet have failed to deliver true success. Finally, off to either side, the two figures from the painting The Ambassadors stand watching over their contemporary counterparts. This collage symbolizes the ignorance and inaction of humanity and its leadership in the face of crisis. The Ambassadors was painted shortly after Boch's death, and in it, the two men stand surrounded by symbols of power and riches, unaware of a distorted skull looming beneath them. In this collage, they look forward in time at those who have come after, only to see that humanity has yet to learn its lesson.