Murat Cem Menguc, Bloom & Doom

Zine of ink drawings by Murat Cem Mengüç prompted by parallels between the Late Devonian mass extinction and our own accelerating Traumacene, a premeditated ecocide.

“I once volunteered at an institution called a national museum of natural history, at an exhibition titled Deep Time, which explored major extinctions in deep history.

Of all the extinctions highlighted, I was most fascinated by the Late Devonian. Like the current Anthropocene extinction, the Late Devonian was hastened by a living organism when rampant algal blooms suffocated the oceans, driving up to 80% of the Earth’s living organisms extinct.

The algae itself died at grand scale, but not to the point of extinction, while the dead of the Late Devonian, primarily the algae, became the fossil fuels on which industrialized society so readily depends.

Like the algae, scientists predict the organism which is causing the current extinction, human beings, will die off at epic scale but will not become extinct. Humans, the scientists argue, are too populous, inhabit too great a diversity of ecologies, and are too adaptable to disappear completely.

Unlike the algae, we are also self-conscious beings and this makes the current extinction a self-conscious disappearance. Probably for the first time in deep history, life will vanish across our planet while the organism responsible for the erasure will keep a record of it.”

—Murat Cem Mengüç