As COVID-19 has spread around the world, it’s been sad to see agencies such as the World Health Organization attacked for alleged shortcomings while it struggles to encourage coordinated action against this unprecedented crisis.

The new coronavirus is a frighteningly accelerated version of the incremental disruptions of climate change. Both are Anthropocene crises because they confound or collapse connections between local and global environments normally believed to be safely distanced and manageable. Here I'll explore how a COVID-19 context affects the roles of Jupiter and Giacomo, and alters the emotional – and potentially transformative -- impacts of the play’s tragicomedy.

Cymbeline in the Anthropocene group discussion of the play's ecology on Day 2 of the Santa Barbara meeting, January 25, 2020.

In the past three decades ecology has lit a greening fire across disciplines, from environmental history to environmental management, from ecofeminism to green economics. Greening artistic values have spawned land-art, site-specific dance, nature writing, and music with whales.