Category Archives: Readings

Posts about scholarly articles–in top menu or sidebar use “Bibliography” to view a list by author or “Disciplines covered” to view by academic field (mobile users see bottom of page)

“The Politics”

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CITATION:
Aristotle. 1981. Tr. T.A. Sinclair, rev. T.J. Saunders. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
Internet Classics Archive version (tr. Jowett) at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.html
ABSTRACT:

In The Politics Aristotle addresses the questions that lie at the heart of political science. How should society be ordered to ensure the happiness of the individual? Which forms of government are best and how Continue reading →

“Designing Autonomy: Opportunities for New Wildness in the Anthropocene”

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CITATION:
Cantrell, B., Martin, L.J., and Ellis, E.C. 2017. Trends in Ecology and Evolution Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 156–66.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
Maintaining wild places increasingly involves intensive human interventions. Several recent projects use semi-automated mediating technologies to Continue reading →

“Svalbard Global Seed Vault: A ‘Noah’s Ark’ for the World’s Seeds”

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CITATION:
Marte Qvenild. 2008. Development in Practice Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 110–16.
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ABSTRACT:
News about Norway’s plans to establish a ‘doomsday vault’ for seeds in the permafrost of the Artic archipelago of Svalbard as a back-up for conventional gene banks reached the world press in 2006. The idea of a Global Seed Vault, which today is considered Continue reading →

“Ethics in the Anthropocene: A research agenda”

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CITATION:
Jeremy J. Schmidt, Peter G. Brown and Christopher J. Orr. 2016. The Anthropocene Review, Vol. 3(3) pp. 188–200.
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ABSTRACT:
The quantitative evidence of human impacts on the Earth System has produced new calls for planetary stewardship. At the same time, numerous scholars reject modern social sciences by claiming that Continue reading →

“Impacts of Emerging Contaminants on Surrounding Aquatic Environment from a Youth Festival”

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CITATION:
JJ Jiang et al. 2015. Environmental Science and Technology, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 792–799.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
The youth festival as we refer to Spring Scream, a large-scale pop music festival, is notorious for the problems of Continue reading →

“Relative impacts of mitigation, temperature, and precipitation on 21st-century megadrought risk in the American Southwest”

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CITATION:
Ault, T.R. et al. 2016. Science Advances, vol. 2, e1600873
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ABSTRACT:
Megadroughts are comparable in severity to the worst droughts of the 20th century but are of much longer duration. A megadrought in the American Southwest would impose unprecedented stress on Continue reading →

“Valuation in the Anthropocene: Exploring options for alternative operations of the Glen Canyon Dam”

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CITATION:
Jones, B.A. et al. 2016. Water Resources and Economics vol. 14, pp. 3-13
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ABSTRACT:
Amidst debates about what conservation and preservation mean for large coupled human and natural systems, survey-based non-market valuation approaches for eliciting non-use values also may confront the need for Continue reading →

“Climate, Environment and Early Human Innovation: Stable Isotope and Faunal Proxy Evidence from Archaeological Sites (98-59ka) in the Southern Cape, South Africa”

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CITATION:

Roberts, P., C. S. Henshilwood, K. L. van Niekerk, P. Keene, A. Gledhill, J. Reynard, S. Badenhorst and J. Lee-Thorp. 2016 PLoS One 11(7):e0157408.

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ABSTRACT:

The Middle Stone Age (MSA) of southern Africa, and in particular its Still Bay and Howiesons Poort lithic traditions, represents a period of dramatic subsistence, cultural, and technological innovation by Continue reading →

“How humans drive speciation as well as extinction”

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CITATION:
Bull, J.W. and Maron, M. 2016. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 283: 20160600.
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ABSTRACT:
A central topic for conservation science is evaluating how human activities influence global species diversity. Humanity exacerbates extinction rates. But by what mechanisms does humanity drive the emergence of new species? Continue reading →

“Advances in restoration ecology: rising to the challenges of the coming decades”

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CITATION:
Perring, M.P. et al. 2015. Ecosphere, 6(8): art. 131.
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ABSTRACT:
Simultaneous environmental changes challenge biodiversity persistence and human wellbeing. The science and practice of restoration ecology, in collaboration with other disciplines, can Continue reading →

“The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis: A Biography of an Ingenious Species”

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CITATION:
R. DeFries. 2014. New York: Basic Books.
BOOK WEBSITE:
ABSTRACT:

The human species has long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food so that all 7 billion of us could eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing transformation as to Continue reading →

“When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal”

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CITATION:
Zalasiewicz, J., et al., 2015. Quaternary International, 383, pp. 196-203.
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ABSTRACT:
We evaluate the boundary of the Anthropocene geological time interval as an epoch, since it is useful to have a consistent temporal definition for this increasingly used unit, whether the presently informal term is eventually formalized or not. Continue reading →

“From hominins to humans: how sapiens became behaviourally modern”

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CITATION:
K. Sterelny. 2011. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, vol. 366, pp. 809–822.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
This paper contributes to a debate in the palaeoarchaeological community about the major time-lag between the origin of anatomically modern humans and the appearance of Continue reading →

“A Paleolithic Reciprocation Crisis: Symbols, Signals, and Norms”

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CITATION:
K. Sterelny. 2014. Biological Theory, vol. 9, pp 65-77.
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ABSTRACT:
Within paleoanthropology, the origin of behavioral modernity is a famous problem. Very large-brained hominins have lived for around half a million years, yet social lives resembling those known from the ethnographic record appeared perhaps 100,000 years ago. Why did it take 400,000 years for humans to start acting like humans? Continue reading →

“Beyond DNA: integrating inclusive inheritance into an extended theory of evolution”

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CITATION:
E. Danchin et al. 2011. Nature Reviews Genetics, vol. 12, pp. 475-486.
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ABSTRACT:
Many biologists are calling for an ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ that would ‘modernize the modern synthesis’ of evolution. Biological information is typically considered as being transmitted across generations by the DNA sequence alone, but accumulating evidence indicates that Continue reading →

“The Global Carbon Cycle: A Test of Our Knowledge of Earth as a System”

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CITATION:
P. Falkowski et al. 2000. Science, vol. 290, pp. 291-296.
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ABSTRACT:
Motivated by the rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 due to human activities since the Industrial Revolution, several international scientific research programs have analyzed the role of Continue reading →

“The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language”

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CITATION:
Steven Pinker. 2010. PNAS, vol. 107, suppl. 2, pp. 8993–8999.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by Continue reading →