Recently it was my privilege to attend the “Anthropocene Campus” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. The Campus brought together over 150 participants from around the world and with an incredible diversity of intellectual backgrounds for Continue reading
Category Archives: Reflections
Posts that reflect on issues related to habitation in the Anthropocene, without presenting a particular reading.
Novel ecosystems
Currently a very interesting and rather important debate is happening within the discipline of ecology. Scientific debates are usually not very public, not because anybody has anything to hide, but because they tend to be rather technical and difficult to follow. The debate over Continue reading
On hope
Water crisis in California: the earth responds
When I recently returned from a trip to California I took something with me that is very precious to that state, something that is causing all kinds of problems for California, but is absolutely essential to everyone and everything in California. I Continue reading
Christianity and Stewardship, North and South
The popularity of Lynn White’s argument shows that it is too easy to think that Christianity is inevitably opposed to an environmental perspective or that evangelicals will reject mainstream climate science. In a previous post, I looked at Continue reading
Are we the walrus?
This post was supposed to be about the People’s Climate March. As I sat down to draft it, however, a headline about a different climate-related gathering caught my eye: tens of thousands of Pacific walruses have again Continue reading
Why “habitability?”
Welcome to the “public” launch of this site! We (see “Who we are“: click or use the menu above) have been posting since late June, and after some tweaks to the site are now ready to present what we are doing. I have re-posted the first entry, which lays out one of the main themes we want to explore; there are already 20 entries that examine it and/or other ideas. We hope you will explore what we have written so far (see the Users’ guide for an explanation of the types of posts we do, and how to find them). We plan to post every Monday morning–please come back, or follow us (buttons in the sidebar on the right or below if you are on a mobile device). Most of all, we invite your comments–we are eager to learn from the conversation!
Environmentalism has plenty of buzzwords already–sustainability and resiliency come right to mind. Does it make sense to propose another? In a sense that is what we are doing by making habitability the focus of this blog. In this initial post I’d like to try to suggest why that theme is worth exploring—with the acknowledgment from the outset that its content is not well developed.
In a very obvious way discussions of the Anthropocene immediately raise the question of
View original post 813 more words
What does the future look like?
As I said in a previous blogpost, there is no dispute among scientists that massive change is happening to our planet right now and that is very likely human induced. What is under debate though are Continue reading
The Pizzly Bear as a Mascot for the Anthropocene
One of the debates about the Anthropocene is about just how precisely the term should be used. In a post this week at the Anthropocene Review blog Clive Hamilton complains about the imprecision he sees in Continue reading
Invaders all around us
Many of us are horrified by stories of invasive species wreaking havoc on ecosystems, upsetting the natural balance, and even impacting humans directly.
The example of Chikungunya that I mentioned in my last post demonstrates Continue reading
Pitfalls and potentials in dating the onset of the Anthropocene
Just when (and how) did humans begin influencing the planetary system? Recent posts on this blog – notably those by Zev and Stephen on creation myths, Noah’s on cosmopolitanism, and David’s on Holocene climate – have spurred me to think about how delimiting a chronological date on the start of the Anthropocene influences how we think about habitability. Here I present some musings.
As initially conceived by non-archaeologists, the start of the Anthropocene was placed Continue reading
Biology in a changing world
Our world is undergoing a massive change, induced by humans. There is no debate about this among scientists. There is debate, however, about the consequences of this change.
Like many other organisms we actively alter our environment and become ecosystem engineers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_engineer). A classical example for this process is Continue reading
Cosmopolitanism in the Anthropocene
What does it mean to live in the Anthropocene? On one hand, it means that the human species has transformed the climatic and environmental processes of its entire planet. So radically are we changing our biosphere that we may bring about the collapse of our economic system[1] and perhaps even a sixth “mass extinction event”[2].
But announcements of the Anthropocene do not merely describe. They also prescribe. Like any environmental matter Continue reading
A discourse on habitability: The Anthropocene as ecological dyad
The Holocene, as depicted in Figure 1 below, is formally the current geological epoch and represents the previous ∼11,500 calendar years to present. During the Holocene, environmental change occurred naturally and Earth’s regulatory capacity maintained the conditions that enabled human development. Regular temperatures, freshwater availability and biogeochemical flows all stayed predominately in a narrow range. Now, in the primeval stages of the Anthropocene, human activities have reached Continue reading
Earth, Life, and Time: What is Natural?
Life on Earth has always altered its environment.1 “Deep” time records major shifts in atmospheric composition, for example, as life evolved photosynthesis, leading to a massive transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere to the biosphere. Given this, is the large-scale injection into the atmosphere of anthropogenically released carbon a completely natural consequence of biotic activity?
Atmospheric levels of CO2 have always changed, attributable in part to life — and well before the influence of humans. On geologic time scales such fluctuation results from Continue reading
A creation myth for the Anthropocene
Stephen’s post on Lynn White helped me focus on an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while: the need for a new creation myth suited to the Anthropocene.
White’s argument reminds us that creation myths derive their power from their status as fundamental texts within the religious tradition that underlies a society’s moral life; a key strategy for justifying a course of action is Continue reading
Why “habitability?”
Environmentalism has plenty of buzzwords already–sustainability and resiliency come right to mind. Does it make sense to propose another? In a sense that is what we are doing by making habitability the focus of this blog. In this initial post I’d like to try to suggest why that theme is worth exploring—with the acknowledgment from the outset that its content is not well developed.
In a very obvious way discussions of the Anthropocene immediately raise the question of the future habitability of the planet. The Anthropocene idea was linked early to Continue reading
Inhabiting the Anthropocene 
You must be logged in to post a comment.