Tag Archives: Anthropocene

“Diachronous beginnings of the Anthropocene: The lower bounding surface of anthropogenic deposits”

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THIS POST IS PART OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT—SEE THIS DESCRIPTION OF OUR SUBMISSION.

CITATION:

Edgeworth, M., deB Richter, D., Waters, C., Haff, P., Neal, C. & Price, S. J. 2015. The Anthropocene Review, pp. 1-26.

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ABSTRACT:

Across a large proportion of Earth’s ice-free land surfaces, a solid-phase stratigraphic boundary marks the division between humanly modified ground and natural geological deposits. At its clearest, the division takes the form of Continue reading →

Decolonizing the Anthropocene

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Does Mother Earth have rights? Can glaciers listen? Should invisible elves be consulted about development projects? If you find these questions fanciful, please bear with me. I may not convince you to answer them in the affirmative, but I think I can convince you to take them seriously. Here goes. Continue reading →

“Futurologists Look Back”

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CITATION:
Sassaman, Kenneth E. 2012. Archaeologies, 8, pp. 250-268.
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ABSTRACT:
The gulf between indigenous and western experiences in the Americas may appear so vast as to obscure the relevance of knowledge about the ancient past to challenges of today. Yet, in imaging alternative futures, people of varied cultural dispositions find Continue reading →

Big History, Deep History, and the Problem of Scale

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What does it mean to talk about the anthropocene historically? Thinking about this has forced me to take a closer look at a couple areas of scholarship that I’ve watched grow over the past few years: big history and deep history. These two interdisciplinary projects have recently gained Continue reading →

Do we need “the Anthropocene?”

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As 2014 came to a close I received a wonderfully provocative e-mail from my friend and colleague in the Environmental Political Theory community John Meyer. He wrote that Continue reading →

“European Colonialism and the Anthropocene: A view from the Pacific Coast of North America”

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CITATION:
Kent G. Lightfoot, Lee M. Panich, Tsim D. Schneider, and Sara L. Gonzalez. 2013. Anthropocene, Vol. 4, pp. 101-115.
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ABSTRACT:
This paper argues that European colonialism from AD 1500 to the early 1800s marked a fundamental transformation in human–environment interactions across much of the world. The rapid founding of various colonial enterprises, particularly mission and managerial colonies, unleashed Continue reading →

“Fingerprint, bellwether, model event: Climate change as speculative anthropology”

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CITATION:
Whitington, Jerome. 2013. Anthropological Theory, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 308-328.
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ABSTRACT:

The climate change fingerprint, bellwether and model event are three epistemic figures through which it may be possible to know the future through attention to specific material relations. They offer Continue reading →

The Anthropocene Campus

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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 →

“On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature”

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CITATION:
Eileen Crist. 2013. Environmental Humanities, Vol. 3, pp. 129-147.
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ABSTRACT:
This paper examines the recent proposal to christen our geological epoch “the Anthropocene.” The reasoning offered for this new name is that humanity’s enormous mark on the geological strata would be Continue reading →

“Intersection of Landscape, Anthropocene and Fourth Paradigm”

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CITATION:
A.S. Barau and A.N.M. Ludin. 2012. Living Reviews in Landscape Research, Vol. 6, No. 1.
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ABSTRACT:
This review explores landscape science in the proposed age of the Anthropocene and Fourth Paradigm. Both the Anthropocene and the Fourth Paradigm put landscape science to task, due to Continue reading →

Water crisis in California: the earth responds

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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 →

Are we the walrus?

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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 →

“Shell middens and other anthropogenic soils as global stratigraphic signatures of the Anthropocene”

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CITATION:
Jon M. Erlandson. 2013. Anthropocene, 4, pp. 24-32.
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ABSTRACT:
Evidence for aquatic foraging, fishing, and scavenging by hominins dates back at least two million years, but aquatic resource use intensified with Continue reading →

“Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”

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CITATION:
Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2012. New Literary History, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 1-18.
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ABSTRACT:
This article begins by describing how the figure of the human has been thought in anticolonial and postcolonial writing—as that of the Continue reading →

The Pizzly Bear as a Mascot for the Anthropocene

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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 →

Pitfalls and potentials in dating the onset of the Anthropocene

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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 →