Are climate change and the Anthropocene inseparable? In the absence of human-made climate change, would we still be talking about and living in the Anthropocene? Anyone might be forgiven for thinking that Continue reading
Tag Archives: climate change
Pondering a diorama to perceive the Anthropocene
“This sprawling epic is as lively as a natural history museum diorama.” (Stephanie Zacharek, review of “10,000 BC”)
Perceiving means to become conscious of, to realize, to understand, to grasp. Natural history museums strive to enable the public to perceive, commonly in re-creations of past worlds. Who hasn’t gazed over a diorama of the Carboniferous Period, for example, Continue reading
Flying Over Greenland
I try not to panic about the Anthropocene. Continue reading
Sensing High Water in Venice
Flood warning siren in Venice (from Sounds Like Noise)
Visiting Venice this summer suggested some intellectual bridges between cities (see our previous series on the Urban Anthropocene), and our new theme (Perceiving the Anthropocene). How do cities help us perceive the Anthropocene— Continue reading
Video of “Coupled Urban Metabolism” panel discussion
On April 19, 2018, Stephanie Pincetl, of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, presented her ideas on coupled urban metabolism at a Continue reading
Video of “Cities and Our Future” panel discussion
Earlier this spring, Cindy Simon Rosenthal offered a series of three posts on the topic of “Cities and Our Future: Governance in the Anthropocene.” On March 6, 2018 (rescheduled
Continue reading
Who Will Lead?
This is the first in Dr. Rosenthal’s three-part series on “Cities and Our Future: Governance in the Anthropocene.”
When President Trump proclaimed that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, he claimed to represent the “citizens of Pittsburgh not Paris.” Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto was quick to respond, tweeting Continue reading
“Moving from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of concern’ in order to grow economic food futures in the Anthropocene”
CITATION:
Hill, A. 2015. Agriculture and Human Values, vol. 32: pp. 551-563.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
Agrifood scholars commonly adopt “a matter of fact way of speaking” to talk about the extent of neoliberal rollout in the food sector and the viability of “alternatives” to capitalist food initiatives. Over the past few decades Continue reading
“Cities in the age of the Anthropocene: Climate change agents and the potential for mitigation”
CITATION:
Pincetl, S. 2017. Anthropocene, Vol. 20, pp. 74-82.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
Cities are human creations where many of the emissions causing climate change originate. Every aspect of daily life in cities Continue reading
The Tragedy of Coral Bleaching
Coral bleaching of Lizard Island. Photo credit: Trond Amundsen
If you have ever been lucky enough to see a tropical reef, you will know what I mean: these are places of Continue reading
Prospection and the Anthropocene
I’d like to share two recent items from the news that make a sobering pairing.
The first is an opinion piece in the New York Times by psychologist Martin Seligman and Times science writer John Tierny summarizing a new theory about human beings that emphasizes our orientation toward the future. Continue reading
“Relative impacts of mitigation, temperature, and precipitation on 21st-century megadrought risk in the American Southwest”
CITATION:
Ault, T.R. et al. 2016. Science Advances, vol. 2, e1600873
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
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
The Iconoclastic Anthropocene: On How We Choose to Destroy Art
On November 4, 1966, the Arno overflowed its banks into the streets of Florence. A number of prominent foreign art historians, including Frederick Hartt and John Shearman, arrived soon thereafter to assist their Italian colleagues, working generally under the oversight of the Uffizi’s conservation director Umberto Baldini, in developing a response to a cultural emergency: the Italian Renaissance was underwater. Their collective expertise facilitated the arduous work of restoring what could be salvaged from the flood, which had 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”
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.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
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
The French Lake Dam Fish Ladder and the Temporality of Usefulness
French Lake Dam Fish Ladder (photograph: Larry Smith)
Dispatch from London: Sunken Cities
Even on a quiet day the British Museum in London is full, but on a rainy day during the summer it is positively packed, with a long line of visitors winding around the corner. Adding to the popularity at the moment is Continue reading
Surviving the Anthropocene Part 2: Of Omega Points and Oil
My previous post lamented the flawed presentation of climate change at the David Koch-funded Hall of Human Origins and suggested that a spiritual-scientific ideology, traceable in part to Teilhard de Chardin, infuses the Smithsonian’s Human Origins initiative and related events. In this follow-up, I take a closer look at this ideology and its connection to broader currents in contemporary evolutionary thought and the Anthropocene. Continue reading
