Last week’s Dream Course talk came from Candis Callison of the University of British Columbia, an expert on Science and Technology Studies, Indigenous Studies, and journalism. She argued that Continue reading
Tag Archives: nonhumans
There Goes the Neighborhood: Urban Coyotes in Pennsylvania and California
Coyote in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
This post was co-authored by Christian Hunold, Drexel University
and Teresa Lloro-Bidart, Cal Poly Pomona
Coyotes have incorporated themselves into nearly every major city in North America. Coyotes’ ability to thrive in cities testifies not only to the Anthropocene’s blurring of human-wildlife boundaries; it also undermines the idea that Continue reading
Pathogens and the Anthropocene: Germs, Genes, Geography, Part 2
[This is the continuation of the post from last week.]
To speak of an “Anthropocene for pathogens” is to imagine the ways that human transformation of the environment has shaped the ecology and evolution of infectious microbes. In other words, it is to imagine Continue reading
Pathogens and the Anthropocene: Germs, Genes, Geography, Part 1
The smallpox virus
We welcome our colleague Kyle Harper to the blog; his bio is on the OU contributors page. His book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, is now available from Princeton University Press. Continue reading
Urban Ecology
As we get started with our series on the urban Anthropocene, I’d like to approach the topic as a biologist, and think of cities as places filled with various kinds of life.
Continue reading
Weedy Resistance: Multispecies Tactics for Contesting “The Age of Man”
We welcome Ellie Irons, an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY, as a guest on the blog . . . click for her own website, or see her bio under the “Who we are” tab.
resistance (Biology): Ability (of an organism, tissue, or cell) to withstand a destructive agent or condition such as a chemical compound, a disease agent, or an environmental stressor. (American Heritage® Medical Dictionary) Continue reading
Loving the Anthr*pocene
My previous post was a provocation on refusal. How, I asked, might the Anthr*pocene concept naturalize and even magnify the violent, dispossessionary forces it purports to describe? And how might refusing this concept relate to Continue reading
Refusing the Anthropocene
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about refusal and resistance. What is the difference between them? And what implications does this distinction have for individual and collective action? In part, my preoccupation reflects Continue reading
4 questions about anthroecological theory from a biologist
THIS POST IS PART OF OUR ANTHROPOCENE BIOSPHERE PROJECT–A SERIES OF POSTS ON ERLE ELLIS’ ‘ECOLOGY IN AN ANTHROPOGENIC BIOSPHERE‘ (ECOLOGICAL MONOGRAPHS, 85/3 (2015))
As a wildlife biologist I have questions about the ways Ellis’ anthroecology theory is different from the long history of ecological theory that precedes it. In reading Ellis (2015) four questions occur to me for which I could not find an easy answer. Continue reading
“A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene”
CITATION:
J.K. Gibson-Graham. 2011. Gender, Place & Culture. Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 1-21.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
ABSTRACT:
At the core of J.K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist political imaginary is the vision of a decentralized movement that connects globally dispersed subjects and places through webs of signification. We view these subjects and places both Continue reading
“A Manifesto for Abundant Futures”
CITATION:
Rosemary-Claire Collard, Jessica Dempsey, and Juanita Sundberg. 2015. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Vol. 105, No. 2, pp. 322-330.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
Publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.973007
ABSTRACT:
The concept of the Anthropocene is creating new openings around the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment. In this article, we address one arena in which the Anthropocene is prompting a sea change: conservation. The path emerging in mainstream conservation is, we argue, Continue reading
Toward a More-Than-Human Anthropocene
THIS POST IS PART OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT—SEE THIS DESCRIPTION OF OUR SUBMISSION.
By exploring habitability in the Anthropocene, we imply that a human-dominated world can still be a world that supports thriving human populations. This orientation holds a certain appeal, but it is, I contend, in need of serious interrogation. Continue reading
Habitability as a commons: Fearing a tragedy of human(ized) nature
THIS POST IS PART OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT—SEE THIS DESCRIPTION OF OUR SUBMISSION.
Some of the recent posts have made me think of the famous book written by Elinor Ostrom, “Governing the Commons.” Ostrom looks at the problem of Continue reading
“Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis”
THIS POST IS PART OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE PROJECT—SEE THIS DESCRIPTION OF OUR SUBMISSION.
CITATION:
Umeek E. Richard Atleo. 2011. Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis. University of British Columbia Press.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
Publisher’s site: http://www.ubcpress.com/search/title_book.asp?BookID=299173519
ABSTRACT:
In Nuu-chah-nulth, the word tsawalk means “one.” It expresses the view that all living things — humans, plants, and animals — form part of an integrated whole brought into harmony through constant Continue reading
“On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature”
CITATION:
Eileen Crist. 2013. Environmental Humanities, Vol. 3, pp. 129-147.
ON-LINE AVAILABILITY:
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
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
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
Inhabiting the Anthropocene 
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