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Archive for the ‘Anthropocene’ Category

4 Noble Truths of Socio-Ecological Suffering

Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , , on May 1, 2015 | 8 Comments »

Some 2500 years ago, a man named Siddhartha Gotama articulated what have come to be known as the “4 Noble Truths”: the truth of dukkha, or fundamental suffering (that there is a basic unsatisfactoriness to life), the truth of its causes (that it arises from an ignorance and misperception of the nature of things, which are […]

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Trembling yet?

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, tagged , , , , on April 25, 2015 | 1 Comment »

The New York Times reported this week that “The United States Geological Survey on Thursday released its first comprehensive assessment of the link between thousands of earthquakes and oil and gas operations, identifying and mapping 17 regions where quakes have occurred. […] “By far the hardest-hit state, the report said, is Oklahoma, where earthquakes are hundreds of […]

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The Orbis spike

Posted in Anthropocene, tagged , , , , , , on March 24, 2015 | Leave a Comment »

In an article in Nature entitled “Defining the Anthropocene,” geographers and climate scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin provide a new approach to dating this era that focuses on an event they call the “Orbis spike,” a dip in atmospheric CO2 occurring around 1610. Effectively, what their proposal does it to allow geologists to harmonize their work […]

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Sustainability bottleneck (or, No one here gets out alive?)

Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries, tagged , , , , , on January 22, 2015 | 10 Comments »

Astrophysicist and NPR blogger Adam Frank writes about the “sustainability bottleneck” as the state faced by technological civilizations like ours, which have learned how to “intensively harvest” energy, but not how to sustain themselves through the crisis this harvesting sets off. It turns out there may be millions of planets that give rise to life in our galaxy alone. Frank […]

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Anthropocenic reckoning

Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged , , , on January 17, 2015 | 2 Comments »

With environmental and eco-political news in the front pages daily, it’s easy to get back into the swing of regular, even daily, posting after the winter holiday lull. Here’s more on the “dating the ecocrisis” theme… Andy Revkin is reporting that the Anthropocene Working Group has concluded that the middle of the twentieth century makes […]

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More transgressions

Posted in Anthropocene, Science & society, tagged , , on January 16, 2015 | 1 Comment »

The journal Science has just released more news of planetary boundary transgression. (This is related to my post from a few days ago.) Specifically, of nine such boundaries connected to “processes and systems [that] regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth System,” four have been crossed. Two of these, climate change and biosphere integrity, are […]

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Anthropocene, multispecies, & other trends

Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged , , , , on December 13, 2014 | 8 Comments »

Academic trend watchers will be interested to see how the digital and the Anthropocene have catapulted to the top of hot topics at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference. (A few others are mentioned here and here, Bruno Latour’s keynote being one of them. Here’s a collection of tweets on Latour’s talk, most of them by Jenny Carlson. […]

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Anthropocene: Too serious for postmodern games

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Philosophy, Science & society, tagged , , , on August 18, 2014 | 6 Comments »

The following is a guest post by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. It continues the Immanence series “Debating the Anthropocene.” See here, here, and here for previous articles in the series. (And note that some lengthy comments have been added to the previous post by Jan Zalasiewicz, Kieran […]

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Anthropocene debate continues

Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged , , , on August 5, 2014 | 10 Comments »

Kieran Suckling’s post Against the Anthropocene, originally posted here on July 7 and subsequently shared with the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Anthropocene Working Group by Andy Revkin, has elicited a round of emailed back-and-forths from some noteworthy individuals, including paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz and paleoecologist Anthony Barnosky. As this debate would be of interest to readers of this […]

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Against the Anthropocene

Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged , , , , on July 7, 2014 | 14 Comments »

The following is a guest post by Kieran Suckling, Executive Director of the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. It follows the discussion begun here and in some AESS conference sessions, including Andy Revkin’s keynote talk (viewable here) and responses to it (such as Clive Hamilton’s).  I In considering why the name “Anthropocene” has been proposed, why it has been embraced by many, […]

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On naming the Anthropocene

Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on June 12, 2014 | 14 Comments »

The following are the comments I prepared for the roundtable “The Arts and Humanities Respond to the Anthropocene.” They follow in the line of critical thinking on the Anthropocene initiated by gatherings like the Anthropocene Project (see here, here, and here, and some of the posts at A(S)CENE) and journals like Environmental Humanities. As a cultural theorist, […]

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NYC: Arts & Humanities on the Anthropocene

Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, tagged , , , on June 10, 2014 | Leave a Comment »

This week’s AESS conference “Welcome to the Anthropocene” features a breakfast roundtable called “The Arts and Humanities Respond to the Anthropocene.” See the session description below. Unfortunately the panelists have been dropping like flies: it looks like neither dancer and performance artist Jennifer Monson, eco-artist Jackie Brookner, nor performer and comedian Jennifer Joy can make it. That […]

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