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 […]
Archive for the ‘Anthropocene’ Category
The Orbis spike
Posted in Anthropocene, tagged Anthropocene, capitalocene, environmental history, geology, modernity/coloniality research program, Orbis spike, world-systems theory on March 24, 2015 | Leave a Comment »
Sustainability bottleneck (or, No one here gets out alive?)
Posted in Anthropocene, Manifestos & auguries, tagged Anthropocene, astrobiology, Buddhism, cosmology, sustainability, sustainability bottleneck 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 […]
Anthropocenic reckoning
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged Anthropocene, Anthropocene Working Group, Clive Hamilton, Revkin 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 […]
More transgressions
Posted in Anthropocene, Science & society, tagged Anthropocene, planetary boundaries, Will Steffen 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 […]
Anthropocene, multispecies, & other trends
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged AAA, Anthropocene, anthropology, Hartigan, multispecies 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. […]
Anthropocene: Too serious for postmodern games
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Philosophy, Science & society, tagged Anthropocene, Clive Hamilton, environmental humanities, geology 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 […]
Anthropocene debate continues
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, environmental humanities, geology 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 […]
Against the Anthropocene
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged Andy Revkin, Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, capitalocene, environmental humanities 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, […]
On naming the Anthropocene
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged Andy Revkin, Anthropocene, capitalism, ecopolitics, environmental humanities, two cultures 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, […]
NYC: Arts & Humanities on the Anthropocene
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, tagged AESS, Anthropocene, eco-arts, environmental humanities 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 […]
Anthropocene aesthetics
Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged aesthetics, Anthropocene, coral reefs on April 10, 2014 | 1 Comment »
Cross-posting this piece by Emil from A(s)cene. Taylor’s coral reef art is beautiful. See also the discussion of Donna Haraway’s “String Figures” lecture and Bruno Latour’s 11 theses on capitalism.
Kant’s quaking subject
Posted in Anthropocene, Philosophy, tagged Anthropocene, Nigel Clark on March 13, 2014 | Leave a Comment »
Emil plunges us further into the inhuman nature of tsunamis, earthquakes, ethics, and modern subjectivity, over at A(S)CENE.