Pivotal 20th Century Contributions to the Development of the Anthropocene Concept:Overview and Implications (original) (raw)
Related papers
Anthropocene: another academic invention?
Rendiconti Lincei, 2014
The concept of Anthropocene is examined in its various aspects from the meaning of the word to its relevance in scientific research. The etymology of the word is not consistent with the meaning of other geologic epochs. The basic assumption that Anthropocene is shaping the planet is challenged considering that natural processes are and will be operating on the planet and have the potential to obliterate any trace left by the human activity.
perspectives The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical References Subject collections
2020
The human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system. Although global-scale human influence on the environment has been recognized since the 1800s, the term Anthropocene, introduced about a decade ago, has only recently become widely, but informally, used in the global change research community. However, the term has yet to be accepted formally as a new geological epoch or era in Earth history. In this paper, we put forward the case for formally recognizing the Anthropocene as a new epoch in Earth history, arguing that the advent of the Industrial Revolution around 1800 provides a logical start date for the new epoch. We then explore recent trends in the evolution of the Anthropocene as humanity proceeds into the twenty-first century, focusing on the profound changes to our relationship with the rest of the living world and on early attempts and proposals for managing our relationship with the large geophysical cycles that drive the Earth's climate system.
Human activities now play a major, integral and ever-increasing role in the functioning of the Earth System. This fact lies at the heart of the notion of the Anthropocene. Documenting, understanding and responding to the present and future challenges posed by the recent, dramatic changes in the relationship between humans and their environment thus becomes an imperative for human society. This editorial presents the rationale for engaging with the Anthropocene across a wide range of disciplines from engineering and environmental science to the social sciences and humanities. This essentially transdisciplinary engagement requires the establishment of a new journal, The Anthropocene Review, the scope of which is outlined in this editorial.
, backed up by an impressive amount of data, trace the history of our entry into the Anthropocene, an era characterised by the impact of human activities on the earth's physical and biological systems. These historians of science make a stand against the deliberately mystifying narrative that suggests that the major changes at play were practically unknown until recent decades. In doing so, they highlight the conflicts between asymmetric forces and interests and call for a repoliticisation of the history of this era.
The anthropocene review, 2013
Human activities now play a major, integral and ever-increasing role in the functioning of the Earth System. This fact lies at the heart of the notion of the Anthropocene. Documenting, understanding and responding to the present and future challenges posed by the recent, dramatic changes in the relationship between humans and their environment thus becomes an imperative for human society. This editorial presents the rationale for engaging with the Anthropocene across a wide range of disciplines from engineering and environmental science to the social sciences and humanities. This essentially transdisciplinary engagement requires the establishment of a new journal, The Anthropocene Review, the scope of which is outlined in this editorial.
Review: Jeremy Davies, Birth of the Anthropocene
World History Connected , 2017
There remains little doubt that the last few centuries of human activity have profoundly altered the earth. The exponential growth of our species combined with our ever-increasing capacity to bend nature to our will have initiated a cascade of changes within the complex biological and climatological systems of this planet. These changes (which certainly include global warming, rising sea levels, declining biodiversity, loss of polar ice, and much else besides) could be of such profound scale that they may collectively qualify as the beginnings of a new epoch in the history of the earth. The environmental changes associated with this new "Anthropocene" may ultimately even threaten the viability of our modern ways of life, if not the entire human species. It should therefore be plain to see the dire need for all scholars, not just those of the earth sciences, to come to grips with the possibility of a dawning Anthropocene epoch. Jeremy Davies' concise, erudite and highly-engaging book, The Birth of the Anthropocene, will, I am sure, soon be regarded as one of the best introductions to this new and rapidly evolving field. Davies unpacks the many debates and complexities surrounding this new human era of global history and champions the Anthropocene as a common framework for scholars of the sciences and humanities to engage with the causes and consequences the current ecological crisis.
Mapping a Controversy of our Time: The Anthropocene
We offer a bibliometric analysis of the literature and authors of the controversial Anthropocene discipline. Thanks to digital tools, we comprehend this complexity by drawing on existing literature and digital networks. In order to appreciate the interdisciplinary character of the controversy, we show clusters of co-cited publications, co-authors, and co-occurring terms in the fields of social science, agricultural and biological science, environmental science, and Earth and planetary science. The multidisciplinary character of Anthropocene research is reflected in the co-citation analysis and the term co-occurrence analysis. We found two clusters of co-occurring terms, representing agreement and disagreement with Anthropocene, and offer a comparison of the emblematic works presented in the network.
Was the Anthropocene anticipated?
The Anthropocene Review, 2015
Various authors have identified ‘precursors’ of the new concept of the Anthropocene, with most frequent reference made to Antonio Stoppani, Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The effect, intended or otherwise, of finding forerunners is to deflate the significance of the proposed new geological epoch. We argue there were no precursors to the notion of the Anthropocene, and that there could not have been because the concept (put forward in the year 2000) is an outgrowth of the recent interdisciplinary understanding of the Earth as an evolving planet inaugurated in the 1980s by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and Earth system science. Earlier scientists who commented on ‘the age of man’ did so in terms of human impact on the environment or ‘the face of the Earth’, not the Earth system. Moreover, earlier Western conceptions relied on a progressive and linear evolutionary understanding of the spread of humankind’s geographical and ecological influence, whe...
Review of "The Birth of the Anthropocene" by Jeremy Davies
The word 'Anthropocene' has caught on amidst a frenzied panic to name a new geological epoch wherein Anthropos or Man as an undifferentiated whole is acting in the scale of a geological force, altering entire climate systems and the planet's biosphere in unprecedented ways. While geologists are still debating the official adoption of the term, the discursive construction of the Anthropocene has spread widely across academic, activist and popular spaces. Jeremy Davies' The Birth of the Anthropocene is a book about how to take the measure of a crisis by providing a stratigrapher's way of seeing the contemporary moment in its place in deep space and deep time. Davies takes the reader on a breathtaking tour of the planet's geohistory in the past millions of years, "to read the strata of the Earth as an autobiography of revolutions, decay and restoration" (27), cultivating an appreciation for how the Earth's layers can be peeled and read as an archive even by a nonspecialist. Davies invites us to consider a geological way of seeing as something political and spiritual.