Anthropos and the Anthropocene (original) (raw)
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The Anthropocene the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability
The British Journal for the History of Science, 2021
, aims to deepen understandings of the mutual shaping of the Anthropocene and environmental humanities. The latter, the author claims, has devoted less attention than economics, politics and historical studies to the apprehended environmental issues and climate change. The intended readership for this work needs to be stated straight up. Although written for 'an educated public' of reading clubs, 'undergraduate courses and graduate seminars' (p. xi), The Anthropocene & the Humanities read, to me, like a high-school-and early undergraduate-level take on human-made climate change, industrial capitalist economies and their depictions in art and literature. The work's geographical bias, by no means an inherent fault, should have been flagged up; the perspective it is written from, and the putative readership it is intended for, are North American. This is because the aforementioned undergraduates are the sorts of students who, in the US, study in liberal-arts colleges or take comparative-literature courses whilst intending to pursue science majors. Such constituencies have shaped the choices Merchant has made. The intention of this book is to demonstrate how 'the concept of the Anthropocene goes beyond earlier concepts and periodizations such as preindustrial, colonial, industrial, modern and postmodern by presenting a clear and forceful characterization of the future crisis humankind faces' (p. xi) and to illustrate its impact upon literature, art and philosophy, and to a lesser extent the law. The six short chapters are scaled for the designated readership. The narrative is paced to allow for non-expert readers to absorb this important argument. The temporal scope of the book ranges from circa the sixth century BC to the present. Its spatial scope is predominantly northern-hemisphere and anglophone. Chapter 1 surveys the definition of the Anthropocene formulated by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer and the key figures and researchers who have advanced various conceptual terms inspired by the former. The book includes black-and-white images of the theorists whose ideas are discussed, from
Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene
Environmental Ethics, 2018
In Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, editors Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino have assembled 19 essays and interventions by some of the most distinguished names in a now 'multisperspectival' (xi) research field, from Greta Gaard to Wendy Wheeler and Kate Rigby, all focused on finding 'more critical and imaginative tools to comprehend the Anthropocene' (13). The challenge faced by the collection's contributors is elegantly summarised by Richard Kerridge in his Foreword (xiii-xvii). 'Even as the Anthropocene challenges uscollective humanityto take greater and more exceptional responsibility,' he writes, 'it also admonishes us for past hubris, and relegates us to the category of stumbling, floundering creatures whose plans go awry because we understand too little: in other words, natural creatures, caught up in forces beyond our understanding' (xv). Not the least difficulty is, therefore, one of finding a narrative or narratives that might contain the multitudes denoted by Kerridge's reference to 'collective humanity'. In fact, and as Kerridge also points out, 'some of the contributors to the collection reject the term "Anthropocene"' precisely because it assumes a 'unitary Anthropos' (xvi). From a 'feminist, postcolonial or more broadly Environmental Justice perspective' (xvii), humans are not all equally responsible for 'environmental disasters' (xv), nor equally able to rise to the challenge those disasters present. Moreover, and as the material turn has underlined, humankind is entangled with the morethan-human in ways that emphasize the extent to which both 'are continuously engaged in the production and modification of the system and thus of each other' (xvi). If this inevitably suggests a 'rich array' of different perspectives, as Oppermann and Iovino point out in their own Introduction (1-22), those perspectives are nevertheless brought together by a strong and shared sense of the urgency of 'current ecological crises' (1) created by and 'within systems of massive exploitation of limited natural capital' (2). Arguably, the Environmental Humanities are united within a 'ethical-educational project of creating alliances between science, society, and cultural discourses' (3): '[t]he pivotal question here is: how will new modes of knowing and being, which the Environmental Humanities call for, enable environmentally just practices?' (2). Divided into four parts, the collection turns first to the challenge of 'Re-mapping the Humanities (23-112). In the opening chapter, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asks if 'word' and 'world' are really as passive as the term Anthropocene implies (25). Instead, he shifts the emphasis towards a 'posthuman environs' (the chapter title) built around 'eco-sonorous terms' (27) that highlight the way that matter inscribes humans, 'regardless of the epochs we declare' (25). In 'Environmental History between Institutionalization and Revolution', Marco Armiero engages with a different aspect of anthropocentrism, the '"human-centric" discipline' of history (45), and the tension between its (potentially revolutionary) transformation and its absorption into the mainstream (45), wryly concluding 'I would prefer to ignore the academic Winter Palace and Occupy reality!' (57). Next, Hubert Zapf explores the challenge of interdisciplinarity through a chapter on 'Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Transdisciplinary Knowledge of Literature', focusing on some of the ways in which literary knowledge might already offer forms of 'transdisciplinary GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM
The theory of the Anthropocene: Inquiry into the ‘age of Anthropos’ between natural sciences and environmental humanities, 2018
The present MA research aims to analyze how the notion of ‘Anthropocene’ is implemented within the scientific and humanistic inquiry. More specifically, the research will attempt to shed light and critically reflect upon the basic elements that constitute the Anthropocene as a potentially rich epistemic concept and as a ‘narrative’ – i.e. a set of beliefs, logics and reasoning that portray the ‘age of man’. This aim will be achieved through a critical meta-analysis of the current and most relevant literature on the matter, from the most recent geological and stratigraphical studies conducted by the Anthropocene Working Group to the questions on meaning and value raised by the humanistic agenda. The methodology is based on a philosophical approach – that is, reflecting on the language, meaning and knowledge that the Anthropocene narrative comprise of. The research attempts to answer to the need of formulating a theoretically solid and well-equipped framework to face the current and unprecedent environmental challenges as a complement to the dominant managerial and business-centered approach. In conclusion, it shall aim to promote the idea of creating interdisciplinary educational programs where scientific and humanistic language are integrated.
The Environmental Humanities and the Challenges of the Anthropocene
2016
risks have long extended into the social sphere-a sphere where, after all, they are also rooted. As Uwe Lübken and Christof Mauch put it, 'environmental risk is not simply a phenomenon "out there" but the result of social, economic and cultural processes' (2011, 112). Food scarcity, poverty, water and air pollution, social injustices and gender inequalities, energy demands, and climate-related health challenges are only some of the conditions to rethink the social in ecological terms and vice versa. The geo-and biopolitical consequences of this discourse on a global scale are also expectable. As Kathleen McAfee writes, AQ3
Metactritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2017
Among eco studies, the Anthropocene theory is by far the most unusual in the field of humanities. First and foremost, it differs from the Eco-Marxist criticism in that that its grounding is not in critical theory, but in the scientifically traceable changes in the environment, which are then re-politicised. Secondly, its claims pose a certain pessimism, in contrast with the activist optimism that we can still change something about our future as a species. In the Anthropocene, humans have changed the face of the Earth in so much that it is irreversible, the industrial man versus nature paradigm is now obsolete and replaced by man as a force of nature. Then why is this part of the “studies” series, what critical insight can humanities impose on the gloom data?
New Paths into the Anthropocene
Historical ecology is a practical framework of concepts and methods for studying the past and future of the relationship between people and their environments. Its holistic, ethical, and place-based approach can ‘grow’ regional expertise in managing the future. This article offers an overview of the origins and growing integration of several strands that comprise historical ecology, paying particular attention to theoretical contexts and offering examples of practical applications. Historical ecology is not a new discipline so much as a ‘cluster’ or ‘cloud’ of mutually compatible questions, concepts, methods, and values that provide a rich environment within which to find common cause with other initiatives; such communities are taking shape and broadening their inclusivity.