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Three galleries of the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene Review, 2014
This paper considers three ‘galleries’ that explore the Anthropocene in cultural ways, and the implications of the Anthropocene idea for cultural institutions and heritage. The first gallery is the 2014–2016 exhibition Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands, [ Willkommen im Anthropozän: Unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Erde] at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The second ‘gallery’ of Anthropocene Posters sponsored by the Art Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), placed the Anthropocene in a ‘museum without walls’ in the streets of Berlin in 2013. The third ‘gallery of the Anthropocene’, was not a museum, but rather a landscape gallery (or ‘spectacle’) of in situ industrial heritage in Svalbard. Pyramiden, a town established to mine coal well north of the Arctic Circle in the early 20th century, has been recently transformed as an attraction for climate change science and heritage tourism. Here the hybridized local landscape creates a snapshot of the Anthropoc...
The term Anthropocene initially emerged from the Earth System science community in the early 2000s, denoting a concept that the Holocene Epoch has terminated as a consequence of human activities. First associated with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, it was then more closely linked with the Great Acceleration in industrialization and globalization from the 1950s that fundamentally modified physical, chemical, and biological signals in geological archives. Since 2009, the Anthropocene has been evaluated by the Anthropocene Working Group, tasked with examining it for potential inclusion in the Geological Time Scale. Such inclusion requires a precisely defined chronostratigraphic and geochronological unit with a globally synchronous base and inception, with the mid-twentieth century being geologically optimal. This reflects an Earth System state in which human activities have become predominant drivers of modifications to the stratigraphic record, making it clearly distinct from the Holocene. However, more recently, the term Anthropocene has also become used for different conceptual interpretations in diverse scholarly fields, including the environmental and social sciences and humanities. These are often flexibly interpreted, commonly without reference to the geological record, and diachronous in time; they often extend much further back in time than the mid-twentieth century. These broader conceptualizations encompass wide ranges and levels of human impacts and interactions with the environment. Here, we clarify what the Anthropocene is in geological terms and compare the proposed geological (chronostratigraphic) definition with some of these broader interpretations and applications of the term "Anthropocene," showing both their overlaps and differences. Plain Language Summary The Anthropocene concept, that modern human impacts on Earth have been sufficient to bring in a new geological epoch, is only two decades old. In that short time, its use has grown explosively, not only in the Earth sciences but also far more widely to spread through the sciences generally, to spill over into the social sciences, arts, and humanities. This has led to welcome discussions between diverse scholarly communities, though also to some very different interpretations of the Anthropocene, when interpreted through different disciplinary lenses. Notably, the geological ZALASIEWICZ ET AL.
Archaeology of the Anthropocene
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2014
What role will archaeology play in the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems? That is the question discussed by thirteen archaeologists and other scholars from five continents in this thought-provoking forum. Their responses are diverse and wide-ranging. While Edward Harris looks to archaeological stratigraphy for a material paradigm of the Anthropocene, Alice Gorman explores the extent of human impact on orbital space and lunar surfaces – challenging the assumption that the Anthropocene is confined to Earth. Jeff Benjamin investigates the sounds of the Anthropocene. Paul Graves-Brown questions the idea that the epoch had its onset with the invention of the steam engine, while Mark Hudson uses Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects to imagine the dark artefacts of the future. Victor Paz doubts the practical relevance of the concept to archaeological chronologies, and Bruce Clarke warns archaeologists to steer clear of the Anthropo...
Introduction. Forum on Archaeology of the Anthropocene
Edgeworth, Matt. 2014. Introduction. Archaeology of the Anthropocene (Forum). Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1:1, 73-77, Aug. 2014. Available at: http://www.equinoxpub.com/journals/index.php/JCA/article/view/18358
Introduction to the Forum on Archaeology of the Anthropocene, with 13 papers by archaeologists and others from various countries around the world, in the opening issue of Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. These papers try to get to grips with archaeology’s potential role in debate about the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems. Includes contributions from Edward Harris, Alice Gorman, Mark Hudson, Zoe Crossland, Chris Witmore...
Human Ecology, 2019
Like it or not, the Anthropocene is here. Despite debates about its emergence and whether or not it can be observed in discrete geomorphic or stratigraphic events, the rise of the Anthropocene as an implicit object of inquiry has marked a new age in art, science, humanism, and history. The renaming of the current geologic epoch as the age of humans is a story about space and time. Yet it is often presented as a story in which humans are the protagonist and other lives, processes, and objects act as mere background sceneries or props. In this collection of essays edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett, objects take centre stage and are enlivened with clever metaphor and meaning to narrate the tale of the Anthropocene. Each object presented in this volume is intricately interconnected to place, space, and time, and to the larger planetary scale within which scholars are increasingly starting to explore. The voices in this contribution include those of anthropologists, biologists, literary critics, geographers, historians, sociologists, artists, and writers who have each chosen a single object with which to narrate the marvels and dangers of the Anthropocene. Celebrated photographer Tim Flachs offers exquisite colour photographs to accompany each object and essay. The collection of essays is a modernized cabinet of curiosity curated by scholars and artists from the global north. Each essay is well written, some are in an almost poetic prose, while others present as personal stories or dialogues, but each tells its own material journey into the Anthropocene. The dearth of academic structure (i.e., few references or data) is at times remiss, but couples nicely with the mainstream fora within
The Anthropocene as an Event, not an Epoch
Journal of Quaternary Science, 2022
ABSTRACTOver the course of the last decade the concept of the Anthropocene has become widely established within and beyond the geoscientific literature but its boundaries remain undefined. Formal definition of the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphical series and geochronological epoch following the Holocene, at a fixed horizon and with a precise global start date, has been proposed, but fails to account for the diachronic nature of human impacts on global environmental systems during the late Quaternary. By contrast, defining the Anthropocene as an ongoing geological event more closely reflects the reality of both historical and ongoing human–environment interactions, encapsulating spatial and temporal heterogeneity, as well as diverse social and environmental processes that characterize anthropogenic global changes. Thus, an Anthropocene Event incorporates a substantially wider range of anthropogenic environmental and cultural effects, while at the same time applying more readily...
Varieties of the Anthropocene: A Transition from Geology to the Philosophy of History
Contrastes, 2019
¿Is the Anthropocene a new geological epoch? There is an open scientific and professional controversy, which stresses, even more, its cultural-theoretical and practical-moment, hard to resume under a single concept unifying all the threads of that denomination. This paper aims at [84] delivering, from a philosophical point of view, a semantic field for «Anthropocene» enabling to put an order in and understand the very extensive present literature on the subject.