scholarly journals Anthropocene: Does the New Geological Age push towards a Metamorphosis of the World

Author(s):  
Jordi Lopez Ortega

The Anthropocene has created a new cartography. Various disciplines and discourses overlap each other. Two fields of knowledge: geology and anthropology are unified in one single concept. The Axial Age separated everyday practices from an unbiased and objective view of the world. Romanticism, in the nineteenth century, challenged the separation between the natural sciences and the sciences of the spirit. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer had two distinct parts; a first establishes "a period of time" the second an "epistemic tool". This paper is intended to illustrate the epistemological dimension of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene defines the present geological epoch as dominated by humans. Eduard Suess, Antonio Stopani, Teilhard de Chardin, Vladimir Vernadsky etc., a century ago, anticipated the concept of Anthropocene. "Noösphere" is a term from the "world of thought". The hypothesis of an earth as a living organism, which is inspired by J.W. Goethe's "Naturwissenschaft", allows two disciplines to be inte-grated into one term: geology and anthropology. We have atmospheric phenomena that are in-compressible without presupposing life. The Anthropocene modifies the foundations of our vi-sion of the world. In the Gaia Hypothesis we find the same roots as in the Anthropocene concept: Goethe, Vernadky, etc. The concepts of symbiogenesis, homeostasis, etc., allow us to formulate new questions. This paper analyzes the reconfiguration of relations between the earth and all its inhabitants. It is, for the social sciences, a challenge: a metamorphosis of our vision of the world is taking place.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 4662-4668
Author(s):  
Amit Mishra ◽  
Neha Prajapati ◽  
Mukesh Chaudhari ◽  
Amit Sharma

Ayurvedic system of medicine is the only one out of all traditional system of medicine where importance of metals for curing ailments was probably first recognized. Iron is the fourth common element and second most common metal in the earth crust and is a biologically essential component of every living organism. Despite the low requirement of iron in human body iron overload is rare and iron deficiency is common in certain parts of the world and in certain age groups6. Iron containing drugs used as hematinics are known to induce some adverse drug reactions -- gastrointestinal symptoms (nausea, vomiting, epigastric pain, colic pain, flatulence, constipation, black feces, and diarrhea. Iron containing compounds like Loha Bhasma, Kasis Bhasma and Mandura Bahsma are practiced since long and are indicated in a wide spectrum of dis-eases and can be a better alternative from Rasa shastra. Pharmacokinetics is proposed to study the absorp-tion, the distribution, the bio transformations and the elimination of drugs in man and animals. A primary aim of pharmacokinetics analyses is to determine bioavailability. Evaluation of Pharmaco kinetics of Loha bhasma, Kasis bhasma and Mandura bhasma were carried out. Serum iron was estimated using AAS. Pa-rameters like Cmax, Tmax etc. were calculated


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Delanty ◽  
Aurea Mota

The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents, thus signalling a temporal shift in Earth history: it can be seen as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorizing in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which contemporary societies make sense of the world as embedded in the Earth, and articulate a new kind of historical self-understanding, by which an alternative order of governance is projected. This points in the direction of cosmopolitics – and thus of a ‘Cosmopolocene’ – rather than a geologization of the social or in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency.


2021 ◽  
Vol 93 ◽  
pp. 01011
Author(s):  
Mikhail Mamichev ◽  
Elena Dergacheva

The technosphere which is the artificial shell of the Earth can be considered the contemporary result of developing the society and the world as a whole. The technosphere, being a complex system, contains entire regions, urban agglomerations, industrial zones, industrial and domestic environments. New technospheric conditions include people’s living conditions in cities and industrial centres, production, transport and life amenities. As a consequence, the society from the primary biological becomes technospheric one, i.e. the society dominated by artificial components. When studying the technosphere-urban society, the author uses the methodology of the socio-natural approach, based on the works of V.I. Vernadsky about changing the biosphere by the scientifically organized human mind and forming the noosphere. The basis of this scientific approach to the world study is researching the society and nature, the Earth reality on the basis of their interconnected social and natural development. Technogenic changes taking place in the world (the growing role of the urbanized environment, genetic engineering, living organism cloning) are inevitable. The technosphere-urban society will be the society of the future, created by the technosphere and the global technological development.


Scene ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
Paula Mccloskey ◽  
Sam Vardy

Since 2016 we have developed the Eile Project, a transdisciplinary investigation of the border in Ireland that centres around site-responsive performance and audio-visual films in a process and praxis that we call border-fictioning. Through this practice, we ask how the border might be differently understood, experienced, critiqued and altered through affective encounters in the artworks produced between bodies, the earth and sovereign power. In this article, we explore (somewhat experimentally) our notion of border-fictioning in the Eile Project, specifically through one of the piece’s ‘experiments’ (#3 Territories of Eile). We draw on a specific concept, that of geopower, and a specific diffractive method. Geopower, or the forces of the earth itself, allows us to comprehend and conceptualize the geo (earthly, material, affect, power) and the human (bio, anthropic, biopolitics, body, power) together in specific ways. A ‘diffractive’ methodology sees the production of knowledge and meaning as inextricably connected to (entangled with) the social and material practices of the world. The article offers a discussion of that which emerges from a ‘diffractive’ approach to border-fictioning in light of the concept of geopower. We show that geopower enables us to see the ways in which the Eile Project border-fictioning through performance and audio-visual film constitutes a particular kind of capitalization of the earth’s forces – radically different from those of capitalism and sovereign power, and potentially resistant to colonial histories, and suggests new alliances and imaginaries that allow us to work through the complex conditions of the border and partition in Ireland through the entanglement of human (anthropic) and earthly (non-human) concerns within the tensions of the Anthropocene.


Author(s):  
Dr. Mohammad Abu Omar

In the light of the COVID-19 virus pandemic that has attacked the earth planet, all nations in the world are becoming suffered more and more from the increasing number of infected cases. The medical infrastructure in most countries aren’t fit to deal with such pandemic, hospitals in these countries are unable to accommodate a such number of the infected cases that have recently been recorded[1],[5]. This pandemic has put countries in a great predicament; they never expected to face a pandemic of this size [1], [5]. Palestine is one of these pandemic victims, COVID-19 virus has started spreading in Palestine on fifth March of 2020 [4]. Palestinian government and leadership have announced immediately by its Prime Minister   Dr Mohammad Shtayyeh the case of emergency in Palestine to prevent this dangerous pandemic from spreading, by closing all schools and universities, crowding prevention, limiting motion and asking people strongly for home-stay [1], [2], [4]. With this step, Palestine has been recorded as one of the most quick-response countries of facing the COVID-19 pandemic in the world [4]. Although the emergency case is still very active in Palestine, the Palestine government and people are still very worry and afraid from the coming future, this is for two main reasons, the first is the inability of Palestine medical infrastructure to process the large numbers of infected cases, the second is the social-cultural system in Palestine that has strong relationships and traditions that promotes social communication in Palestine which may help the COVID-19 virus for more spreading. So, this study aims to help Palestinian government to be ready as possible to face this pandemic in the coming days, by designing a computerized model to predict the expected numbers of the infected cases that may be recorded in the coming days.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jed O. Kaplan ◽  
Katie Hong-Kiu Lau

Abstract. Lightning is one of the most important atmospheric phenomena and has wide ranging influence on the Earth System, but few long-term observational datasets of lightning occurrence and distribution are currently freely available. Here we analyze global lightning activity over the second decade of the 21st century using a new global, high-resolution gridded timeseries and climatology of lightning stroke density based on raw data from the World-Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN). While the total number of strokes detected increases from 2010–2014, an adjustment for detection efficiency reduces this artificial trend. The global distribution of lightning shows the well-known pattern of greatest density over the three tropical terrestrial regions of the Americas, Africa, and the Maritime Continent, but we also noticed substantial temporal variability over the 11 years of record, with more lightning in the tropics from 2012–2015 and increasing lightning in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere from 2016–2020. Although the total number of strokes detected globally was constant, mean stroke power decreases significantly from a peak in 2013 to the lowest levels on record in 2020. Evaluation with independent observational networks shows that while the WWLLN does not capture peak seasonal lightning densities, it does represent the majority of powerful lightning strokes. The resulting gridded lightning dataset (Kaplan and Lau, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.904253) is freely available and will be useful for a range of studies in climate, earth system, and natural hazards research, including direct use as input data to models and as evaluation data for independent simulations of lightning occurrence.


Author(s):  
Bronwyn Davies

Abstract In the last 30 years we have increasingly, as humans, been individualised and set in competition with each other in the quest for ever increasing productivity. Neoliberalism has exacerbated those very liberal humanist features that feminist poststructuralist theory set out to dismantle with its critique of binary thought and the ascendance of white, male, elite, western consciousness. While transferring the responsibility for individual survival to the individual, away from the social, it weakened our responsibility, our response-ability, to each other and to the earth and our earth others. In this paper I tease my way, through stories, and through new materialist concepts, to a sense of self as emergent, as process rather than (id)entity, as response-able and responsible in the mattering of the world.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 468-506
Author(s):  
Matthias Dörries

Music and seismology merged in the daily work of the Caltech professor Hugo Benioff, who united the avant-garde technology of the 1920s with a nineteenth-century Helmholtzian aesthetic, cultural, and scientific understanding of music. The transducer facilitated this merger, mediating between science and music and allowing for new ways of listening to waves outside the audible range. Benioff had the capacity to listen—“listening” understood here not as passive perception, but as an active search to distinguish and separate signal from noise, whether from in- or outside of the instrument. For more than forty years, Benioff worked as a sonic expert, perfecting the recording and reproduction of waves and vibrations of all types and frequencies. After tracing elements of Benioff’s biography, I examine how he incorporated the technology of the transducer in his workshop into his seismological and musical instruments, notable not only for the control, austerity, and clarity of lines of their modernist design, but also for a new kind of poetic technology. Benioff’s seismological instruments made it possible to listen to a large variety of previously undetectable phenomena such as the free oscillations of the earth, and his work with the pianist Rosalyn Tureck on electric musical instruments aimed to reproduce the pure sound of traditional instruments. I argue that Benioff’s search for an aesthetic reconciliation of the scientific modern with an enchanted view of the world is very much a product of the social, cultural, technical, and scientific conditions of the interwar period.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 10024
Author(s):  
Silvia Peppoloni ◽  
Giuseppe Di Capua

The development of geoethics is at a turning point. After having strengthened its theoretical structure and launched new initiatives aimed at favouring the spread of geoethical thinking, geoethics must deal with some issues concerning the social organization of dominant cultures, the existing economic structures, and the political systems that govern the world. Nowadays geoethics must move towards the construction of a pedagogical proposal, which has a formative purpose, for future generations and the policy leaders, but also a political one, in the noble sense of the term, that is, concerning the action of citizens who take part in public life. The pedagogical and political project of geoethics will have to be founded on the principles of dignity, freedom, and responsibility on which to ground a set of values for global ethics in order to face planetary anthropogenic changes. Furthermore, this project must be inclusive, participatory, and proactive, without falling into simplistic criticism of the current interpretative and operational paradigms of the world, but always maintaining realism (therefore adherence to the reality of the observed facts) and a critical attitude towards the positive and negative aspects of any organizational socio-economic system of human communities. In our vision there can be no sustainability, adaptation, or transition in human systems that do not pass through an ethical regeneration of the human beings, who are aware of their inborn anthropocentric and anthropogenic perception/position and assume responsibility for the consequences of their actions impacting the Earth system. In fact, the ecological crisis is the effect of the crisis of humans who have moved away from their intimate human nature. Through this paper we want to enlarge disciplinary areas that should be investigated and discussed through the lens of geoethical thinking and propose geoethics for an ethical renewal of societies, making them more sustainable from a social, economic, and environmental perspectives.


1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.


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