Ice and Ivory: the cryopolitics of mammoth de-extinction

Woolly mammoth tusk hunting has become a black-market industry in the Siberian region of Yakutia, where thawing permafrost due to climate change is revealing the bodies of thousands of mammoths. They are often in a state of incredible preservation, and their accompanying tusks can be sold to China where they are carved into ornaments as a marker of status. Alongside tusk hunting, another potential industry has emerged: de-extinction. Many of the mammoths found on the tundra have potentially viable DNA that might be used to resurrect a mammoth through genetic technology. Mammoth de-extinction is a cryopolitical process – a focus on the preservation and production of life at a genetic level through cold storage. 'Cryobanks' have emerged as a way to safeguard endangered and extinct species' genetic material, and forms part of a turn towards pre-empting conservation crises during what some scholars are calling the 'sixth great extinction.' The mammoth's body is broken down into pieces – tusks form luxury commodity chains, whilst flesh and blood is parceled into frozen genes and cells. The mammoth in the freezer is indicative of a reorganization of cold life in a warming world, with the specific cryopolitics found in the cryobank an attempt at extending human control over planetary processes that are now seemingly out of control. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, Siberia, and at the Natural History Museum's cryobank in London, I follow the mammoth from permafrost, to freezer, to back outside, and consider how her de-extinction is a response to a particular sort of future crisis –that of our own extinction.

The search for lunar mantle rocks exposed on the surface of the Moon

The lunar surface is ancient and well-preserved, recording Solar System history and planetary evolution processes. Ancient basin-scale impacts excavated lunar mantle rocks, which are expected to remain present on the surface. Sampling these rocks would provide insight into fundamental planetary processes, including differentiation and magmatic evolution. There is contention among lunar scientists as to what lithologies make up the upper lunar mantle, and where they may have been exposed on the surface. We review dynamical models of lunar differentiation in the context of recent experiments and spacecraft data, assessing candidate lithologies, their distribution, and implications for lunar evolution.

Urban Environmental Politics meets Urban Theory

Two claims are common in environmental discourses: that cities are key sites of intervention for a shift towards greater sustainability and that grassroots sustainability initiatives embody particularly promising drivers of such a shift. Drawing on Lefebvre, this chapter challenges ›episteme of the urban‹ that confine cities to ›sites‹ and argues that the planetary ›processes‹ that underpin given sites require more attention in light of socio-ecological crises. The chapter also challenges the common ›doxa‹ that ›truly‹ transformative interventions operate at a distance from dominant political institutions, such as law, and introduces ›heterodox right-claims‹ as an alternative political strategy - also for grassroots politics.

Apulia agro-biodiversity between rediscovery and conservation: the case of the «Salento km0» network

Green Revolution and the birth of the current global economic system had two opposite, subsequent effects. If, initially, they led to processes of crop homogenization, seasonal adjustment, homogenization of the landscape and markets standardization, they have subsequently pushed local communities towards a recovery of endemic biodiversity at risk of extinction because of such planetary processes, as well as a fundamental element in terms of local development, food security and sovereignty and reduction of environmental impacts. Starting from these instances of recovery and protection, which are increasingly taking place in Apulia, this work will examine both projects created "from above" and initiatives "from below", being the latter the result of a new consciousness that renews social cohesion and gives new value to the territorial milieu. In this regard, the case of the Salento km0 network will be examined: born in 2011 and now made up of 61 local subjects including producers, restaurateurs, associations, ethical purchasing groups and traditional stores, which represent a key symbol of a territory that resists and a population that has chosen to stay and innovate according to economic, social, cultural and environmental sustainability.

Towards an Arctic Sustainability Monitoring Framework

It is becoming more evident that in the twenty-first century we are living in the new era of Anthropocene, where humans attained the ability to alter planetary processes, bringing new urgency to the systematic understanding of current and future social and environmental changes [...]

Amp-TB2: An Updated Model for Calcic Amphibole Thermobarometry

Amphibole (Amp) plays a crucial role in the study of several earth and planetary processes. One of its most common applications is in thermobarometry, especially for volcanic-magmatic systems. However, many thermobarometers require the input of melt composition, which is not always available in volcanic products (e.g., partially crystallized melts or devitrified glasses), or show rather high errors for characterizing the depth of magma chambers. In this work, a new version of amphibole thermobarometry based on the selection of recently published high-quality experimental data is reported. It is valid for Mg-rich calcic amphiboles in magmatic equilibrium with calc-alkaline or alkaline melts across a wide P-T range (up to 2200 MPa and 1130 °C) and presents the advantage of being a single-phase model with relatively low errors (P ±12%, T ±22 °C, logfO2 ±0.3, H2O in the melt ±14%). A user-friendly spreadsheet (Amp-TB2.xlsx) for calculating the physico-chemical parameters from the composition of natural amphiboles is also reported. It gives warnings whenever the input composition is incorrect or diverges from that of the calibration data and includes diagrams for an easy graphical representation of the results.

‘Shattering’ and ‘Violent’ Forces: Gender, Ecology, and Catastrophe in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe with the image of the disastrous female body in order to challenge contemporary geological readings of nature as a balanced, self-regulating domain. Both incorporating and revising the work of Charles Lyell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Georges Cuvier, Eliot emphasises the interconnectedness of human and planetary processes, feminises environmental catastrophe, and blends human and ecological history. She does so in order to write the human presence back into geological histories that tended to evacuate the human, and to invite readers to account for the effects their lifestyles and industries have upon the supposedly balanced and orderly processes of nature.

The Problem of Personality in Sapiozoi

Article discusses the problem of personality in the coming era of Sapiozoic. In geochronology, the quaternary period (from 2.6 million years ago to the present) is called the epoch that gave rise to man (anthropogen). In the Holocene epoch (the last 12-thousand-year period), human economic activity is visible. At the same time, the planet’s ecosystems were in balance. Discussions are underway about the geologically transitional Anthropocene – the epoch of hu­man activity as a global factor in the evolution of the Earth’s ecosystems. During the last 200–250 years, the co-evolution of man, society and nature has been on the path of the formation of techno-natural systems. Since the 1950s and 1960s the era of “Great Acceleration” begins. Consumer society, unrestrained mining, the course of technologization, the loss of the meaning of life led to chaos on a planetary scale. Many natural scientists pointed out the anthropogenic factors of the new geological epoch. The parameters (and language of descrip­tion) of the Anthropocene that are put forward in the discussions are limited by the methodologies of specific disciplines. The philosophical-integrative approach to the problem is relevant. It is worth paying attention to non-Western philosoph­ical teachings about large cycles of planetary development. In part, they resem­ble the scientific models. The acceleration of planetary development and the new large-scale cycle are discussed in the Roerichs philosophy. Purification by the global crisis should lead to the disclosure of the spiritual potential of a person, the construction of a world community. In one scenario, the coming era of sus­tainable development is called “sapiozoi” – “intelligent life” (D. Grinspoon). Its essence is associated with the management of planetary processes. Geosocio­engineering projects in the cognitive aspect involve fundamental transformations of human consciousness as an active worker, the formation of planetary forms of collective cooperation. The strategic task of managing the Earth’s ecosystems re­quires the formation of cosmo-geo-bio-socio-human-dimensional thinking, noo­spheric ethics and noospheric culture. The problem of the mind and the inner na­ture of man becomes the key to overcoming the global crisis.