The Anthropocene Review
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Published By Sage Publications

2053-020x, 2053-0196

2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110568
Author(s):  
Joana Gaspar de Freitas

What connects the sci-fi book Dune with coastal dunes and geoengineering? The answer lies in humans and their world-making activities. This paper proposes an innovative approach to coastal dunes as hybrid environments by analyzing the dunes stabilization programs developed on the US Pacific Coast. It looks into the shifting sands of the Oregon coast and how they influenced Frank Herbert to write his novel, why local communities and federal authorities were interested in fixing the moving dunes and how these works ended up having unexpected consequences. It explores how human features acting as forcing mechanisms on beach-dune systems caused changes that turned into controlling influences in their own right, creating new environments and concerns. The paper ends with a reflection on how fiction and the history of dunes can be used to critically think about the anthropocentric hubris of building futures by geoengineering the planet for environmental repair.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110570
Author(s):  
Benedict E Singleton ◽  
Maris Boyd Gillette ◽  
Anders Burman ◽  
Carina Green

Culture and tradition have long been the domains of social science, particularly social/cultural anthropology and various forms of heritage studies. However, many environmental scientists whose research addresses environmental management, conservation, and restoration are also interested in traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous and local knowledge, and local environmental knowledge (hereafter TEK), not least because policymakers and international institutions promote the incorporation of TEK in environmental work. In this article, we examine TEK usage in peer-reviewed articles by environmental scientists published in 2020. This snapshot of environmental science scholarship includes both critical discussions of how to incorporate TEK in research and management and efforts to do so for various scholarly and applied purposes. Drawing on anthropological discussions of culture, we identify two related patterns within this literature: a tendency toward essentialism and a tendency to minimize power relationships. We argue that scientists whose work reflects these trends might productively engage with knowledge from the scientific fields that study culture and tradition. We suggest productive complicity as a reflexive mode of partnering, and a set of questions that facilitate natural scientists adopting this approach: What and/or who is this TEK for? Who and what will benefit from this TEK deployment? How is compensation/credit shared? Does this work give back and/or forward to all those involved?


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110534
Author(s):  
Christoph Rosol ◽  
Thomas Turnbull ◽  
Jürgen Renn

Is it possible to trace ongoing transitions in the Earth system back to the regional scales at which they are produced and where their effects can be directly experienced? This editorial introduces two special issues of The Anthropocene Review that document a two-year, transdisciplinary experiment: a collaborative investigation of the Mississippi River Basin (MRB) as a model region for studying the Anthropocene condition in situ. Coordinated by the Anthropocene Curriculum, an initiative led by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,1 the project Mississippi: An Anthropocene River involved a large consortium of institutions and more than three hundred researchers, artists, activists, and local community members. Together, participants learned about, questioned, and experienced the Anthropocene at a level meaningful to people, a level at which historical legacies and future commitments play out amid concrete infrastructures and socio-ecological formations, and alongside existing inequalities and life’s everyday struggles. The introduction summarizes eleven scientific and creative research outputs that were selected from this wide-ranging experiment, contextualizes the river’s history, and explains the regional approach the project undertook.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-229
Author(s):  
Christoph Rosol

The daunting crisis of the Anthropocene cannot be adequately addressed without re-envisioning our conceptual approach to knowledge formation. This background essay to the double special issue on the Mississippi River provides an account on the Anthropocene Curriculum (AC) initiative, the general framework in which the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project was devised and implemented. The AC is an ambitious, long-term attempt to model and test experimental forms of post-disciplinary collaboration in order to come up with sensible and experiential strategies of co-learning and co-producing critical knowledge in a rapidly changing planetary situation. The AC essentially explores the novel epistemic, aesthetic, and educational challenges presented by the transition into the new geo-human epoch, foregrounding collective, constructive and transformative practices of research, and education across the sciences, arts, and humanities that help to interlink and integrate the existing pluralities of earth-bound knowledge forms. Developed by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science since 2013, the undertaking has grown today into a global network of partner projects, one of which was the two-year project on the Mississippi River Basin. The AC experiment is thus directly tied to the research and teaching contexts of other geographic, cultural, and institutional settings that together map the larger terrain of altered human-Earth relations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110512
Author(s):  
Jesús Rodrigo-Comino ◽  
Stephan Seeling ◽  
Manuel K. Seeger ◽  
Johannes B. Ries

Light pollution is the consequence of elevated lighting emitted by human-made artefacts to the lower atmosphere. Recently, there have been major advances in the assessment and mitigation of light pollution impacts on humans and the natural ecosystems. Severe negative impacts of light pollution have been highlighted while very few mitigation measures have been implemented. People (scientists, policymakers or stakeholders) interested in light pollution may not have a holistic perspective of the problem, and also there is a need for incorporating social and natural dimensions. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to review the literature on light pollution using ISI Web of Science by paying attention to the (i) type of publication, year and journal; (ii) impacts on specific elements; (iii) location and (iv) methods used. Our results indicated that the elevated number of papers come from a diverse range of disciplines, methods, places and scales. It is clear that light pollution is getting enough attention from the scientific community but decisions on the implementation of mitigation measures are left with the stakeholders, ordinary inhabitants, policymakers and politicians. Nevertheless, light pollution is having impacts on the health of humans and the natural ecosystem as perceived by experts and inhabitants having divergent perspectives. Thus, light pollution is multifaceted but difficult to be faced, mitigated and not holistically understood. This review paper groups the total impacts of light pollution on the Earth presents some contradictory results, summarises mitigation measures, and provides specific future research directions.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110446
Author(s):  
John Kim

The author traveled for 2.5 months by canoe and other modes of transport down the entire length of the Mississippi River with the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project. Reflecting on this journey, this essay revisits Catherine Brown and William Morrish’s 1991 essay, The Fourth Coast: An Expedition on the Mississippi River, in which Brown and Morrish document their research efforts to identify coherent anthropogenic structures and systems that could warrant the characterization of the Mississippi River as a Fourth Coast. To encourage a flourishing of overlapping multispecies life, the essay moves beyond their spatial reimagining by defining the “distributed nature of home” as a model for conceptualizing distributed spatialities and plural temporalities along the Mississippi River.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110455
Author(s):  
Catherine Russell ◽  
Colin N Waters ◽  
Stephen Himson ◽  
Rachael Holmes ◽  
Annika Burns ◽  
...  

The Mississippi River maintains commercial and societal networks of the USA along its >3700 km length. It has accumulated a fluvial sedimentary succession over 80 million years. Through the last 11,700 years of the Holocene Epoch, the wild river shaped the landscape, models of which have become classic in geological studies of ancient river strata. Studies of the river were led by the need to develop infrastructure and to search for hydrocarbons, through which, these models have become quite sophisticated. However, whilst the models demonstrate how the wild river behaves, a monumental shift in fundamental controls on the entire fluvial system, broadly coinciding with the proposed mid-20th century onset of the Anthropocene Epoch, has generated new geological patterns that are becoming globally ubiquitous, and which the Mississippi River typifies. As such, whilst classic Holocene river models may be compared to human-modified systems such as the Lower Mississippi River (and others worldwide), locally the models may now only directly apply to its fossilized components preserved in the sub-surface. Such river models need adapting to better understand the present dynamics, and future evolution of these landscapes.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110386
Author(s):  
Henrieke Stahl (Trier)

With the help of the concepts ‘aura’ and ‘autopoiesis’, the relationship between poetry and natural phenomena can be defined as a ‘translation from nature’. Gennadij Ajgi translates his auratic manner of perceiving into poetry. For him, the poem becomes an epistemic medium transcending the sensory perception of nature for a hidden, spiritual level. Les Murray, conversely, demonstrates an autopoietic understanding of nature: The poet himself becomes the medium of the living being. Christian Lehnert takes up impulses from both orientations. He combines the opposing concepts so that they correspond to the hierarchical levels of his religious and metaphysical vision of the world. The three authors all aim to alter the attitude of humans towards nature through their ‘translation from nature into poetry’ so that humankind will open itself towards nature and raise it from an object which can be instrumentalised to an autonomous subject on equal footing with humanity itself.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110296
Author(s):  
Benjamin Steininger

The paper discusses the CF-industries ammonia plant in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. The plant is framed as an exemplary site from which the Anthropocene can be observed and understood. In doing so, a proposal for a “chemical cultural theory” is set out, to allow us to understand such molecular planetary technologies and interpret their (geo)historical significance. As one of the largest fertilizer plants in the world in terms of its output, and one of the largest chemical plants along the “Petrochemical Corridor,” a cluster of chemical industries situated between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Donaldsonville typifies the relations between the nitrogen and hydrocarbon industries. Catalysis is here used both as a chemical concept and as a metaphor central to the proposed chemical cultural theory. As key to the Haber-Bosch process and refinery technologies in general, investigating the role of catalysis allows us to connect the history of the Petrochemical Corridor to that of German industrialism. This relation reveals how, from the late 19th century through to the World Wars, an ambivalent industrial co-operation between the US and Germany not only transformed local and planetary environments, it also contributed to the Anthropocene condition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205301962110512
Author(s):  
Justyna Chodkowska-Miszczuk ◽  
Krzysztof Rogatka ◽  
Aleksandra Lewandowska

Dynamic and unrestrained socio-economic development is upsetting the balance of nature’s mechanisms, causing a climate stalemate, or even climate destabilisation. After the Second World War a new political system – real socialism – was enforced on Poland. It brought about changes of a social, cultural, economic and environmental nature. Its immanent feature was the application of top-down decisions that did not take into account environmental components. There was also little ecological awareness within Polish society at that time. The transformations of the 1990s resulted not only in the liberalisation of the Polish economy, but also in the permeation of new trends oriented towards pro-environmental activities. The aim of the article is to find an answer to the question: How is ecological awareness currently shaped in the context of Anthropocene in Poland during the transition from a socialist economy to a capitalist economic system?


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