Arquivo da tag: Antropoceno

Trying to assemble an “Anthropocene Curriculum” (environmentalhumanities.org)

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Posted on Mar 16, 2014

This event is to be held
November 14-22, 2014
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin

The Anthropocene—or however you choose to name the current era of environmental transition on a planetary scale—is a more-than-real challenge for human civilization. A crucial aspect of this challenge is to ferret out and create new forms of collectives. First of all, there is a need for a wide array of habitual collectives to bring the technically empowered, and maybe out-of-control human agency into closer awareness of and care for this capacious non-site of immersion, formerly known as “Nature”. The Anthropocene discloses the immediate resonance between our actions—but also our omissions and failures—with the entire geosphere, so why not perceive them as one and the same collage, always changing and shifting in its pattern but staying true to their reciprocal dependency? Second, there is the challenge to re-create collectives in a more classical sense: assemblages of mutual attention and co-workmanship amongst the billions of different “anthropoi” who are and will be dwelling on this planet.

The project

This applies foremost to where critical knowledge is formed, shared and raised: the university. Within the confines of knowledge production and dissemination in higher education, the “Anthropocene Curriculum” project proposes an experiment to tackle this challenge and explore creative solutions in relation to it. Developed by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG, both in Berlin, Germany) the “Anthropocene Curriculum” is a central, production-oriented element among a manifold of research-based exhibitions, experimental events, academic and curatorial workshops, as well as an ambitious publication project that comprise the output of the two-year “Anthropocene Project” led by HKW.

The “Anthropocene Curriculum” brings together university teachers from science, humanities, and art and design faculties from across the globe to collaboratively negotiate, develop, and supervise an exemplary curriculum on Anthropocene-relevant topics. Setting the curriculum as a practical goal the task is to creatively develop a mutual understanding of recursive themes and tropes within the confines of Anthropocene research, an emergent field that becomes more integrated and trans-disciplinary along the way. The curriculum itself will be implemented at the “Anthropocene Campus” taking place in November 2014 at HKW. Cast into the form of an autumn session helding a set of exemplary courses, a total of one hundred international young researchers from academia and civil society will get actively involved into the program, joining the effort by bringing in their own perspectives and expertise.

The immediate aim of this temporary co-learning space on the premises of a cultural institution and embedded within a more expansive situation in the HKW (exhibitions, screenings, artistic events), is to enter a productive discourse—free of university-curricular constraints—on knowledge design and dissemination, on skills and their trainings. As a result of the pre- and postwork of the 9-day event an “Anthropocene Coursebook” will be edited by the participants, ”instructors” and “students” alike. In the end, such cooperation seeks to adequately address the collaborative and educational skills needed to tackle the critical environmental challenges that the Anthropocene poses, challenges that immediately become social, technological, and epistemological on closer examination.

Hence, and on a more general note, the further goal of this ambitious project is to convey a wider grasp as well as epistemic sensibility for the spectra, interplays and metabolisms of elements taking place on and within a planet in transition. This includes efforts in prospectively conjoining the variegated systemic and anthropogenic exchange processes, from the biophysical and geochemical to the cultural, industrial, and virtual. Yet, it also critically reflects on social and aesthetic inputs and the effects that emanate from the general acceptance of a human-nature indivisibility. While this clearly speaks to the heart of the environmental humanities endeavour, such knowledge also implies the potency of design and actively pursues a readjustment of both “knowing” and “doing” within the broader geo-fabric. By incorporating diverse views and materials from different disciplines, by debating and combining them to form cross-disciplinary syllabi, a potent, earth-bound collective might be composed.

To be sure: the courses assembled within this project do not strive for a comprehensive, fully integrated tour d’horizon of the Anthropocene. Instead, they aim for a kaleidoscopic and resourceful approach that emerges from the glaring necessity to build a knowledge base simultaneously broad in its disciplinary perspectives, as well as out-of-the-box in its experimentation. An ideal curriculum informed by and calibrated for the Anthropocene does not teach disciplines, at least not as an end in itself. Working “in silos” certainly has its merits and so does rigorous disciplinary training. Nevertheless, the overall challenge to educate people for living up to the planetary scale of our pending crisis demands different approaches and methods.

Nor does an ideal “Anthropocene Curriculum” unify and equalize everything into a global view of nowhere. Instead, it composes out of localities, drawing connections between local concerns and local knowledge that carries it’s own historical contingencies. It mediates between different contemporary approaches and modes of scientific artistry. It prepares students for what will surely become turbulent times in the interdependency of science, culture, and a habitable planet. Its interdisciplinarity is genuine and rests on necessity. It provides methodical avenues for grappling with the scopes and scales of the Anthropocene predicament.

Moreover, the ever changing role of academia itself is hereby brought into the equation (or rather, multiple equations). Therefore, another central aim of this project is to accentuate the process of constructing and composing a curriculum and to bring this “becoming” to the foreground. Though building a curriculum with a panoramic view on topical, trans-disciplinary knowledge serves in and of itself as an end, the project’s desire is to also develop a self-reflexive discourse, as well as to highlight the uncertainties and humble limitations of scholarly engagement with the planet.

… and its procedures

As a result of general discussions and negotiations that took place since the start of the project in September 2013 on an internal online platform, and building on the presentations given at a midway meeting that took place January 23-24, 2014 at the MPIWG, the 27 participants of the project have now formed themselves into interdisciplinary groups of three or four. Within (but also across) these groups, the current task of each is to start elaborating their chosen topics and prepare materials for the seminars, excursions, exercises, and public lectures that will be presented during the “Anthropocene Campus” in November this year. Utilizing the online platform to mitigate communication procedures, the general discussion on goals and feasibilities of an Anthropocene-adequate knowledge base will continue.

Later this year the online platform will expand to include prospective students, while a public website presenting the compiled materials as well as videos of public presentations will be launched after the “Anthropocene Campus”. This will provide an accessible repository for further realizations of curricula that may be initiated at other places around the globe and added to the website later on. It is also planned to publish an open access edition of an “Anthropocene Coursebook”, consisting of the curriculum topics co-authored by the three tutors and their respective students.

All this is, no doubt, a bold and risky undertaking. Being a magnificent task in inter-disciplinary diplomacy, it challenges the academic folklore of often talking about collaboration but rarely putting it into practice. Here lies the virtue and open possibility of the Berlin “Anthropocene Project”: grounded within a cultural institution, it provides an extra-academic terrain to allow for another standard of exchange to happen. Strictly speaking, the “Anthropocene Curriculum” is a rare opportunity, namely one in which different perspectives may be debated in a frank and straightforward manner and controversial standpoints may be used in a productive way. The challenge here is to be a collective.

You can find more information on the project, the instructors, and the seminars athttp://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/

Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene (New York Times)

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November 10, 2013, 3:00 pm

By ROY SCRANTON

Jeffery DelViscio

I.

Driving into Iraq just after the 2003 invasion felt like driving into the future. We convoyed all day, all night, past Army checkpoints and burned-out tanks, till in the blue dawn Baghdad rose from the desert like a vision of hell: Flames licked the bruised sky from the tops of refinery towers, cyclopean monuments bulged and leaned against the horizon, broken overpasses swooped and fell over ruined suburbs, bombed factories, and narrow ancient streets.

Civilizations have marched blindly toward disaster because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today.

With “shock and awe,” our military had unleashed the end of the world on a city of six million — a city about the same size as Houston or Washington. The infrastructure was totaled: water, power, traffic, markets and security fell to anarchy and local rule. The city’s secular middle class was disappearing, squeezed out between gangsters, profiteers, fundamentalists and soldiers. The government was going down, walls were going up, tribal lines were being drawn, and brutal hierarchies savagely established.

I was a private in the United States Army. This strange, precarious world was my new home. If I survived.

Two and a half years later, safe and lazy back in Fort Sill, Okla., I thought I had made it out. Then I watched on television as Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. This time it was the weather that brought shock and awe, but I saw the same chaos and urban collapse I’d seen in Baghdad, the same failure of planning and the same tide of anarchy. The 82nd Airborne hit the ground, took over strategic points and patrolled streets now under de facto martial law. My unit was put on alert to prepare for riot control operations. The grim future I’d seen in Baghdad was coming home: not terrorism, not even W.M.D.’s, but a civilization in collapse, with a crippled infrastructure, unable to recuperate from shocks to its system.

And today, with recovery still going on more than a year after Sandy and many critics arguing that the Eastern seaboard is no more prepared for a huge weather event than we were last November, it’s clear that future’s not going away.

This March, Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, the commander of the United States Pacific Command, told security and foreign policy specialists in Cambridge, Mass., that global climate change was the greatest threat the United States faced — more dangerous than terrorism, Chinese hackers and North Korean nuclear missiles. Upheaval from increased temperatures, rising seas and radical destabilization “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen…” he said, “that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’

Locklear’s not alone. Tom Donilon, the national security adviser,said much the same thing in April, speaking to an audience at Columbia’s new Center on Global Energy Policy. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, told the Senate in March that “Extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves) will increasingly disrupt food and energy markets, exacerbating state weakness, forcing human migrations, and triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism.”

On the civilian side, the World Bank’s recent report, “Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the Case for Resilience,” offers a dire prognosis for the effects of global warming, which climatologists now predict will raise global temperatures by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit within a generation and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit within 90 years. Projections from researchers at the University of Hawaii find us dealing with “historically unprecedented” climates as soon as 2047. The climate scientist James Hansen, formerly with NASA, has argued that we face an “apocalyptic” future. This grim view is seconded by researchers worldwide, including Anders Levermann, Paul and Anne Ehrlich,Lonnie Thompson and many, many, many others.

This chorus of Jeremiahs predicts a radically transformed global climate forcing widespread upheaval — not possibly, not potentially, but inevitably. We have passed the point of no return. From the point of view of policy experts, climate scientists and national security officials, the question is no longer whether global warming exists or how we might stop it, but how we are going to deal with it.

II.

There’s a word for this new era we live in: the Anthropocene. This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The Economist and the The New York Times, represents the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earth’s geological history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force. The biologist Eugene F. Stoermer and the Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen advanced the term in 2000, and it has steadily gained acceptance as evidence has increasingly mounted that the changes wrought by global warming will affect not just the world’s climate and biological diversity, but its very geology — and not just for a few centuries, but for millenniums. The geophysicist David Archer’s 2009 book, “The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate,” lays out a clear and concise argument for how huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and melting ice will radically transform the planet, beyond freak storms and warmer summers, beyond any foreseeable future.

The Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London — the scientists responsible for pinning the “golden spikes” that demarcate geological epochs such as the Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene — have adopted the Anthropocene as a term deserving further consideration, “significant on the scale of Earth history.” Working groups are discussing what level of geological time-scale it might be (an “epoch” like the Holocene, or merely an “age” like the Calabrian), and at what date we might say it began. The beginning of the Great Acceleration, in the middle of the 20th century? The beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 1800? The advent of agriculture?

Every day I went out on mission in Iraq, I looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole.

The challenge the Anthropocene poses is a challenge not just to national security, to food and energy markets, or to our “way of life” — though these challenges are all real, profound, and inescapable. The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses may be to our sense of what it means to be human. Within 100 years — within three to five generations — we will face average temperatures 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today, rising seas at least three to 10 feet higher, and worldwide shifts in crop belts, growing seasons and population centers. Within a thousand years, unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases wholesale right now, humans will be living in a climate the Earth hasn’t seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago, when oceans were 75 feet higher than they are today. We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping and energy networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off in the biosphere that’s already well on its way, and our own possible extinction. If homo sapiens (or some genetically modified variant) survives the next millenniums, it will be survival in a world unrecognizably different from the one we have inhabited.

Jeffery DelViscio

Geological time scales, civilizational collapse and species extinction give rise to profound problems that humanities scholars and academic philosophers, with their taste for fine-grained analysis, esoteric debates and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill suited to address. After all, how will thinking about Kant help us trap carbon dioxide? Can arguments between object-oriented ontology and historical materialism protect honeybees from colony collapse disorder? Are ancient Greek philosophers, medieval theologians, and contemporary metaphysicians going to keep Bangladesh from being inundated by rising oceans?

Of course not. But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: “What does it mean to be human?” and “What does it mean to live?” In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality — “What does my life mean in the face of death?” — is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?

These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They are philosophical problems par excellence. Many thinkers, including Cicero, Montaigne, Karl Jaspers, and The Stone’s own Simon Critchley, have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that’s true, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age — for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The rub is that now we have to learn how to die not as individuals, but as a civilization.

III.

Learning how to die isn’t easy. In Iraq, at the beginning, I was terrified by the idea. Baghdad seemed incredibly dangerous, even though statistically I was pretty safe. We got shot at and mortared, and I.E.D.’s laced every highway, but I had good armor, we had a great medic, and we were part of the most powerful military the world had ever seen. The odds were good I would come home. Maybe wounded, but probably alive. Every day I went out on mission, though, I looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole.

“For the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him,” wrote  Simone Weil in her remarkable meditation on war, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force.” “Yet the idea of man’s having death for a future is abhorrent to nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face.” That was the face I saw in the mirror, and its gaze nearly paralyzed me.

I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”

I got through my tour in Iraq one day at a time, meditating each morning on my inevitable end. When I left Iraq and came back stateside, I thought I’d left that future behind. Then I saw it come home in the chaos that was unleashed after Katrina hit New Orleans. And then I saw it again when Sandy battered New York and New Jersey: Government agencies failed to move quickly enough, and volunteer groups like Team Rubicon had to step in to manage disaster relief.

Now, when I look into our future — into the Anthropocene — I see water rising up to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots, hurricanes, and climate refugees. I see 82nd Airborne soldiers shooting looters. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste, and plagues. I see Baghdad. I see the Rockaways. I see a strange, precarious world.

Our new home.

The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today — it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.

The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.

If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.

Anthropology and the Anthropocene (Anthropology News)

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By Anthropology News on December 17, 2013 at 2:44 pm

By Amelia Moore

“The Anthropocene” is a label that is gaining popularity in the natural sciences.  It refers to the pervasive influence of human activities on planetary systems and biogeochemical processes.   Devised by Earth scientists, the term is poised to formally end the Holocene Epoch as the geological categorization for Earth’s recent past, present, and indefinite future.  The term is also poised to become the informal slogan of a revitalized environmental movement that has been plagued by popular indifference in recent years.

Climate change is the most well known manifestation of anthropogenic global change, but it is only one example of an Anthropocene event.  Other examples listed by the Earth sciences include biodiversity loss, changes in planetary nutrient cycling, deforestation, the hole in the ozone layer, fisheries decline, and the spread of invasive species.  This change is said to stem from the growth of the human population and the spread of resource intensive economies since the Industrial Revolution (though the initial boundary marker is in dispute with some scientists arguing for the Post-WWII era and others for the advent of agriculture as the critical tipping point).  Whatever the boundary, the Anthropocene signifies multiple anthropological opportunities.

What stance should we, as anthropologists, take towards the Anthropocene? I argue that there are two (and likely more), equally valid approaches to the Anthropocene: anthropology in the Anthropocene and anthropology of the Anthropocene.  Anthropology in the Anthropocene already exists in the form of climate ethnography and work that documents the lived experience of global environmental change.  Arguably, ethnographies of protected areas and transnational conservation strategies exemplify this field as well.  Anthropology in the Anthropocene is characterized by an active concern for the detrimental affects of anthropogenesis on populations and communities that have been marginalized to bear the brunt of global change impacts or who have been haphazardly caught up in global change solution strategies.  This work is engaged with environmental justice and oriented towards political action.

Anthropology of the Anthropocene is much smaller and less well known than anthropology in the Anthropocene, but it will be no less crucial.  Existing work in this vein includes those who take a critical stance towards climate science and politics as social processes with social consequences.  Beyond deconstruction, these critical scholars investigate what forms scientific and political assemblages create and how they participate in remaking the world anew.  Other existing research in this mode interrogates the idea of biodiversity and the historical and cultural context for the notion of anthropogenesis itself.  In the near future, we will see more work that can enquire into both the sociocultural and socioecological implications and manifestations of Anthropocene discourse, practice and logic.

I have only created cursory sketches of anthropology in the Anthropocene and anthropology of the Anthropocene here.  However, these modes are not at all mutually exclusive, and they should inspire many possibilities for future work.  The centrality of anthropos, the idea of the human, within the logics of the Anthropocene is an invitation for anthropology to renew its engagements with the natural sciences in research collaborations and as the object of research, especially the ecological and Earth sciences.

For starters, we should consider the implications of the Anthropocene idea for our understandings of history and collectivity.  If the natural world is finally gaining recognition within the authoritative sciences as intimately interconnected with human life such that these two worlds cease to be separate arenas of thought and action or take on different salience, then both the Humanities and the natural sciences need to devise more appropriate modes of analysis that can speak to emergent socioecologies.  This has begun in anthropology with some recent works of environmental health studies, political ecology, and multispecies ethnography, but is still in its infancy.

In terms of opportunities for legal and political engagement, the Anthropocene signifies possibilities for reconceptualizing environmentalism, conservation and development.  Anthropologists should be cognizant of new design paradigms and models for organizing socioecological collectives from the urban to the small island to the riparian.  We should also be on the lookout for new political collaborations and publics creating conversations utilizing multiple avenues for communication in the academic realm and beyond.  Emergent asymmetries in local and transnational markets and the formation of new multi-sited assemblages of governance should be of special importance.

In terms of science, the Anthropocene signals new horizons for studying and participating in global change science.  The rise of interdisciplinary socioecology, the biosciences of coupled natural and human complexity, geoengineering and the biotech interest in de-extinction are just a sampling of important transformations in research practices, research objects, and the shifting boundaries between the lab and the field.  Ongoing scientific reorientation will continue to yield new arguments about emergent forms of life that will participate in the creation of future assemblages, publics, and movements.

I would also like to caution against potentially unhelpful uses of the Anthropocene idea.  The term should not become a brand signifying a specific style of anthropological research.  It should not gloss over rigid solidifications of time, space, the human, or life.  We should not celebrate creativity in the Anthropocene while ignoring instances of stark social differentiation and capital accumulation, just as we should not focus on Anthropocene assemblages as only hegemonic in the oppressive sense.   Further, we should be cautious with our utilization of the crisis rhetoric surrounding events in the Anthropocene, recognizing that crisis for some can be turned into multiple forms of opportunity for others.  Finally, we must admit the possibility that the Anthropocene may not succeed in gaining lasting traction through formal designation or popularization, and we should not overstate its significance by assuming its universal acceptance.

In the next year, the Section News Column of the Anthropology and Environment Society will explore news, events, projects, and arguments from colleagues and students experimenting with various framings of the Anthropocene in addition to its regular content.  If you would like to contribute to this column, please contact Amelia Moore at a.moore4@miami.edu.

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ANTHROPOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT SOCIETY

Big Data and the Science of the Anthropocene

By Anthropology News on December 17, 2013 at 2:44 pm

By Lizzy Hare

In her September Section News Column, “Anthropology and the Anthropocene,” Amelia Moore made a distinction between anthropology in the Anthropocene and anthropology of the Anthropocene. The distinction is made between those who research the effects of global change and those who investigate the concept of the Anthropocene as a social process. My own research related to the Anthropocene is not on the effects of climate change. Rather, it focuses on the process of establishing credibility, authority, and trust through scientific knowledge.  I am following the process of developing an ecosystem forecast model. This model will provide land managers and policy makers with predictions about landscape and vegetation responses to climate change. Following the model’s development serves as an entry point for exploring what counts as credible scientific knowledge about climate change, who gets to decide what counts, and how credibility is determined.  It is fair to describe my research as “anthropology of the Anthropocene.” However, framing it in this way makes it too easy to neglect the generative nature of the Anthropocene as a concept.

As it is used colloquially, the Anthropocene carries heavy connotations of destruction and degradation, and I do not want to discount the serious environmental consequences of global change, or the inequitable distribution of their effects. But the Anthropocene as a concept also has political and technological consequences. Scientists and policymakers who wish to understand, predict, and manage the consequences of this new anthropogenic geological epoch have pushed forward tremendous innovations in science and technology. The Anthropocene is thus not only about unprecedented human impact on the planet, but also about unprecedented changes in technology, such as the rise of global connectivity and computing power that made “Big Data” possible.

“Big Data” typically refers to massive data sets of quantitative data, often originally collected automatically and for non-specific purposes. Big Data’s optimistic supporters claim that they will be able to revolutionize science by using statistics to mine large sets of data rather than tackling each research question with a different set of methods and tools. While Big Data techniques have led to the success of companies like Google, it remains unclear how or even whether automated data collection and statistical analysis can produce more than large-scale correlations. Recently, however, scientists have been working to develop tools for incorporating Big Data with more traditional empirical data by using simulation models. Scientists are developing this technique for use in climate, weather, and ecological forecast models, as a way to reduce uncertainty in forecasts by constraining them with observed data.

Data assimilation is not the only way that modelers have tried to control uncertainties within climate models. Some political leaders have misconstrued climate science, and it has come under intense scrutiny by multiple government committees following the 2009 “Climategate” scandal. The critics of climate science cite the uncertainties inherent in forecasting as well as concerns that scientists with political agendas manipulate data. This specter hangs over US climate science, and one response has been to develop a quantitative scale for uncertainty in forecasts. This move is grounded in the assumption that quantification is an effective technique for neutralizing information, and it displaces concern and politics on to users of the quantitative information. This is especially attractive when trying to convey information as (potentially) dire as the consequences of climate change.

The Anthropocene as a concept asks us to pay attention to changes in the world around us. These changes have environmental, social, and political impacts. In efforts to understand the environmental changes of the Anthropocene, and to respond to changes in political and social order, both anticipated and actualized, scientists have developed new tools and techniques. Many claim that Big Data techniques are revolutionizing science, but it is probably too early to assess that claim. Techniques for assimilating Big Data into climate models are just one example of technological and scientific developments of the Anthropocene. There are certainly many more. The generative potential of this epoch should be a site for ongoing anthropological inquiry because it has the ability to drastically change the world we live in.

The effects of global change—and thus the scope of anthropology in the Anthropocene—will be vast, even more so if we take seriously the impacts that this epoch has had and will have on science and technology. The lived experience of global environmental change is not limited to encounters with environmental catastrophe. New technologies will have consequences for everyone, perhaps especially for those who cannot access them. As anthropologists, we ought to be attentive to what the Anthropocene is capable of producing, not only what it is capable of destroying.

Lizzy Hare is a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Antropólogo francês Bruno Latour fala sobre natureza e política (O Globo)

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28.12.2013 | 07h30m

Bruno Latour diz que ‘ecologizar’ é o verbo da vez, mas propõe uma noção de ‘ecologia’ com sentido mais amplo do que o defendido hoje por ativistas e políticos. Para ele, o Brasil, apesar das contradições, é ator fundamental na construção de uma inteligência política e científica para o futuro

Por Fernando Eichenberg, correspondente em Paris

A modernidade é uma falácia, uma ficção inventada para organizar a vida intelectual. Os chamados “modernos” pregam a separação de ciência, política, natureza e cultura, numa teoria distante da realidade do mundo e inadaptada aos desafios impostos neste início de século, acusa o pensador francês Bruno Latour, de 66 anos. “Ecologizar” é verbo da vez, sustenta ele, mas num sentido bem mais amplo do que o espaço compreendido pela ecologia defendida por ativistas e partidos políticos.

— O desenvolvimento da frente de modernização, como se fala de uma frente pioneira na Amazônia, sempre foi, ao contrário, uma extensão de uma quantidade de associações, da marca dos humanos, da intimidade de conexões entre as coisas e as pessoas. A modernidade nunca existiu — dispara Latour, em entrevista ao GLOBO.

Na sua opinião, o Brasil, com todas as suas contradições, é fundamental na possibilidade de um futuro de inovações que gerem um novo tipo de “civilização ecológica”, numa nova “inteligência política e científica”.

Antropólogo, sociólogo e filósofo das ciências, Bruno Latour, que recebeu em maio passado o prestigiado prêmio Holberg de Ciências Humanas, é um dos intelectuais franceses contemporâneos mais traduzidos no exterior. Além de suas originais investigações teóricas, também se aventurou no terreno das artes (com as exposições “Iconoclash” e “Making things public”) e, em outubro, estreou a peça “Gaïa Global Circus”, uma “tragicomédia climática”, que ele espera um dia poder encenar no Jardim Botânico, no Rio. Professor do Instituto de Estudos Políticos de Paris (Sciences-Po), lançou ainda este ano o ensaio “Enquête sur les modes d’existence — Une anthropologie des Modernes” (Investigação sobre os modos de existência – uma antropologia dos Modernos, ed. La Découverte).

Qual a diferença entre “ecologizar” e “modernizar”, segundo seu pensamento?

Modernizar é o argumento que diz que quanto mais nós separamos as questões de natureza e de política, melhor será. Ecologizar é dizer: já que, de fato, não separamos tudo isso, já que a História recente dos humanos na Terra foi o embaraçamento cada vez mais importante das questões de natureza e de sociedade, se é isso que fazemos na prática, então que construamos a política que lhe corresponda em vez de fazer de conta que há uma história subterrânea, aquela das associações, e uma história oficial, que é a de emancipação dos limites da natureza. Ecologizar é um verbo como modernizar, exceto que se trata da prática e não somente da teoria. Mas pode-se dizer “modernidade reflexiva” ou utilizar outros termos. O importante é que haja uma alternativa a modernizar, que não seja arcaica, reacionária. Que seja progressista, mas de uma outra forma, não modernista. Um problema complicado hoje, sobretudo no Brasil. Mas é complicado por todo o lado, na França também. Qualquer dúvida sobre a modernização, se diz que é preciso estancar a frente pioneira, decrescer, voltar ao passado. Isso é impossível. É preciso inovar, descobrir novas formas, e isso se parece com a modernização. Mas é uma modernização que aceita seu passado. E o passado foi uma mistura cada vez mais intensa entre os produtos químicos, as florestas, os peixes, etc. Isso é “ecologizar”. É a instituição da prática e não da teoria.

Qual é a situação e o papel do Brasil neste contexto?

Penso que deve haver uma verdadeira revolução ecológica, não somente no sentido de natureza, e o Brasil é um ator importante. A esperança do mundo repousa muito sobre o Brasil, país com uma enormidade de reservas e de recursos. Se fala muito do movimento da civilização na direção da Ásia, o que não faz muito sentido do ponto de vista ecológico, pois quando se vai a estes países se vê a devastação. Não se pode imaginar uma civilização ecológica vindo da Ásia. No Brasil — e também na Índia — há um pensamento, não simplesmente a força nua, num país em que os problemas ecológicos são colocados em grande escala. Há um verdadeiro pensamento e uma verdadeira arte, o que é muito importante. Se fosse me aposentar, pensaria no Brasil. Brasil e Índia são os dois países nos quais podemos imaginar verdadeiras inovações de civilização, e não simplesmente fazer desenvolvimento sustentável ou reciclagem de lixo. Podem mostrar ao resto do mundo o que a Europa acreditou por muito tempo poder fazer. A Europa ainda poderá colaborar com seu grão de areia, mas não poderá mais inovar muito em termos de construir um quadro de vida, porque em parte já o fez, com cidades ligadas por autoestradas, com belas paisagens e belos museus. Já está feito. Mas numa perspectiva de inventar novas modas e novas formas de existência que nada têm a ver com a economia e a modernização, com a conservação, será preciso muita inteligência política e científica. Não há muitos países que possuem esses recursos. Os Estados Unidos poderiam, mas os perderam há muito tempo, saíram da História quando o presidente George W. Bush disse que o modo de vida dos americanos não era negociável. Brasil e Índia ainda têm essa chance. Mas este é o cenário otimista. O cenário pessimista talvez seja o mais provável.

Qual a hipótese pessimista?

Há os chineses que entram com força no Brasil, por exemplo. Meu amigo Clive Hamilton (pensador australiano) diz que, infelizmente, nada vai acontecer, que se vai fazer uma reengenharia, se vai modernizar numa outra escala e numa outra versão catastrófica. Provavelmente, é o que vai ocorrer, já que não conseguimos decidir nada, e que será preciso ainda assim tomar medidas. Uma hipótese é a de que se vai delegar a Estados ainda mais modernizadores no sentido tradicional e hegemônico a tarefa de reparar a situação por meio de medidas drásticas, sem nada mudar, portanto agravando-a. Mas meu dever é o de ser otimista. Em todo caso, é preciso inventar novas formas para pensar essas questões.

O senhor acompanhou as manifestações de rua no Brasil neste ano que passou?

É uma das razões pelas quais o Brasil é interessante, porque há ao mesmo tempo um dinamismo de invenção política, ligado a outros dinamismos relacionados às ciências, às artes. Há um potencial no Brasil. E há, hoje, uma riqueza. Não são temas que se pode abordar em uma situação de miséria. É preciso algo que se pareça ao bem-estar. Na Índia, se você tem um milhão de pessoas morrendo de fome não pode fazer muito. O Brasil é hoje muito importante para a civilização mundial.

Os partidos ecologistas, na sua opinião, não souberam assimilar estas questões?

Nenhum partido ecologista conseguiu manter uma prática. A ecologia se tornou um domínio, enquanto é uma outra forma de tudo fazer. A ecologia se viu encerrada em um tema, e não é vista como uma outra forma de fazer política. É uma posição bastante difícil. É preciso ao mesmo tempo uma posição revolucionária, pois significa modificar o conjunto dos elementos do sistema de produção. Mas é modificar no nível do detalhe de interconexão de redes técnico-sociais, para as quais não há tradição política. Sabemos o que é imaginar a revolução sem fazê-la, administrar situações estabelecidas melhorando-as, modernizar livrando-se de coisas do passado, mas não sabemos o que é criar um novo sistema de produção inovador, que obriga a tudo mudar, como numa revolução, mas assimilando cada vez mais elementos que estão interconectados. Não há uma tradição política para isso. Não é o socialismo, o liberalismo. E é preciso reconhecer que os partidos verdes, seja na Alemanha, na França, nos EUA não fizeram o trabalho de reflexão intelectual necessária. Como os socialistas, no século XIX, refizeram toda a filosofia, seja marxista ou socialista tradicional, libertária, nas relações com a ciência, na reinvenção da economia. Há uma espécie de ideia de que a questão ecológica era local, e que se podia servir do que chamamos de filosofia da ecologia, que é uma filosofia da natureza, muito impregnada do passado, da conservação. O que é completamente inadaptado a uma revolução desta grandeza. Não podemos criticá-los. Eles tentaram, mas não investiram intelectualmente na escala do problema. Não se deram conta do que quer dizer “ecologizar” em vez de “modernizar”. Imagine o pobre do infeliz responsável pelo transporte público de São Paulo ou de Los Angeles.

A França receberá em 2015 a Conferência Internacional sobre o Clima. Como o senhor avalia esses encontros?

Estamos muito mobilizados aqui na Sciences-Po, porque em 2015 ocorrerá em Paris, e trabalhamos bastante sobre o fracasso da conferência de Copenhague, em 2009. Estamos muito ativos, tanto aqui como no Palácio do Eliseu. Na minha interpretação, o sistema de agregação por nação é demasiado convencional para identificar as verdadeiras linhas de clivagens sobre os combates e as oposições. Cada país é atravessado em seu interior por múltiplas facções, e o sistema de negociação pertence à geopolítica tradicional. E também ainda não admitimos de que se tratam de conflitos políticos importantes. A França aceitou a conferência sem perceber realmente do que se tratava, como um tema político maior. Por quê? Porque ainda não estamos habituados a considerar — e aqui outra diferença entre “ecologizar” e “modernizar” — que as questões de meio ambiente e da natureza são questões de conflito, e não questões que vão nos colocar em acordo. Vocês têm isso no Brasil em relação à Floresta Amazônica. Não é porque se diz “vamos salvar a Floresta Amazônica” que todo mundo vai estar de acordo. Há muita discordância. E isso é muito complicado de entender na mentalidade do que é uma negociação.

Poderá haver avanços em 2015?

Uma das hipóteses que faço para 2015 é a de que é preciso acentuar o caráter conflituoso antes de entrar em negociações. Não começar pela repartição das tarefas, mas admitindo que se está em conflito nas questões da natureza. Os ecologistas têm um pouco a ideia de que no momento em que se fala de natureza e de fatos científicos as pessoas vão se alinhar. Acham que se falar que o atum está desaparecendo os pescadores vão começar a parar de matá-los. Sabe-se há muito tempo que é exatamente o contrário, eles vão rapidamente em busca do último atum. A minha hipótese para 2015 é que se deve tornar visíveis estes conflitos. O que coloca vários problemas de teoria política, de ecologia, de representação, de geografia etc. Talvez 2015 já seja um fracasso como foi 2009. Mas é interessante tentar, talvez seja nossa última chance. Tenho muitas ideias. Faremos um colóquio no Rio de Janeiro em setembro de 2014, organizado por Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, sobre isso. Depois faremos um outro, em Toulouse, para testar os modelos de negociação. Em 2015 faremos um outro aqui na Sciences-Po. A ideia é encontrar alternativas no debate sobre conflitos de mundo. Não é uma questão das pessoas que são a favor do carvão, os que são contra os “climacéticos” etc. Não é a mesma conexão, não é a mesma ciência, não é a mesma confiança na política. São conflitos antropocêntricos. Interessante que as pessoas que assistiram à minha peça de teatro ficaram contentes em ver os conflitos. Na ecologia se faz muita pedagogia, se diz como se deve fazer para salvar a Floresta Amazônica. Mas não se fala muito de conflitos.

Anthropocene Continues to Spark Scientific Debate (The Geological Society of America)

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GSA Annual Meeting Technical Session: “Geomorphology of the Anthropocene”

Boulder, Colorado, USA – How have humans influenced Earth? Can geoscientists measure when human impacts began overtaking those of Earth’s other inhabitants and that of the natural Earth system? Responding to increasing scientific recognition that humans have become the foremost agent of change at Earth’s surface, organizers of this GSA technical session have brought together speakers and poster presentations from a variety of sources in order to answer these questions and define the “Geomorphology of the Anthropocene.”

“Anthropocene” is a fairly new term (first used ca. 2002 by Paul Crutzen) now being applied to the current global environment and its domination by human activity (see J. Zalasiewicz et al.’s 2008 GSA Today article “Are we now living in the Anthropocene” [v. 18, no. 2, p. 4]). This “era” or “epoch” spans a yet-undetermined but so far brief (in geologic terms) time scale potentially marking the end of the Holocene epoch.

Session organizers Anne Jefferson of Kent State University, Karl Wegmann of North Carolina State University, and Anne Chin of the University of Colorado Denver have gathered presentations addressing human interactions with Earth’s systems. Research studies span a range of temporal and spatial scales and investigate a variety of influences, including the effects of indigenous culture as well as dams and cities.

Chin says that part of the research is spurred by “the difficulty of finding any place (no matter how ‘pristine’) where the landscape hasn’t been affected by human activities.” She cites the U.S. National Research Council’s “Grand Challenge” in Landscapes on the Edge: New Horizons for Research on Earth’s Surface (2010) to determine how Earth’s surface may evolve in the Anthropocene.

Chin also points to the intensification of debate over “Anthropocene” and the time frame it encompasses as scientists, policymakers, the media, and the public become increasingly aware of the term. A goal of this session is to address the debate and add a greater base of scientific understanding to round out the popularity of the idea.

Three Geological Society of American (GSA) specialty divisions cosponsor this session: the GSA Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division, the GSA Geology and Society Division, and the GSA Archaeological Geology Division, thus bringing to bear a multidisciplinary perspective to the problem. Talks include “An early Anthropocene analog: Ancient Maya impacts on the Earth’s surface”; “Removing streams from the landscape: Counting the buried streams beneath urban landscapes”; and Anthropogenic influences on rates of coastal change.”

Papers from this session will be compiled into a special issue of Anthropocene, a new journal launching in 2013 by Elsevier, devoted to addressing one of the grand challenges of our time.

Session 8: T24. Geomorphology of the Anthropocene: The Surficial Legacy of Past and Present Human Activities
Talks: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2012AM/webprogram/Session30644.html
When: Sunday, 4 Nov., 8 a.m. to noon
Where: Charlotte Convention Center, Room 207A
Poster Session: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2012AM/webprogram/Session31925.html
When: Sunday, 4 Nov., 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Where: Charlotte Convention Center Hall B

Contacts: 
Anne J. Jefferson: ajeffer9@kent.edu, +1-980-213-5933
Karl W. Wegmann: kwwegman@ncsu.edu
Anne Chin: anne.chin@ucdenver.edu, +1-979-492-0074

Find out what else is new and newsworthy by browsing the complete technical program schedule at https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2012AM/finalprogram/.

To identify presentations in specific areas of interest, search topical sessions by discipline categories or sponsors using the drop-down menus atwww.geosociety.org/meetings/2012/sessions/topical.asp, or use your browser’s “find” feature to search for keywords or convener names.

The Anthropocene? Planet Earth in the Age of Humans (AAA)

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Posted on October 16, 2012 by Joslyn O.

Today’s guest blog post is by AAA member Shirley J Fiske. Fiske is an environmental anthropologist and Research Professor at University of Maryland’s College Park campus.  She is the Chair of the American Anthropological Association ’s task force on Global Climate Change. 

The first in a series of Grand Challenges symposia organized by the Smithsonian for the public (at least the highly educated, concerned public from what I could tell)—a full day with stellar speakers and response panels.  Invigorating discussion and ideas.  Kudos!  Many well-known names Charles Mann (1491, 1493 ), Richard Alley, Andrew Revkin, Senator Tim Wirth and incredibly moving & convincing presentation by photographer Chris Jordan whose images of “the infrastructure of our mass consumption” are familiar to many – as well as his photos of the stomach contents of dead baby Albatrosses on Midway Island, showing them starved with their bellies full of plastic debris.

Environmental humanities were well-represented and exciting, but the social sciences less so – disappointingly, economist Sabine O’Hara did nothing to illuminated the human aspects of the changes in the Anthropocene but chose to talk about “internalizing the economy.”  However, two archaeologists, both at the Smithsonian, did an excellent job as panelists-rapporteurs, ensuring that the audience kept the long dimension of human evolution and development in mind.  Rick Potts, (National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program Director), a paleo-anthropologist, offered a tantalizing insight, roughly paraphrased as a lot of change took place during periods of high climate variability (unstable periods)—such as innovations in lithic technology and other things.  He also stated that he’s in the process of getting a long core that will show us 500,000 years of climate change in East Africa during the time period of the development of our species.  Torben C. Rick (NMNH Director of the Program in Human Ecology and Archaeobiology)  focused on the “mid-term time frame”—the last 1,000 years!  and offered that sustainability rests on reconciling the short term developments with long term cycles.  The last 10,000 years has been a series of changes, re-organizations—not collapses.

The symposium was titled as a declarative, but there was a necessary and good discussion about whether naming it the Anthropocene showed abundant human hubris in our assumed agency in changing the world and the course of the earth .  In that vein, some concluded that whatever we do at this point won’t have any effect on the ‘big picture’ of the earth’s 4-billion year existence and that the Anthropocene is wrongly named.  Highlights and some familiar assumptions, brought to the fore, were that nature can no longer be studied in isolation from humans and human systems. (check!), that ‘homogenization’ of the planet started well before the industrial revolution (Mann), that we’re the first species that recognizes who recognizes that we’re having a global impact (compared with, say, cyanobacteria);  and that we need to move away from trying to “manage” the system and focus on monitoring and adapting;  the recognition that science-based decision have inherently imbedded values within them  (Revkin).

Richard Alley has re-focused his energy onto renewables, pointing out that is the direction we need to go, that all the easy oil is gone.  His talk made abundantly clear that the argument that encouraging renewable energy means loss of jobs is a blatant red herring; that the way to start such a massive transformation is to jettison the dirtiest and most dangerous (i.e. the work of coal mining is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US) of fossil fuel resources, coal, and develop the others.  He de-bunked the ‘myth of intermittency’ (my words) with wind and solar energy quite effectively.  One of the panelists aptly said Alley is a “radical center of an environmental view of the world.”  Glad to have him there.

The culture concept was constantly invoked, as it is almost universally these days.  “How do we change culture?”   (away from consumption, from “need,” from capitalism or communism)  The most insightful answers (although not necessarily action-oriented) came from photographer Chris Jordan, who argued that we should do essentially nothing, in the short term;  we should let our human-created disaster settle in and we should grieve.  It is only by grieving fully that we will reconnect with our spiritual side and with love, the fundamental emotion of humans.  The symposium was organized to begin a dialogue around the meaning of the Anthropocene, and it accomplished those goals.  The symposium led me to conclude, similar to one of the speakers (Alley?) who said that the meaning of the Anthropocene is ethical and moral – how do we want the future to look and what can we do with the knowledge we have?