ANT 380K and GRG 396T
Anthropocene in the Longue Durée
This seminar explores the “Anthropocene” from the perspectives of multiple disciplines, its historical roots, and its chronologies. Two professors lead this seminar and will be part of all meetings. One, Arlene Rosen, is an environmental archaeologist who has worked all over the planet and directs the environmental archaeology lab. The other, Tim Beach, is a soils geoscientist who has worked mainly in Central America and the Mediterranean and directs the Soils and Geoarchaeology Lab. They bring perspectives from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
From Plato to Alexander von Humboldt to John Muir and Rachel Carson, thinkers have long written about the metamorphosis of the Earth wrought by humans at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Only with Stoermer and Crutzen in the Early 2000s did the final term Anthropocene come to the fore. Many disciplines offer perspectives on this topic, including archaeology, ecology, climatology, geomorphology and paleontology, as well as the social sciences and humanities. Moreover, human impacts have been substantial for millennia, though “the great acceleration” since the 1950s has certainly lived up to its name. From our 21st century vantage point, now squarely in the “Anthropocene”, we need to muster all of these tools and technologies and innovate more to understand and manage our present and future, increasingly human-dominated world.
Topics
History of the concept and nature of Epochs
The Great Levers of Change
Human Drivers of Change
Markers and Golden Spikes
Who owns the narrative?
When does the Anthropocene begin? Late Pleistocene or the Holocene and its new subdivisions: The Greenlandian, Northgrippian, and Meghalayan
Early Anthropocene
15,000 BP
5,000 BP
1610
16 July 1945
1950
Geographic dimensions of intensive human impacts
The Anthropocene in Ecology: biodiversity, ecosystem services . . .
The Anthropocene in the soils, oceans, atmosphere, geomorphology, and anthropology
Utopian Environments, The Chthulucene, The Capitalocene, & Terrascaping
The Anthropocene & Environmental Restoration
The Great Acceleration