THE ANTHROPOCENE! Beyond the Natural? …………………………………………………………………………
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Planetary Quotas and the Planetary Accounting Framework Comparing Human Activity to Global Environmental Limits
School of Design and Built Environment Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute Planetary Quotas and the Planetary Accounting Framework Comparing Human Activity to Global Environmental Limits Katherine Meyer This thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University November 2018 i DECLARATION To the best of my knowledge and belief this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgment has been made. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. Signature: …………………………………………. Date: …21st November 2018…………... ii ABSTRACT Human activity is altering environmental processes to the extent that we are at risk of changing the state of the planet from one that is hospitable to humanity to one that is potentially hostile. The Planetary Boundaries are global environmental limits derived from Earth system Science that together define the “safe operating space”. Within the Planetary Boundaries, the risk of changing the state of the planet is low but already four of the Planetary Boundaries have been transgressed. There is an urgent need to manage human impacts on the global environment so that we can return to the safe operating space. Policy makers and scientists want to use the Planetary Boundaries to manage human impacts on the environment so that we can return to the safe operating space. However, the Planetary Boundaries were not designed to be scaled or compared to human activity. There is a need to translate the Planetary Boundaries into a framework that is accessible and actionable. -
Environmental Worldviews, Ethics, and Sustainability 25
Environmental Worldviews, Ethics, and Sustainability 25 Biosphere 2—A Lesson in Humility C O R E C A S E S TUDY In 1991, eight scientists (four men and four women) were sealed sphere’s 25 small animal species went extinct. Before the 2-year inside Biosphere 2, a $200 million glass and steel enclosure period was up, all plant-pollinating insects went extinct, thereby designed to be a self-sustaining life-support system (Figure 25-1) dooming to extinction most of the plant species. that would add to our understanding of Biosphere 1: the earth’s Despite many problems, the facility’s waste and wastewater life-support system. were recycled. With much hard work, the Biospherians were A sealed system of interconnected domes was built in the also able to produce 80% of their food supply, despite rampant desert near Tucson, Arizona (USA). It contained artificial ecosys- weed growths, spurred by higher CO2 levels, that crowded out tems including a tropical rain forest, savanna, and desert, as well food crops. However, they suffered from persistent hunger and as lakes, streams, freshwater and saltwater wetlands, and a mini- weight loss. ocean with a coral reef. In the end, an expenditure of $200 million failed to maintain Biosphere 2 was designed to mimic the earth’s natural chemi- this life-support system for eight people for 2 years. Since 2007, cal recycling systems. Water evaporated from its ocean and other the University of Arizona has been leasing the Biosphere 2 facility aquatic systems and then condensed to provide rainfall over the for biological research and to provide environmental education tropical rain forest. -
Endangered Species and Biodiversity Vol
Endangered Species and Biodiversity Vol. 4, 2018, pages 199-203 H Rolston III, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, United States ã 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. An Anthropocene Biosphere Humans and Endangered Species The End of Nature Geoengineered Biodiversity Ecomodern Conservation Creative Biogenesis References “Instead of pursuing the protection of biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake, a new conservation should seek to enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people, especially the poor.” “Protecting biodiversity for its own sake has not worked. Protecting nature that is dynamic and resilient, that is in our midst rather than far away, and that sustains human communities— these are the ways forward now. Otherwise, conservation will fail, clinging to its old myths” (Kareiva et al., 2011, pp. 36, 37). We need a “New Conservation” ethic. So argue prominent enthusiasts for the Anthropocene. The International Commission on Stratigraphy has a working group that has recommended Anthropocene as a geological unit (Waters et al., 2016). Beyond the geology, Anthropocene has become a Promethean term, what philosophers call an “elevator word,” and put to use revising worldviews, asserting the dominant human place in nature and conservation policy, as in the title of Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier, “Conservation in the Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene has its proponents and equally its critics, well illustrated in contrasting views of endangered species and biodiversity. An Anthropocene Biosphere In a Dictionary of Ecology, Allaby (2005) tells us: “The biosphere itself, at levels from the genetic to the landscape, is increasingly a human product.” These human effects, however, are often negative. -
Jeremy Baskin, “Paradigm Dressed As Epoch: the Ideology of The
Paradigm Dressed as Epoch: The Ideology of the Anthropocene JEREMY BASKIN School of Social and Political Sciences University of Melbourne Victoria 3010, Australia Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT The Anthropocene is a radical reconceptualisation of the relationship between humanity and nature. It posits that we have entered a new geological epoch in which the human species is now the dominant Earth-shaping force, and it is rapidly gaining traction in both the natural and social sciences. This article critically explores the scientific representation of the concept and argues that the Anthropocene is less a scientific concept than the ideational underpinning for a particular worldview. It is paradigm dressed as epoch. In particular, it normalises a certain portion of humanity as the ‘human’ of the Anthropocene, reinserting ‘man’ into nature only to re-elevate ‘him’ above it. This move pro- motes instrumental reason. It implies that humanity and its planet are in an exceptional state, explicitly invoking the idea of planetary management and legitimising major interventions into the workings of the earth, such as geoen- gineering. I conclude that the scientific origins of the term have diminished its radical potential, and ask whether the concept’s radical core can be retrieved. KEYWORDS Anthropocene, ideology, geoengineering, environmental politics, earth management INTRODUCTION ‘The Anthropocene’ is an emergent idea, which posits that the human spe- cies is now the dominant Earth-shaping force. Initially promoted by scholars from the physical and earth sciences, it argues that we have exited the current geological epoch, the 12,000-year-old Holocene, and entered a new epoch, Environmental Values 24 (2015): 9–29. -
Our Common Future
Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future Table of Contents Acronyms and Note on Terminology Chairman's Foreword From One Earth to One World Part I. Common Concerns 1. A Threatened Future I. Symptoms and Causes II. New Approaches to Environment and Development 2. Towards Sustainable Development I. The Concept of Sustainable Development II. Equity and the Common Interest III. Strategic Imperatives IV. Conclusion 3. The Role of the International Economy I. The International Economy, the Environment, and Development II. Decline in the 1980s III. Enabling Sustainable Development IV. A Sustainable World Economy Part II. Common Challenges 4. Population and Human Resources I. The Links with Environment and Development II. The Population Perspective III. A Policy Framework 5. Food Security: Sustaining the Potential I. Achievements II. Signs of Crisis III. The Challenge IV. Strategies for Sustainable Food Security V. Food for the Future 6. Species and Ecosystems: Resources for Development I. The Problem: Character and Extent II. Extinction Patterns and Trends III. Some Causes of Extinction IV. Economic Values at Stake V. New Approach: Anticipate and Prevent VI. International Action for National Species VII. Scope for National Action VIII. The Need for Action 7. Energy: Choices for Environment and Development I. Energy, Economy, and Environment II. Fossil Fuels: The Continuing Dilemma III. Nuclear Energy: Unsolved Problems IV. Wood Fuels: The Vanishing Resource V. Renewable Energy: The Untapped Potential VI. Energy Efficiency: Maintaining the Momentum VII. Energy Conservation Measures VIII. Conclusion 8. Industry: Producing More With Less I. Industrial Growth and its Impact II. Sustainable Industrial Development in a Global Context III. -
Eolss Sample Chapters
JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION – Vol. II - Sustainability - Stephen Viederman SUSTAINABILITY Stephen Viederman Former President, Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, New York, USA Keywords: Sustainability, sustainable development, equity, justice, environment, conventional economics, democracy, public participation, vision, social construct, ‘rules of the game’, multinational corporations, population, consumption. Contents 1. Introduction 2. What is Sustainability? 2.1 Sustainability is a Social Construct 2.2 Sustainability is a Vision of a Desired Future 2.3 Sustainability is a Process With a Beginning But No End 2.4 Sustainability is Qualified By Context and is Location Specific 2.5 Sustainability is About the Ecosystem and its Interrelationships With Other Subsystems 3. Sustainability: A Definition 4. Barriers to Sustainability 4.1 The Capacity to Envision the Future 4.2 The “Rules of the Game” 5. Issues 5.1 Sustainability and the Multinational Corporation 5.2 Dimensions of Sustainable Development 5.3 Population, Consumption, and Sustainability 6. Conclusion Bibliography Biographical Sketch Summary Sustainability has become reified, as if one day society was unsustainable and the next day it becomes sustainable. In reality, sustainability is about a participatory process with a beginning and no end, a vision of the future, an ideal, a goal. It is a social construct that is UNESCOunattainable by definition, because – understanding EOLSS of the goal and definition of the vision will change with time. Much of the discussion of sustainability has been focused on environmental or ecological sustainability with little attention to the human dimension. WhileSAMPLE it is true that the environment CHAPTERS is the basis for all life and all production, in fact, in the absence of attention to issues of equity and justice, the environment cannot be sustained. -
3 Scenario 1: Earth Charter This Is a World in Which Humans Have A
Scenario 1: Earth Charter This is a world in which humans have a respect for all life. People understand themselves as part of an integrated biosphere and focus on finding balance and harmony with each other and nature and focus on nurturing a thriving and healthy world. With expanding equity and inclusion, a broadening of the definition of knowledge and science leads to extreme new insights and advancements in a highly interconnected and richly diverse world. There is a porous boundary between human focus and non-human focus as people honor all species’ labor and space. Conservancy in interconnected systems and infrastructure become so efficient that “waste” is no longer a common term in language. Data are collected, monitored, and analyzed to ensure interspecies equity. The result is species return to pre-human levels as the human population stabilizes. Technology and advancements combined with the inclusion of art and expression have led to the development of new approaches to learning and the delivery of knowledge that are increasingly adaptive, personalized and driven by the student. Institutional models of education are obsolete as education is no longer measured by degree but by knowing, adaptiveness, creativity, continuity of learning and freedom of thought and expression. Universal access to learning and education leads to broad societal agency and empowerment. The public has a great acceptance of science with an acknowledgement that science must integrate with other world views that ecumenically bridges all faith traditions. Current Drivers and Trends Signaling the Potential of this Scenario The progressive and global orientation and activism of youth combines with the growing climate justice movement to create an unprecedented and sustained societal shift toward a new understanding of humans as part of a complex and vulnerable living system and environment. -
The Anthropocene
The Anthropocene The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea Rob Nixon Time gets thicker, light gets dim 1 Allen Ginsberg, “The Gates of Wrath” What does it mean to imagine Homo sapiens as not merely a historical but a geo- logical actor, a force of such magnitude that our impacts are being written into the fossil record? What does it mean to acknowledge that, for the first time in Earth’s history, a sentient species, our own, has shaken Earth’s life systems with a pro- fundity that paleontologist Anthony Barnosky has likened to an asteroid strike? How does that perceptual shift disturb widespread assumptions about the deep past and the far future, about planetary history, human power relations, and the dynamics between humans and nonhuman agents of Earth’s metamorphosis? If our actions have become geologically consequential, leaving an enduring archive that will be legible for tens or even hundreds of millennia to come, what will that archive disclose about social relations, above all, about the unequal weight of human communities possessing disparate earth- changing powers? And, in terms of the history of ideas, why now? Why has the idea of Homo sapiens as a fused biological- geological force gained traction in the second decade of the twenty- first century, when in the twentieth century geologists typically dismissed our species’ occupancy of this planet as not just ephemeral but as geologically trivial? Such consequential questions follow from the turn to the Anthropocene, a hypothesis advanced by Nobel Prize– winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Chicago Press. -
The God Species Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans 1St Edition Download Free
THE GOD SPECIES SAVING THE PLANET IN THE AGE OF HUMANS 1ST EDITION DOWNLOAD FREE Mark Lynas | 9781426208911 | | | | | Mark Lynas I've been recommending this book to everyone, and I recommend it to you, too. Okay, this is going to be a long review, since I will collect almost all of my blog posts on this book I did last year on Lenz Blog. He gets 2 stars--one for nuclear power and one for promoting genetically modified food as a "green" technology. Three large rocky planets orbit the star at the center of our solar system: Venus, Earth, and Mars. This latter position was attacked as patronising and naive by some developing world commentators, including one featured in a Channel Four debate after the programme aired. Rather importantly, it puts climate change in the context of a larger global set of problems that need highlighting. Or that in comparison to the electricity actually consumed in France the generation percentage of nuclear and renewable energy is already over percent. If the German government had had its way, all of Tokyo would have been evacuated. This attitude pervades his book, and he reserves most of his ire for leftists who continue to take anti-science positions on key environmental issues. You will get thumb-ache reading this edition through the night. We have wiped out countless species and are now heating the planet, poisoning the oceans, and transforming the atmosphere. But their convenient fictions chime with the thinking of the new establishment: corporations, thinktanks, neoliberal politicians. As mentioned before, the Fukushima accident would be a good opportunity to just dump a lot of low-level radioactive water in the sea and then use the hysterical irrational fear of radiation to declare a large area around the site completely off limits for fishers. -
A Brief Guide to Planetary Management
A Brief Guide to Planetary Management Copyright © 2002 Joseph George Caldwell. All rights reserved. Posted at Internet website http://www.foundationwebsite.org . May be copied or reposted for noncommercial purposes, with attribution to author and website. 8 September 2002; updated 10 September 2002. Contents A Brief Guide to Planetary Management ............................... 1 Vision Statement ................................................................... 2 Mission Statement ................................................................. 3 Goals ..................................................................................... 4 Some Additional Background Discussion ........................... 10 Author’s note… ................................................................... 20 This document provides a high-level guide to planetary management for Earth. It provides a statement of vision, mission, and goals. It sets forth concepts, principles and policy, and outlines the general approach to planetary management (PM). This “Guide” includes background information on the rationale for its statements of principles and goals. (In doing so, it is a little “rambling” at places. A more succinct guide may be issued at a later time.) Since the form of planetary management proposed herein is based on a world thriving on the recurrent flux of solar energy – a solar civilization – the planetary management organization (PMO) embodying this planetary management system will be referred to as Solaria. Vision Statement The vision for Earth is a planet with a “minimal-regret” human population of ten million people – a single-nation technologically advanced city-state of five million people, and a low-technology (hunter-gatherer) population of five million people distributed over the planet. A “minimal-regret” population is one that keeps the likelihood of extinction of the human species and destruction of the biosphere as we know it at low levels, and keeps the likelihood of long-term survival (of the same) at high levels. -
Jonathan Z. Cannon
VIRGINIA JOURNAL FINDING A WAY FORWARD ON THE ENVIRONMENT U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS enacted in the late 1960s and 1970s were successful in addressing a number of the pressing issues that gave rise to the modern environmental movement. But daunting issues remain, such as climate change, species loss, and watershed degradation, while the public debate about environmen- tal law and policy is more polarized than ever. Jonathan Cannon’s perspectives on these issues grow from a career in environmental law that encompasses, in roughly equal portions, private practice, government service, and teaching and scholarship. This combination is unusual among environmental law scholars and helps give Cannon’s insights a distinctive balance and persuasiveness. Cannon’s interest in the environment began with a youthful delight in the outdoors, which continues unabated into his seventy-first year. It grew with his attraction as an undergraduate English major to the English romantic poets Wordsworth and Keats and to American writ- ers such as Thoreau and Whitman. Cannon’s undergraduate training as a critical reader of literary texts would later become instrumental in his distinctive interpretation of environmental texts, most notably the Supreme Court’s opinions in major environmental cases. In this aspect of his work, Cannon explores the significance of these opin- ions as cultural as well as legal texts. Equally important to Cannon’s scholarship was his decades-long apprenticeship as a lawyer in the private practice of environmental law and as a senior official in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, charged with shaping and implementing national environmental policy. Stemming from this experience, a second strain of Cannon’s scholarly work is a pragmatic JONATHAN Z. -
16 Environmental Ethics for Tomorrow Sustaining the Biosphere Holmes Rolston III
Helen Kopnina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, eds. Sustainability: Key Issues. London: Routledge, Earthscan, 2015 16 Environmental ethics for tomorrow Sustaining the biosphere Holmes Rolston III Sustainability What do we want for tomorrow? What ought we to want? Sustainability!! But of course! "Sustaining" is rather similar to "surviving," and nobody can be against it. The basic principle of people living on landscapes is that past and present continue into the future. But what are you for? Some answers are quite inclusive: All living things ought to be sustained, equally people and nature, and these two go together. "Sustainable devel- opment," Ronald Engel tells us, with emphasis, "may be defined as the kind of human activity that nourishes and perpetuates the historical ful- fillment of the whole community of life on Earth" (Engel 1990, 10-11). Such answers are both generous and nonspecific, giving little guidance for ethics or policy. Proponents argue that sustainability is useful just because it is a wide-angle lens. The specifics are unspecified, giving peoples and nations the freedom and responsibility of self-development (although the UN has further sug- gested some indicators of sustainable development, United Nations Depart- ment of Economic and Social Affairs 2007). This is an orienting concept that is at once directed and encompassing, a coalition-level policy that sets aspira- tions and thresholds, and allows pluralist strategies for their accomplish- ment. Work your development out however you wish - provided only that it is sustainable into the future. Critics reply that sustainability has proved to be an umbrella concept so diffuse that it requires little but superficial agreement, bringing a con- stant illusion of consensus, glossing over deeper problems with a rhetori- cally engaging word.