Category: Blog

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Anthropocene Science: There May Be Trouble Ahead

Now and then scientists act in concert to speak truth to power. Back in the 1970s, for example, they invented and used the idea of a “nuclear winter,” which became a semantic weapon that helped de-escalate the Cold War arms race between the communist countries and members of NATO. Today the daily war against Earth is a prime focus: teams of scientists have coined new terms to sound the alarm about humanity’s various misuses of the nonhuman world. Chief among them is the Anthropocene. It describes human impacts on Earth of such scope, scale, and magnitude as to initiate a new phase of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. “Anthropo” means people, “cene” an extended period: “the age of humans,” as a rough translation. Originating in environmental science at the turn of the millennium, the Anthropocene may soon graduate from an academic buzzword to a keyword—that is, one of those terms that animates inquiry within and between a plethora of disciplines over a long period of time (in the ways that “globalization” and “genetic modification” have done since the mid-1990s).

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New Featured Article!: “Origins, Uses, and Transformation of Extinction Rhetoric” Available as Free PDF

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Origins, Uses, and Transformation of Extinction Rhetoric,” comes from Volume 1 (2010). Richard Ladle and Paul Jepson trace the historical origins of the extinction concept and discuss its power to influence policies, agendas, and behaviors.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

RICHARD LADLE is Titular Professor of Conservation Biogeography and Director the 21st Century Conservation Lab at the Federal University of Alagoas. He is  a Senior Research Associate at the School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University, where he was formerly the Course Director of the MSc degree program in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management (2003–2009). He has diverse and interdisciplinary research interests that span all aspects of the theory and practice of conservation.

PAUL JEPSON directs the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the University of Oxford. He transferred to academia from a career in conservation policy, working in the UK, Indonesia, and Indochina, and he now leads an interdisciplinary conservation governance laboratory working to generate novel and creative insight to help ensure the relevance and impact of conservation in the twenty-first century.

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Public Statement on Zika Virus in Puerto Rico

This essay was originally published on Savage Minds on 15 March 2016.

This call to action was written by Adriana Garriga-López, Ph.D. (Kalamazoo College), and Shir Lerman, M.A., M.P.H., PhD Candidate (University of Connecticut), with Jessica Mulligan, Ph.D. (Providence College), Alexa Dietrich, Ph.D., M.P.H. (Wagner College), Carlos E. Rodríguez-Díaz, PhD, MPHE, MCHES (University of Puerto Rico), and Ricardo Vargas-Molina, M.A. (University of Puerto Rico), through the auspices of the American Anthropological Association’s Zika Interest Group, as part of the rapid response mechanism of the Society for Medical Anthropology. The authors are members of the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Zika Interest Group.

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“Something Wicked This Way Comes”: Energy, Modernities, and the AnthropoScene

The verdict of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is clear: we are the dominant species on this planet, and our documented role in the global system gives many (but not all) confidence that the Anthropocene is well named. We need to understand the interactions, impacts, and development of systems to attempt either adaptation or mitigation with respect to our changing climate, recalling that unintended consequences must always be counted. As they say, there is no planet B, no other place where externalities can be stored for later disposal. Of course, wicked problems like climate change are nothing new. They resist resolution because they are difficult to define/multicausal (unlike the ozone hole); have incomplete or changing parameters, such that “solving” one part of problem generates new ones; and have no clear solution, just better or worse options (Rittel and Webber 1973). Wicked problems are socially complex and generally require behavioral or cultural changes of significant proportions. Examples of these, such as climate change, energy transitions, water management, and biodiversity loss, are also the hallmark of the Anthropocene: they are “socionatural” transformations that we have set in motion ourselves, and the ones I have mentioned all have strong connections with each other. Here, I focus on energy.

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A Conversation on Climate Change in the Papua New Guinea Islands

Ranguva Solwara Skul, Kaselok Village, New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea

Participants: Sekunda Aini, Michael Tarere, Ambrose Kolmaris, Hagar Boskuru, Bernard Miller Silakau, Wilson Tonias, GomanMatas

On 13 December 2015, the authors and participants gathered at the headquarters of Ailan Awareness, a locally owned environmental NGO in New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea, to talk about climate change. Eight of the nine of us reside in Lovongai Village in the nearby island of New Hanover. The majority of our conversation was focused on changes that were occurring in that particular village, with useful comparisons being made to “mainland” New Ireland. This was, in part, a local response to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) held in Paris earlier in the month.

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New Featured Article!: “Transforming Participatory Science” Available as Free PDF

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Transforming Participatory Science into Socioecological Praxis,” comes from Volume 5 (2014). Brian J. Burke and Nik Heynen evaluate the participatory traditions of citizen science and sustainability science, finding that they often fall short of the transformative potential because they do not directly confront the production of environmental injustice and political exclusion.

Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.

BRIAN J. BURKE is an assistant professor in the Goodnight Family Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University. From 2012 to 2014 he was a postdoctoral researcher with the Coweeta Listening Project. His research aims to support movements for social justice and environmental sustainability by examining their ethical visions and strategies and the challenges they face. Drawing on political economy and political ecology, he studies how material and sociocultural forces shape processes of social and socionatural change in specific contexts. His work has included projects on urban environmental activism on the US-Mexico border, rural cooperatives in Latin America, alternative economies in Colombia, and environmental knowledge.

NIK HEYNEN is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Georgia and director of the Coweeta Listening Project. His research utilizes a combined urban political ecology/urban political economy framework to investigate how economic, political, and cultural processes contribute to the production of material inequality and uneven urban environments. His three main research foci relate to the analysis of how social power relationships, including class, race, and gender, are inscribed in the transformation of nature, and how in turn these processes contribute to interrelated and interdependent connections between nature, space, and social reproduction.

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Working With, Part II: On the Work of Collaboration in Coastal Alaska

“Please join me and stand with the bears!” So ends a recent e-mail I received from an environmental organization campaigning to curtail old-growth logging in Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The Tongass is the United States’ largest national forest and encompasses most of the land in Southeast Alaska. In November, the US Forest Service released a draft of a proposed amendment to the current Tongass management plan, whose ninety-day comment period extends through February 22.1 According to the message in my inbox, written by a wilderness advocate and bear-viewing guide, the draft amendment includes some important provisions to protect prime salmon habitat and forest livelihoods but leaves bears out in the cold. The proposed plan sacrifices the “bears’ necessities” to continued old-growth logging in the Tongass, the e-mail contends.

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Solar, Sustainability, and Strategies in Sarawak

The orang solar (“solar men”) are finally here. The longhouse community has been lit in a pleasant buzz since awaiting the arrival of the technicians (described by my adoptive parents, as “orang solar”) who would install new solar panels. The week prior, the available men in the longhouse had worked every day on building the shed that would house the solar batteries within and the solar panels above.

Apai building the solar shed (December 2015)
Apai building the solar shed (December 2015)

Apai1 tells me that the solar batteries are arriving separately from Germany. He is so impressed with the origin of the batteries that he repeats this fact to me a couple of times. However, he worries, they might be delayed in the port, not in time for Christmas when the villagers’ adult children return for the holidays from working in the cities.

The solar panels are not the first that the village has had. The first sixteen solar panels were placed above the longhouse roof about a year ago, replacing the many village generators run on diesel. However, the electricity generated from the solar panels is enough for “lights and TV only”—not enough to run the iceboxes or a washing machine that sits idle in a bathroom where I bathe with a scoop and a bucket.

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Olgeta Meri Igat Raits? (All Women Have Rights?)

The “David and Goliath” story Stuart Kirsch tells in Mining Capitalism (2014)—of global underdogs triumphing over a powerful mining company, aided and abetted by Global North activists—is replicated in another story from Papua New Guinea (PNG), albeit concerning a different mine: the Porgera gold mine in the PNG highlands, the country’s second largest mine (Columbia-Harvard 2015: 20). In brief, the Porgera Landowners Association (PLOA) and the Porgera-based Akali Tangi Association (ATA; commonly translated as Human Rights Association), operating in tandem with MiningWatch Canada (MWC),1 pressured Porgera Joint Venture (PJV) to give reparations to women who claimed to have been gang raped by PJV’s security guards. At the time, the Canadian company Barrick Gold Corporation, then regarded as the world’s leading gold mining company, was the majority shareholder. Although Barrick continues to manage the mine, it shares that honor with Zijin, a large Chinese gold company, which bought 50 percent of Barrick’s equity in May 2015.

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Regeneration of Human-Modified Landscapes: The Irony of Antipathy to Resilient Animals

Lambert1

You hear a lot about resilience these days—for good reason. Our planet is undergoing profound ecological and climatological change, and we are now unequivocally in a geochemically distinct epoch (Anthropocene) with its own unique signature of human-produced aluminum, concrete, and plastics—direct by-products of the “Great Acceleration of population growth, industrialization, and mineral and energy use” (Waters et al. 2016: 2622). The resilience of species—including human—to this Great Acceleration has received considerable attention of late by social scientists, although the concept as applied to ecological systems has been around for several decades. As originally conceived by Holling (1973), ecologists define resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks” (Walker et al. 2004: 5). However, it is not my goal to explore resilience per se; many superb reviews and analyses already exist (e.g., Jacka 2015). Instead, here I explore the irony of resilience from the perspective of human antipathy toward “pest” species.

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