Anthropocene

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Desalination and the Political (Blue) Economy of Climate Adaptation

Posted on March 7, 2022March 17, 2022

**Figure 1**. Inside the largest seawater desalination plant in United States that produces 50 million gallon per day, located in Carlsbad, CA. Image © Brian F. O’Neill (2019).

A Blue Revolution?

Seawater desalination, the industrial production of drinking water from the ocean, is a practice of increasingly intense interest to thirsty cities across the globe. And why not? It promises the ability to provide a reliable water source that is (seemingly) invulnerable to climate change. What is more, the market is responding, with a global estimated value of roughly $18 billion[1] (c.f., Swyngedouw and Williams 2016). And there is significant expected growth, up to $32 billion (that’s about half the estimated size of the wind industry),[2] in the next four years.

Oceans

Governance for the Anthropocene Ocean

Posted on March 9, 2021March 17, 2022

In 2020, the world watched as climate, public health, economic, and racial justice crises converged. It has become increasingly evident that failures of collective and public policies around health and the environment have perpetuated individual suffering. If ever there was an opportunity for the collective to re-think business as usual… it is now. We are firmly situated in the Anthropocene: a time in which human activities are arguably driving our climate and changing environment. The ocean is not exempt from these human influences. Indeed, human energy demands and associated carbon emissions, unsustainable extraction of living and non-living marine resources, land-based activities, and natural processes are contributing to significant changes in marine and coastal environments. These changes include the persistence of plastic waste in most, if not all, ocean ecosystems and species, reduced oxygen and lower pH levels in coastal waters, unprecedented shifts in the range and distribution of marine species, and sustained elevated ocean temperatures over time and space, among others. These conditions exemplify what we are now calling the Anthropocene Ocean. The Anthropocene Ocean is also occurring amidst rapidly changing societies and associated limits to land-based industrial expansion; feeding an emerging narrative about the economic potential of the ocean and its resources (Campbell et al. 2016). Our rapidly changing ocean is also now perceived as the next frontier for growth and expansion of our global economic system.

Oceans

Shifting Baseline and Factish Resilience

Posted on March 9, 2021March 17, 2022

The 1949 Fisheries Law in Japan underwent a historic revision in 2018, which went into effect in December 2020. The revision included the further application of science-based resource assessment, the introduction of the Individual Quota (IT) system, the expansion of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) to more commercially targeted species, and the loosening of the entry restrictions to open fisheries to private companies. While the inclusion of scientific knowledge and approaches could deepen our understanding of oceans and marine species in the Anthropocene, most coastal fishing communities in Japan, whose fishing operation is local and cooperative-based, could find this revision a threat to their communal livelihoods due to its emphasis on rationalized single species-oriented approach to management, rather than a relational multi-species approach for their community wellbeing. This short essay aims to supplement and contextualize my recent article in Environment and Society (Hamada 2020) with the current state of Pacific herring fishery in Japan.

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The Social Life of Blame in the Anthropocene

Posted on September 30, 2018March 10, 2021

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”The Social Life of Blame in the Anthropocene”—comes from Volume 6 (2015). In his article, Peter Rudiak-Gould shows how life in the Anthropocene reconfigures blame in four ways—it invites ubiquitous blame, ubiquitous blamelessness, selective blame, and partial blame—and reviews case studies from around the world, investigating which climate change blame narratives actors select, why, and with what consequences

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

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New Featured Article!: “Beyond the Anthropocene”

Posted on November 1, 2017

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article—”Beyond the Anthropocene: Un-Earthing an Epoch”—comes from Volume 6 (2015). In their article, Valerie Olson and Lisa Messeri examine the Anthropocene’s emerging rhetorical topology, showing that Anthropocene narratives evince a macroscale division between an “inner” and “outer” environment.

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

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Landscapes of Change, Inertia, and Species Coexistence

Posted on April 7, 2017April 10, 2017

Humans are adapted to change. I’ll illustrate this point using feeding and diet as an example.[1] Our nutritional niche is arguably among the broadest on the planet, rivaling most other species in its eclectic omnivory and diverse patterns of food consumption; we are gustatory generalists extraordinaire, flexible, and adapted to shifting landscapes of food availability. Such biological flexibility has been the subject of lively discussion among biological anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. The Variability Selection Hypothesis (Potts 1998), for example, posits that humans (and our hominin forebears) are best adapted not to any particular sort of ecological circumstances but instead to change itself. This makes sense from a climatological and ecological vantage: the most dramatic and frequent climate oscillations in the past 27 million years have occurred recently, in the past 5 to 6 million years—dates corresponding with the evolution of our lineage. We continue to adapt as new foods have been introduced, with continually shifting gut microbiomes and new alleles. The phylogenetic inertia[2] of our biological and ecological flexibility has clearly served us well over evolutionary time: we are a true cosmopolitan species, occupying virtually every habitat type on the planet.

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New Featured Article!: “Anthropological Engagement with the Anthropocene”

Posted on February 22, 2017

The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Anthropological Engagement with the Anthropocene: A Critical Review,” comes from Volume 6 (2015), a special issue on the Anthropocene. In their review of anthropology’s evolving engagement with the Anthropocene, HannahGibson and Sita Venkateswar contemplate multifarious approaches to research and discuss critical engagement discussed including anthropology beyond disciplinary borders, queries writing in the Anthropocene, and anthropology of climate change.

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

“It is not a concrete state of ‘being’ but a process of becoming. For example, consider that a rider on a horse has to some extent ‘become’ like a horse in order to interact, connect, and think with the horse, just as we can say that an animal may ‘become human’” (Gibson and Venkateswar 2015: 13). Photograph by Pranav Bhasin via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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Present Progressive?: Of Cell Phones and Energy Transitions in the Anthropocene

Posted on September 28, 2016September 28, 2016

The first week of September was a rather busy one, beginning with the announcement by the Subcomission on Quaternary Stratigraphy’s Working Group on the Anthropocene (AWG), reporting their vote for the onset of the Anthropocene Epoch. In their report to the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), the Working Group favored the nuclear fallout of 1950s as a defining moment, though only one of several candidates that must still be considered before the designation of type location for the Anthropocene’s golden spike. A “golden spike” is a physical marker for the lower boundary of a geologic period, as defined by a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), which must be specified by a unit of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. So, the AWG must decide what signal demonstrates most clearly and continuously the reality of anthropogenic dominance on the geologic processes of the planet. Most often, this is done by designation of a type fossil; in the case of the Anthropocene, a leading candidate is the domestic chicken. Just think about that one: dinosaurs have literally come home to roost…

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

Posted on March 2, 2016March 2, 2016

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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New Open Access Article from Environment and Society!

Posted on December 9, 2015December 9, 2015

“Less Than One But More than Many: Anthropocene as Science Fiction and Scholarship-in-the-Making”

By Heather Anne Swanson, Nils Bubandt, and Anna Tsing

ABSTRACT: How might one responsibly review a field just coming into being—such as that provoked by the term Anthropocene? In this article, we argue for two strategies. First, working from the premise that the Anthropocene field is best understood within its emergence, we review conferences rather than publications. In conference performances, we glimpse the themes and tensions of a field-to-come. Second, we interpret Anthropocene as a science-fiction concept, that is, one that pulls us out of familiar space and time to view our predicaments differently. This allows us to explore emergent figurations, genres, and practices for the transdisciplinary study of real and imagined worlds framed by human disturbance. In the interplay and variation across modes for constructing this field, Anthropocene scholarship finds its shape.

HEATHER ANNE SWANSON, NILS BUBANDT, and ANNA TSING are core members of the Aarhus University Research in the Anthropocene program (AURA). With Elaine Gan, they are editors of the forthcoming Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Stories from the Anthropocene and curators of More Than Human: AURA Working Papers. Among their current and forthcoming books are Caught in Comparisons: Japanese Salmon in an Uneven World; The Empty Seashell: Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island; and The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ares.2015.060109

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This article is Open Access under license CC-BY-NC-ND 4. To access all of the articles of Environment and Society Volume 6, which specifically focuses on the Anthropocene, visit the journal’s website here.