ANTHROPOCENE

TED’s Science Curator Sees Hope in Earth’s Anthropocene Age

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Earlier this month I had a chat on the fate of the planet and humanity in a Brooklyn bookstore with David Biello, who recently became curator of science at TED (as in talks) after many years at Scientific American. The subject was his first book, “Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age” — a brisk, unsettling and, yes, hopeful, guide to the Anthropocene. We also touched on my recent magazine essay, “ An Anthropocene Journey.”

The discussion was happily recorded by Heleo, a web enterprise devoted to fostering consequential conversations. Read on for excerpts from the video and Heleo’s helpful transcript, but I encourage you to watch and/or read the longer conversation at the links below: Read more…

Rx for the Anthropocene? A Dose of ‘Anthropophilia’

In September, I participated in a TEDx event in Schenectady, N.Y., focused on William Gibson’s proposal that the future is here now — just not evenly distributed. My talk has been posted online:

I’m basically making the case for a broadening of how folks think about Earth’s human age. So far, misanthropy has dominated. Woe is me; shame on us. But our exasperating diversity of perception, experience and character may be our salvation in the end.

Here’s the summary, but I encourage you to click to a 2011 post here and my “ Anthropocene Journey” article in Anthropocene Magazine for more: Read more…

An Anthropocene Journey

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Felix M. Gradstein, a prominent Norwegian stratigrapher, discussed debates over the Geologic Time Scale with the Anthropocene Working Group in Oslo in April. Credit Andrew C. Revkin

Updated, Nov. 9, 12:22 a.m. | If you need a diversion as the extraordinary election aftermath plays out in the United States, here’s one option.

Below you can read excerpts from a magazine essay I was asked to write reflecting on my “anthropocene” journey — the decades I’ve spent examining what’s now called humanity’s great acceleration, the explosive growth in our numbers, resource appetites and environmental footprint since around 1950.

I wrote the piece for the inaugural issue of, yes, Anthropocene Magazine — the new incarnation of Conservation Magazine, published for 15 years by the University of Washington and now reimagined with help from the MacArthur Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation and Future Earth, an international sustainability science consortium. Here’s a video in which I and other contributors and partners explain the magazine’s focal point. I put it this way:

“What an amazing juncture to be alive. Humanity was a dribble for most of its existence, and then there’s been zoom, and within the lives of almost everyone who’s alive right now something different is coming.”

In the essay, I explore the host of meanings and debates that have emerged around the word, saying, “After 16 years of percolation and debate, anthropocene has become the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this turbulent, momentous, unpredictable, hopeless, hopeful time—duration and scope still unknown.”

What has your Anthropocene journey been like, and where is it going? Read on for mine, and weigh in. For a soundtrack while you read, I recommend “Anthrocene,” the new song by the Australian musician Nick Cave (and bandmate Warren Ellis), using a spelling I proposed way back in 1992.

Here are some excerpts and a link to the full piece: Read more…

Can Networked Knowledge Help Communities Thrive on a Turbulent Planet?

Revised and updated, 10 p.m. | Science has long been focused mainly on knowledge frontiers, with universities often seeming to track “impact factors” of published papers more than a researcher’s impact in the real world.

But there’s been a welcome effort, of late, particularly in fields relevant to sustainable development, to shift priorities toward helping communities address challenges as humanity’s “ great acceleration” plays out in the next few decades. An early iteration of this call came in a 1997 essay on “the virtues of mundane science” by Daniel Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael R. Dove of Yale. (I discussed the essay in a lecture last year.)

It seems such efforts are gaining steam. For example, consider the growth of the Thriving Earth Exchange, an effort by the American Geophysical Union to help connect its global network of scientists with communities seeking science-based solutions to a variety of vexing problems: Read more…

Building a ‘Good’ Anthropocene From the Bottom Up

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A paper proposes that certain kinds of social and environmental projects can reverse a pattern in which human prosperity has come with harms to ecosystems and excluded communities. Credit Timon McPhearson and Taylor Drake of The New School, for Frontiers in Ecology & the Environment

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a determined cast of characters in academia aiming to identify paths to a good AnthropoceneAnthropocene being the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this span of human-dominated planetary history unfolding around us.

One such researcher is Elena M. Bennett, an ecosystem ecologist and geographer at McGill University. She’s the lead author of “ Bright Spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene,” published in the October edition of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The paper describes an effort to identify and propagate social and environmental projects that could reverse a centuries-long pattern in which human prosperity has come at the cost of substantial harm to ecosystems and excluded communities.

Bennett describes the work in a “Your Dot” contribution here:  Read more…

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Al Gore Explore Climate Change, Life in a Naval Observatory and More

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Former Vice President Al Gore discussed climate change science and activism on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk program. Credit StarTalk/ Laura Berland

Earlier this year, the astrophysicist and science-literacy evangelist Neil deGrasse Tyson recorded a conversation for his Star Talk Radio program with former Vice President Al Gore exploring Gore’s decades-long campaign for action to stem climate change, what it’s like to live in the United States Naval Observatory (the official vice presidential residence), the path from the vice president’s “GoreSat” vision in 1998 to the functioning Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite, and more.

Tyson then invited me into the studio to discuss Gore’s career and comments, along with his smartly comedic co-host, Maeve Higgins.

The topics included paths to a world with abundant clean energy, Gore’s thoughts on trends in renewable energy technology, ethics on science frontiers (Gore broached the topic of “ spider goats“), and my interview with Bill Gates.

Tyson also talked with me about the emerging idea that Earth has entered a new geological epoch named for us — the Anthropocene. (He said he prefers my 1992 “Anthrocene” proposal — fewer syllables, simpler.)

I hope you’ll listen to the program at the Soundcloud link and weigh in constructively below:
Read more…

A Student of ‘Cultural Environmentalism’ Explores the Many Views of Earth’s Anthropocene ‘Age of Us’

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The Flower Dome at Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay attraction hold hundreds of species of plants from cool, dry climates (large). Credit Andrew C. Revkin
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Robert Macfarlane, a writer and director of studies in English at Emmanuel College, the University of Cambridge. Credit Emmanuel College

I’ve found it impossible to keep up with the many books and monographs that have accrued around the emerging idea that Earth and its inhabitants have entered a geological epoch shaped by humans — the Anthropocene.

This is the case even though (and partly because) I am a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, the body created by the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy “to examine and debate the case for formalizing this term within the Geological Time Scale.” (Yes, that is a mouthful.)

That’s why I was attracted to a fascinating tour of the expanding array of conceptions and critiques of this proposed epoch written by Robert Macfarlane for The Guardian last week. Macfarlane, a much-lauded writer who directs English studies at Cambridge University’s Emmanuel College, calls himself a student of “cultural environmentalism.”

I encourage you to read the entire essay. The link is below. But here are a couple of my favorite excerpts, followed by a brief note about some unmentioned voices.

Macfarlane first explores how the sweeping dimensions of the Anthropocene, in time and geography (and I’d add uncertainty), make it a tough fit for conventional narrative or mental models:
Read more…

A Times Course for Young World Changers Asks, ‘Sustain What?’

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The website of a course on sustainable development for high school students.Credit NYTedu.com

Most visitors know I left full-time journalism in 2010 to teach courses on communication and environmental policy at Pace University. But you may not know that The Times, itself, is expanding its mission beyond traditional journalism and, with a partner, has launched The School of The New York Times, offering mini-courses on weekends to high school and older middle school students and courses for professionals in various fields. There’ll soon be online classes and much more.

I jumped at the chance to design and teach one of the first classes this fall, focused on climate science and policy and built around the run-up to the Paris negotiations over a new climate agreement.

Starting January 24, I’ll be teaching a five-week course examining a single question: “Sustain What?

One of the most overused and ill-defined words in conversations about the environment these days is “sustainability.” We’ll look at the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the world’s nations last fall. We’ll meet with an expert from the Wildlife Conservation Society to explore a tough question I’ve written on before: “ How much nature is enough?” And of course we’ll discuss population and consumption trends and solutions, and climate and energy choices.
Read more…

Scientists Propose a Research Agenda Aimed at Fostering Sustainable Human Progress

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A proposed model of the linkages between processes shaping earth systems that are increasingly influenced by humans.Credit Global Environmental Change

Updated, 11:36 a.m. | Since 2002, when The Times ran a special Science Times issue called “Managing Planet Earth,” I’ve been exploring how that might happen — or even if it’s possible. After all, I often find myself agreeing with what Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, a close adviser to Pope Francis, said at the 2014 Vatican meeting on “sustainable humanity” that went on to underpin much of Francis’s encyclical: “Nowadays man finds himself to be a technical giant and an ethical child.”

One thing is clear. If societies are to improve their relationship with Earth’s vital systems in ways that work for the long haul, science has to be involved (including the sciences that reveal more about how humans perceive and respond to risks).

But that leads to questions. Science has helped demonstrate that we have entered the Anthropocene, an age in which humans, through our “great acceleration,” have become a planetary force and left a signature — in fallout, carbon, plastic and more — that could mark the dawn of a geological age of our own making (if not yet our own design).

But what does science do now?

This focus led me to a role on the initial engagement committee for Future Earth, a 10-year international initiative aimed at creating a research agenda supporting sustainable human progress.

A paper laying the foundation for such an agenda has just been published online in Global Environmental Change, with some very modest input from me: Read more…

Varied Views (Dark, Light, in Between) of Earth’s Anthropocene Age

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An installation by the photographer known as JR along a path at the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colorado.Credit Andrew C. Revkin

Updated, 12:28 p.m. | Last month, the Breakthrough Institute, a scrappy research organization focused on the interface of environment, energy, technology and economics, organized a spirited dialogue around its “Ecomodernist Manifesto” — an 18-author essay arguing that “knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene.”

Anthropocene, as you likely know, is the term applied increasingly by a range of scientists and others to this period in Earth and human history in which our species is influencing a host of planetary systems in big ways with long-lasting consequences. In the strictest sense, it’s the name proposed for an emerging geological epoch measurably shaped by humans and putting an end to the Holocene, the epoch since the last ice age ended. In a looser sense, Anthropocene is an emerging name (for lack of a better one) for a time in which the global environment is increasingly what we choose to make it — for better or worse.

On that “better or worse” point, there’s a range of strongly held views. I’ve spoken repeatedly about the prospect, with sustained effort, of a good human age, and noted a positive outcome was possible in my 1992 global warming book. The writer Diane Ackerman has similar views. Many of the authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, together and as individuals, express optimism.

But other writers, campaigners and scholars, including Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity and the Australian ethicist and author Clive Hamilton, flatly disagree. Hamilton has written that it is delusional to think there can be a “good” Anthropocene. ( See our discussion, with Grist’s Nathanael Johnson, for more depth.) Elizabeth Kolbert, the author and New Yorker writer focused on climate change and extinction, embraced Hamilton’s views, summarizing things this way on Twitter: “2 words that probably should not be used in sequence: ‘good’ & ‘anthropocene.’

At this year’s Breakthrough Dialogue meeting [main panels are here], Hamilton presented a new lecture, with a rebuttal provided by Mark Lynas, an environmental writer best known for his recent shift to support of nuclear power and genetic engineering in agriculture. He is an author of the manifesto.

Below you can read excerpts from both talks and follow links to read them in full. But you can also read a third valuable view, articulated by Christian Schwägerl, a Berlin-based science journalist and author of “The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet,” which was published in a revised English edition last year. The book is valuable for its dispassionate, reportorial assessment of the science and history behind this concept.

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Smog envelops buildings on the outskirts of the Indian capital New Delhi in November, 2014.Credit Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Here’s a portion of Clive Hamilton’s lecture: Read more…