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…
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.
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.
“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…
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…
Over the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a determined cast of characters in academia aiming to identify paths to a
good Anthropocene — Anthropocene 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…
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’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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
Here’s a portion of Clive Hamilton’s lecture: Read more…