From the Guardian: The night skies illuminated with light from many sources. For example, the midwestern United States has a night-time appearance not unlike a patchwork quilt when viewed from orbit. The artificial light from human settlements appears with a characteristic yellow tinge. The green light of the Aurora borealis also shines brightly in this […]
James Syvitski a geology professor at the University of Colorado created this 200-year compilation of dams built in the USA. He used it to illustrated his talk on the age of the human-shaped Earth at the Geological Society of London meeting on the Anthropocene, May 11, 2011.
The Anthropocene, the idea that the entire planet has become a social-ecological system, is now being discussed in the mass media. Three recent sightings… 1) The Economist has a feature story A man-made world: Science is recognising humans as a geological force to be reckoned with. The author writes: To think of deliberately interfering in […]
Will Steffen and I gave contrasting talks in a Mock Court on the meaning of the Anthropocene at the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability in Stockholm. The talks are now online, along with other talks from the symposium (I recommend Frances Westley‘s on innovation). Will and I were arguing about four charges (defined […]
UPDATED: Slides from the talks at the end of this blogpost The use of social media for political mobilization during the political uprisings in Northern Africa and the Middle East during 2010 and 2011; digital coordination of climate skeptic networks during “Climategate” in 2010; and the repercussions of hackers in carbon markets the last years. […]
On Yale360 Paul Crutzen and Christian Schwägerl write that Living in the Anthropocene: Living up to the Anthropocene means building a culture that grows with Earth’s biological wealth instead of depleting it. Remember, in this new era, nature is us.
Chris Turner, author of Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need, writing in the Walrus about the Anthropocene and the coral reef crisis in his long article Age of Breathing Underwater: I first heard tell of “resilience” — not as a simple descriptive term but as the cornerstone of an entire ecological philosophy […]
From In The Field a report on a symposium on Bill Ruddiman‘s long anthropocene hypothesis – that the development of agriculture caused significant global warming: Ruddiman’s basic argument goes like this: Although the climate has cycled through a series of ice ages and warm interglacial periods for more than a million years, none of those […]
In a commentary Shifting Baselines, Local Impacts, and Global Change on Coral Reefs in PLoS Biology coral reef ecologists Nancy Knowlton and Jeremy Jackson write: Imagine trying to understand the ecology of tropical rainforests by studying environmental changes and interactions among the surviving plants and animals on a vast cattle ranch in the center of […]
Humanity is now a geological force reshaping the Earth’s surface, atmosphere, and biogeochemistry. This reality has lead Earth System Scientists to argue that we are living in a new geological era – the Anthropocene. Recently Navin Ramankutty, a colleague of mine here at McGill, and Erle Ellis, from the University of Maryland, have developed a […]