The Anthropocene and the Humanities PDF Download

Author: Carolyn Merchant
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300244231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
A wide-ranging and original introduction to the Anthropocene (the Age of Humanity) that offers fresh, theoretical insights bridging the sciences and the humanities From noted environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, this book focuses on the original concept of the Anthropocene first proposed by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in their foundational 2000 paper. It undertakes a broad investigation into the ways in which science, technology, and the humanities can create a new and compelling awareness of human impacts on the environment. Using history, art, literature, religion, philosophy, ethics, and justice as the focal points, Merchant traces key figures and developments in the humanities throughout the Anthropocene era and explores how these disciplines might influence sustainability in the next century. Wide-ranging and accessible, this book from an eminent scholar in environmental history and philosophy argues for replacing the Age of the Anthropocene with a new Age of Sustainability.

Author: Eva Horn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429800908
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The Anthropocene is a concept which challenges the foundations of humanities scholarship as it is traditionally understood. It calls not only for closer engagement with the natural sciences but also for a synthetic approach bringing together insights from the various subdisciplines in the humanities and social sciences which have addressed themselves to ecological questions in the past. This book is an introduction to, and structured survey of, the attempts that have been made to take the measure of the Anthropocene, and explores some of the paradigmatic problems which it raises. The difficulties of an introduction to the Anthropocene lie not only in the disciplinary breadth of the subject, but also in the rapid pace at which the surrounding debates have been, and still are, unfolding. This introduction proposes a conceptual map which, however provisionally, charts these ongoing discussions across a variety of scientific and humanistic disciplines. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in the environmental humanities, particularly in literary and cultural studies, history, philosophy, and environmental studies.

Author: Seth T. Reno
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100047433X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning "The Age of Humans," the Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has now become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing assessment and critique. Why and how has the geological concept of the Anthropocene become important to the humanities? What new approaches and insights do the humanities offer? What narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene do the humanities produce? What does it mean to study literature of the Anthropocene? These are the central questions that this collection explores. Each chapter takes a decidedly different humanist approach to the Anthropocene, from environmental humanities to queer theory to race, illuminating the important contributions of the humanities to the myriad discourses on the Anthropocene. This volume is designed to provide concise overviews of particular approaches and texts, as well as compelling and original interventions in the study of the Anthropocene. Written in an accessible style free from disciplinary-specific jargon, many chapters focus on well-known authors and texts, making this collection especially useful to teachers developing a course on the Anthropocene and students undertaking introductory research. This collection provides truly innovative arguments regarding how and why the Anthropocene concept is important to literature and the humanities.

Author: Elizabeth Leane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429770758
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Anthropocene Antarctica offers new ways of thinking about the ‘Continent for Science and Peace’ in a time of planetary environmental change. In the Anthropocene, Antarctica has become central to the Earth’s future. Ice cores taken from its interior reveal the deep environmental history of the planet and warming ocean currents are ominously destabilising the glaciers around its edges, presaging sea-level rise in decades and centuries to come. At the same time, proliferating research stations and tourist numbers challenge stereotypes of the continent as the ‘last wilderness.’ The Anthropocene brings Antarctica nearer in thought, entangled with our everyday actions. If the Anthropocene signals the end of the idea of Nature as separate from humans, then the Antarctic, long considered the material embodiment of this idea, faces a radical reframing. Understanding the southern polar region in the twenty-first century requires contributions across the disciplinary spectrum. This collection paves the way for researchers in the Environmental Humanities, Law and Social Sciences to engage critically with the Antarctic, fostering a community of scholars who can act with natural scientists to address the globally significant environmental issues that face this vitally important part of the planet.

Author: Serpil Oppermann
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield International - Intersections
ISBN: 9781783489398
Category : Environmental sciences
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An international and interdisciplinary team of scholars offer innovative models of thinking about environmentality in the humanities and in Anthropocene discourse in the environmental sciences.

Author: Joanna Zylinska
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781013284915
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life-understood as both a biological and social phenomenon-it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. "Anthropocene" names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink "life" and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist's method; it also includes a photographic project by the author. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Author: Robert S. Emmett
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262342308
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A concise overview of this multidisciplinary field, presenting key concepts, central issues, and current research, along with concrete examples and case studies. The emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline early in the twenty-first century reflects the growing conviction that environmental problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. This book offers a concise overview of this new multidisciplinary field, presenting concepts, issues, current research, concrete examples, and case studies. Robert Emmett and David Nye show how humanists, by offering constructive knowledge as well as negative critique, can improve our understanding of such environmental problems as global warming, species extinction, and over-consumption of the earth's resources. They trace the genealogy of environmental humanities from European, Australian, and American initiatives, also showing its cross-pollination by postcolonial and feminist theories. Emmett and Nye consider a concept of place not synonymous with localism, the risks of ecotourism, and the cultivation of wild areas. They discuss the decoupling of energy use and progress, and point to OECD countries for examples of sustainable development. They explain the potential for science to do both good and harm, examine dark visions of planetary collapse, and describe more positive possibilities—alternative practices, including localization and degrowth. Finally, they examine the theoretical impact of new materialism, feminism, postcolonial criticism, animal studies, and queer ecology on the environmental humanities.

Author: Sverre Raffnsøe
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113752670X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 75

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Book Description
The Anthropocene is heralded as a new epoch distinguishing itself from all foregoing eons in the history of the Earth. It is characterized by the overarching importance of the human species in a number of respects, but also by the recognition of human dependence and precariousness. A critical human turn affecting the human condition is still in the process of arriving in the wake of an initial Copernican Revolution and Kant's ensuing second Copernican Counter-revolution. Within this landscape, issues concerning the human - its finitude, responsiveness, responsibility, maturity, auto-affection and relationship to itself - appear rephrased and re-accentuated as decisive probing questions. In this book Sverre Raffnsøe explores how the change has ramifications for the kinds of knowledge that can be acquired concerning human beings and for the human sciences as a study of human existential beings in the world.

Author: Kate Wright
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317434919
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene offers a new perspective on international environmental scholarship, focusing on the emotional and affective connections between human and nonhuman lives to reveal fresh connections between global issues of climate change, species extinction and colonisation. Combining the rhythm of road travel, interviews with local Aboriginal Elders, and autobiographical storytelling, the book develops a new form of nature writing informed by concepts from posthumanism and the environmental humanities. It also highlights connections between the studied area and the global environment, drawing conceptual links between the auto-ethnographic accounts and international issues. This book will be of great interest to scholars and postgraduates in environmental philosophy, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, Australian studies, anthropology, literary and place studies, ecocriticism, history and animal studies. Transdisciplinary Journeys in the Anthropocene may also be beneficial to studies in nature writing, ecocriticism, environmental literature, postcolonial studies and Australian studies.

Author: Bill Gilbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429763182
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Arts Programming for the Anthropocene argues for a role for the arts as an engaged, professional practice in contemporary culture, charting the evolution of arts over the previous half century from a primarily solitary practice involved with its own internal dialogue to one actively seeking a larger discourse. The chapters investigate the origin and evolution of five academic field programs on three continents, mapping developments in field pedagogy in the arts over the past twenty years. Drawing upon the collective experience of artists and academicians in the United States, Australia, and Greece operating in a wide range of social and environmental contexts, it makes the case for the necessity of an update to ensure the real world relevance and applicability of tertiary arts education. Based on thirty years of experimentation in arts pedagogy, including the creation of the Land Arts of the American West (LAAW) program and Art and Ecology discipline at the University of New Mexico, this book is written for arts practitioners, aspiring artists, art educators, and those interested in how the arts can contribute to strengthening cultural resiliency in the face of rapid environmental change.