Ecological Entanglements In The Anthropocene

This edited collection explores the relationships between humans and nature at a time when the traditional sense of separation between human cultures and a natural wilderness is being eroded. The ‘Anthropocene,’ whose literal translation is the ‘Age of Man,’ is one way of marking these planetary changes to the Earth system. Global climate change and rising sea levels are two prominent examples of how nature can no longer be simply thought of as something outside and removed from humans (and vice versa). This collection applies the concepts of ecology and entanglement to address pressing political, social, and cultural issues surrounding human relationships with the nonhuman world in terms of ‘working with nature.’ It asks, are there more or less preferable ways of working with nature? What forms and practices might this work take and how do we distinguish between them? Is the idea of ‘nature’ even sufficient to approach such questions, or do we need to reconsider using the term nature in favour of terms such as environments, ecologies or the broad notion of the non-human world? How might we forge perspectives and enact practices which build resilience and community across species and spaces, constructing relationships with nonhumans which go beyond discourses of pollution, degradation and destruction? Bringing together a range of contributors from across multiple academic disciplines, activists and artists, this book examines how these questions might help us understand and assess the different ways in which humans transform, engage and interact with the nonhuman world.

Anthropocene Ecologies brings political ecology and tourism studies to bear on the Anthropocene. Through a collective examination of political ecologies of the Anthropocene by leading scholars in anthropology, geography and tourism studies, the book addresses critical themes of gender, health, conservation, agriculture, climate change, disaster, coastal marine management and sustainability. Each chapter theoretically and empirically unravels entanglements of tourism, nature and imagination to expose the political-ecological drivers of the Anthropocene as a material and symbolic force and its deepening integration with tourism. Grounded in ethnographic and qualitative research, the volume is interdisciplinary in scope, yet linked in its shared focus on the political threat as well as the social potential of the Anthropocene and its imaginaries. This collection contributes to emerging scholarship on tourism, sustainability and global environmental change in the current geological epoch. Anthropocene Ecologies will be of great interest to political ecology focused scholars of tourism, socio-environmental change and the Anthropocene. The chapters were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

The return of nature in the anthropocene / Anne Fremaux -- Environmental political theory and the material turn : a critical assessment / Luigi Pellizzoni -- Nature in the anthropocene : political science meets ecology debates / Susan Baker -- Political theory in the anthropocene / John Meyer -- The ecological circumstances of the circumstances of politics / Zev Trachtenberg -- What cities can teach us about environmental political theory in the anthropocene / Nir Barak -- Anthropocene : the emergence of the figure of "governator" / Yohan Ariffin -- Real anthropocene politics / Simon Hailwood -- Towards a good anthropocene? / Manuel Arias-Maldonado -- Geo-engineering : a curse or a blessing? / Marcel Wissenburg -- Sustainability governance in a democratic anthropocene : the realm of the arts as a foundation for deliberative citizen engagement / Marit Hammond and Hugh Ward -- Critical design, hybrid labor, just transitions : moving beyond technocratic ecomodernisms and the it's-too-late-o-cene / Damian White -- Afterword / John Barry

The Anthropocene concept draws attention to the various forms of entanglement of social, political, ecological, biological and geological processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The ensuing complexity and ambiguity create manifold challenges to widely established theories, methodologies, epistemologies and ontologies. The contributions to this volume engage with conceptual issues of scale in the Anthropocene with a focus on mediated representation and narrative. They are centered around the themes of scale and time, scale and the nonhuman and scale and space. The volume presents an interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, geography, political sciences, history and literary, cultural and media studies. Together, they contribute to current debates on the (re-)imagining of forms of human responsibility that meet the challenges created by humanity entering an age of scalar complexity. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003136989

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.

This book has two interlocking ambitions. The first is to steer what we purposefully call the idioms of critical philosophy towards a more ecologically informed paradigm. The second is to recognise that what has rightly come to be called The Anthropocene extinction is not and cannot be treated as simply a scientific fact but rather a socio-political and ecological dispute of immense complexity. We start with an exploration of the consequences of a critical tradition which, under the name Enlightenment, has placed humanity at its centre and chance as its most general – and problematic – characteristic. We argue that this leads to a schizophrenic relationship between radical critique and science which can be avoided if we take the implications of biosemiotics seriously and develop a new, ecologically informed social science. We argue that in practice this means that for science to be practical in addressing the Anthropocene extinction, we have to recognise that it operates in a historically emergent, highly differentiated technopolitical ecology. Science, as it is currently commonly understood and used, is not ecological enough. This book will interest social scientists interested in not only describing and critiquing but also understanding and responding to the complex problems facing humanity; scientists wanting to make sense of social phenomena; those educating the next generation of social scientists; and climate activists and policy-makers.

How the science of ecology is changing to meet the daunting challenges of environmental sustainability Our species has transitioned from being one among millions on Earth to the species that is single-handedly transforming the entire planet to suit its own needs. In order to meet the daunting challenges of environmental sustainability in this epoch of human domination—known as the Anthropocene—ecologists have begun to think differently about the interdependencies between humans and the natural world. This concise and accessible book provides the best available introduction to what this new ecology is all about—and why it matters more than ever before. Oswald Schmitz describes how the science of ecology is evolving to provide a better understanding of how human agency is shaping the natural world, often in never-before-seen ways. The new ecology emphasizes the importance of conserving species diversity, because it can offer a portfolio of options to keep our ecosystems resilient in the face of environmental change. It envisions humans taking on new roles as thoughtful stewards of the environment to ensure that ecosystems have the enduring capacity to supply the environmental services on which our economic well-being—and our very existence—depend. It offers the ecological know-how to maintain and enhance our planet's environmental performance and ecosystem production for the benefit of current and future generations. Informative and engaging, The New Ecology shows how today’s ecology can provide the insights we need to appreciate the crucial role we play in this era of unprecedented global environmental transition.

This book deals with the potentials of social-ecological systems analysis for resolving sustainability problems. Contributors relate inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives to systemic dynamics, human behavior and the different dimensions and scales. With a problem-focused, sustainability-oriented approach to the analysis of human-nature relations, this text will be a useful resource for scholars of human and social ecology, geography, sociology, development studies, social anthropology and natural resources management.

In The End of the Anthropocene: Ecocriticism, the Universal Ecosystem, and the Astropocene, Michael J. Gormley examines literary imaginings of the Anthropocene’s end and the Astropocene’s beginning—when humans are no longer bound to the blue planet on which we evolved. Gormley analyzes literary images of human tracks on Earth, the Moon, and Mars to characterize the late-stage Anthropocene and to explore humanity’s role in the universal ecosystem. The End of the Anthropocene uses a predictive and paradigmatic model of ecocriticism, examining science fiction works as interplanetary nature narratives.

Freedom in the Anthropocene illuminates the Anthropocene from the perspective of critical theory. The authors contextualize our current ecological predicament by focusing on the issues of history and freedom and how they relate to our present inability to render environmental threats and degradation recognizable and surmountable.