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Reviews the evidence underpinning the Anthropocene as a geological epoch written by the Anthropocene Working Group investigating it. The book discusses ongoing changes to the Earth system within the context of deep geological time, allowing a comparison between the global transition taking place today with major transitions in Earth history.
This is a book about how politics, government - and much else - needs to change in response to the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. The Holocene is the last 12,000 years of unusual stability in the Earth system. The Anthropocene is the emerging epoch of human-caused instability in the system and its life-support capacities. Dominant institutions such as states, markets, and international organizations that developed in the late Holocene are nolonger fit for purpose, and need to develop a capacity to transform themselves in response to a changing Earth system. The analysis is developed in the context of issues such as climate change,biodiversity, and global efforts to address sustainability.
How product design criticism has rescued some products from the trash and consigned others to the landfill. Product design criticism operates at the very brink of the landfill site, salvaging some products with praise but consigning others to its depths through condemnation or indifference. When a designed product's usefulness is past, the public happily discards it to make room for the next new thing. Criticism rarely deals with how a product might be used, or not used, over time; it is more likely to play the enabler, encouraging our addiction to consumption. With Sifting the Trash, Alice Twemlow offers an especially timely reexamination of the history of product design criticism through t...
In Ancient Andean Houses, Jerry Moore offers an extensive survey of vernacular architecture from across the entire length of the Andes, drawing on ethnographic and archaeological information from Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia to the Patagonia region of Argentina and Chile. This book explores the diverse ways ancient peoples made houses, the ways houses re-create culture, and new perspectives and methods for studying houses. In the first part of this multidimensional approach, Moore examines the construction of houses and how they shaped different spheres of household life, considering commonalities and variations among cultural traditions. In the second part, Moore discusses how d...
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) strives for the sustainable and equitable utilization of genetic resources, with the ultimate goal of conserving biodiversity. The CBD and the Nagoya Protocol which has since been elaborated suggest a bilateral model for access to genetic resources and the sharing of benefits from their utilization. There is concern that the bilateral exchange "genetic resource for benefit sharing" could have disappointing results because providers are left out of the process of research and development, benefits are difficult to be traced to sources, and providers owning the same resource may complain of being excluded from benefit sharing. Thus, the CBD objectiv...
In The Power of Nature archaeologists address the force and impact of nature relative to human knowledge, action, and volition. Case studies from around the world focusing on different levels of sociopolitical complexity—ranging from early agricultural societies to states and empires—address the ways in which nature retains the upper hand in human agentive environmental discourse, providing an opportunity for an insightful perspective on the current anthropological emphasis on how humans affect the environment. Climatic events, pathogens, and animals as nonhuman agents, ranging in size from viruses to mega-storms, have presented our species with dynamic conditions that overwhelm human ca...
Anthropocene Poetry: Place, Environment and Planet argues that the idea of the Anthropocene is inspiring new possibilities for poetry. It can also change the way we read and interpret poems. If environmental poetry was once viewed as linked to place, this book shows how poets are now grappling with environmental issues from the local to the planetary: climate change and the extinction crisis, nuclear weapons and waste, plastic pollution and the petroleum industry. This book intervenes in debates about culture and science, traditional poetic form and experimental ecopoetics, to show how poets are collaborating with environmental scientists and joining environmental activist movements to respo...
Why might interdependence, the idea that we are made up of our relations, be horrifying? Philosophy, Film, and the Dark Side of Interdependence argues that philosophy can outline the contours of dark specter of interdependence and that film can shine a light on its shadowy details, together revealing a horror of relations. The contributors interrogate the question of interdependence through analyses of contemporary film, giving voice to new perspectives on its meaning. Conceived before and written during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and through a period of deep social unrest, this volume reveals a reality both perennial and timely.
A fundamentally new approach to the history of science and technology This book presents a new way of thinking about the history of science and technology, one that offers a grand narrative of human history in which knowledge serves as a critical factor of cultural evolution. Jürgen Renn examines the role of knowledge in global transformations going back to the dawn of civilization while providing vital perspectives on the complex challenges confronting us today in the Anthropocene—this new geological epoch shaped by humankind. Renn reframes the history of science and technology within a much broader history of knowledge, analyzing key episodes such as the evolution of writing, the emerge...
What grows out of the ordinary? This volume focuses on that which has been regarded as ordinary, self-evident and formulaic in literary and cultural phenomena such as diasporic cuisine, pet adoption narratives, Prairie writing, romance between stepsiblings, the program of a political party, and everyday shopping in poetry. The book argues that by engaging with that which is perceived as ordinary we also gain understanding of how otherness becomes defined and constituted. The volume seeks new ways to access that which might lie in-between or beyond the opposition between exploitation and emancipation, and contests the hegemonic logic of revealing oppression and rebuilding liberation in contemporary critical theory to create new ways of knowing which grow out of the ordinary.