Welcome to the Anthropocene!

Catalog description

Every species modifies its environment to some degree; it's really all a matter of scale. What happens when one species dominates environmental change to a degree that endangers the life prospects of other species? One species Homo sapiens has, especially over the last three centuries, significantly enlarged their imprint ("ecological footprint") from the early emergence of crop cultivation and animal husbandry to our current state of advanced technologies that are now threatening earth's life support systems. Today, human activities account for changes in climate, air pollution, water pollution, and soil degradation; now, we are even colonizing DNA! These changes show no signs of slowing down, in fact they seem to be accelerating. This period of acceleration over the past 200 years has prompted geologists and climate scientists to label the current epoch, the Anthropocene: the age when the human species has become a geological force as powerful as tectonic plate movement. These dramatic environmental changes have not only caught the attention of the physical scientists, but have found their way into the social sciences and the humanities. This interdisciplinary learning community will explore these anthropogenic changes through the disciplines of anthropology and philosophy. The central question that unites both disciplines is: What is the place of humans in nature? Do we have a proper place in nature or are we occupying a region beyond nature subject to different evolutionary forces? Or perhaps Homo sapiens is so embedded in nature that the distinction between nature and culture is empty? Ultimately, working toward answering these questions will lead us to posit alternatives to current institutional arrangement.