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This paper addresses the discussion on the Anthropocene in environmental education research. It aims to enrich and widen the debate about the appropriateness of humanist approaches to environmental education and sustainability. In response to criticism about anthropocentric responses to human-made environmental destruction, the authors introduce a version of Eastern humanism: Tu Weiming's 'Anthropocosmism'. This idea of a non-anthropocentric humanism embedded in the cosmic order is strikingly different from the anthropocentric separatism typical of Western humanism. Moving beyond a blanket condemnation of humanism, this paper explores what a specific, non-Western form of humanism may have to offer in response to anthropogenic ecological crises. The argument is developed that Anthropocosmism can help us fully recognize humans' exceptional ethical responsibility in light of these crises without falling into the mistake of Western humanism's dominant discourse that connects this exceptionalism to forms of human superiority over and domination of other-than-human nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I present the concept of global citizenship from the perspective of virtue theory, namely as a disposition to do the right thing, for the right reason and in the right way. The paper consists of two parts. In the first part, I show that global citizenship is a virtue that is needed to respond in the right way to the challenges that Anthropocenians meet. In the second part, I focus on the possibility of including the virtue of global citizenship in global education. I present arguments for including virtues in global education programmes and an example of a successful virtue education programme in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heritage relies, to a large extent, on notions of endangerment and consequential attempts to arrest or reverse processes of loss and change. The papers in this special issue engage critically with this underlying orientation, exploring the social and cultural work which is produced through efforts to avert loss. In doing so, the papers also point towards alternative ways of valuing objects, places and practices which are not solely determined by notions of endangerment and risk. We suggest three general themes which connect critical investigation of these issues across the varied natural and cultural heritage contexts through which these papers work – the inevitability of loss; the politics of loss; and the potential in loss. These themes have significant implications not only for the future of natural and cultural heritage preservation, conservation and management but also in mapping out future research directions for critical heritage studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Deleuze/Guattari text Anti-Oedipus burst onto the intellectual scene in 1972 as a radical new means to reconceptualise capitalism and its effects. At the heart of Anti-Oedipus and its analysis of capitalism is the concept of deterritorialization, and how it evacuates identities, culture, values, and, indeed, coherent thought itself, and it makes them susceptible to the equations and dynamics of capital flows. Anti-Oedipus presents the mechanisms with respect to how deterritorialization interacts with and to an extent liberates desire as 'desiring-machines'. This philosophy of education paper applies the workings of deterritorialization and desire from Anti-Oedipus to the dynamics of contemporary climate change education and the Anthropocene. As such, it posits this dynamic as being critical to present day approaches to the philosophy of education that wish to engage with capitalism and its effects, and at the same time positively enter the climate change debate. This paper suggests that understanding the matrix of deterritorialization, desire, climate change and learning, is perhaps the most important work that can be performed in the philosophy of education today and with respect to the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bernard Stiegler highlights many of the problems faced by education with respect to the 'bringing forth' of knowledge on an individual, collective, and technical level in the Anthropocene. These problems include the short-circuiting of dreams, automatization of thought, and toxic digital networks. Stiegler's φάρμακον (pharmakon) seeks to treat the toxicity of the Anthropocene with a care-ful hermeneutic approach that is directed towards the disautomatized, inventive, co-individuating knowledge act. This paper first explores Stiegler's Anthropocene and his development of Heideggerian ποίησις (poeisis) in terms of the challenge of the 'bringing forth' of knowledge acts, which are illustrated by free software. It then explores, through the additional example of free radio, of Félix Guattari's work in free radio, the problem and possibility of creative co-individuating ex-pression in the Anthropocene by expanding on Stiegler's emphasis on the importance of hermeneutics. This raises the question of how to read Stiegler's own ex-pression of the future of knowledge. Next, the paper reviews Stiegler's educational project involving a dis-automatizable hermeneutic web. Finally, the paper gives an autoethnographic account of an attempt to 'bring forth' learning through the implementation of free software in local, online classrooms. The free software example does not solve the problem of the Anthropocene but does raise the question of our responsibility to choose our digital tools care-fully and the importance of maintaining the possibility of co-individuating ex-pression like the kind that is remembered in song and which online education should remind us of. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on animal ethics in tourism has gained traction but posthumanist approaches to wildlife (eco)tourism remain sparse. There has never been a more urgent need to redress this paucity in theory and practice. More than 60% of the world's wildlife has died-off in the last 50 years, 100 million-plus nonhuman animals are used for entertainment in wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs), more than one billion "wildlife" live in captivity, and some scholars argue that earth has entered its sixth mass extinction event known as the Anthropocene. This paper presents a posthumanist multispecies livelihoods framework (MLF) based on an applied ethnographic study of 47 wildlife ecotourism (WE) operators and wildlife researchers in protected area WTAs across four countries. Like any framework, it is a snapshot of the authors' thinking at a particular time and must be improved upon. The MLF does not purport to solve the negative treatment of nonhumans that can occur in tourism settings, but rather responds to calls in the tourism literature to acknowledge our effects on other species and advocates for equitable human-nonhuman livelihoods. This paper argues that we have a moral responsibility to nonhumans and the environment, and the authors hope to generate reflexive discourse concerning the role tourism can play in redressing the ecological crisis and improving the treatment of individual nonhumans to foster wildlife-human coexistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author talks about the Anthropocene period in the history of planet Earth and its impact on educational philosophy and ecology. Topics discussed include a paper published in the periodical "Studies in Educational Philosophy" by Chloe Humphreys and Sean Blenkinsop; the role of education as a social process; and the things that educational philosophy needs to learn from Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

This paper follows young people's shifting sense of inheritance in the context of the environmental and ontological crises of the epoch named the Anthropocene. It discusses a research project in which young people were invited to work critically and creatively with a British university museum to explore its storerooms and exhibits. The ethnographic and artistic engagements led to the curation of a 'cabinet of curiosities' within the museum itself. We use the concept of atmosphere to examine the ways in which space, time, and affect entangle with museological practices of curiosity, care, and curation to produce particular feelings and figurations of inheritance. We propose atmospheric attunement as a means of critically and care-fully examining and re-curating the inheritance of the Anthropocene, including the failures and absences due to colonial disinheritance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Indigenous and post-development commentators view the hegemony of western conceptions of 'development' as profoundly implicated in the Anthropocene's global ecological crises and underpinned by modernity's extractivist and anthropocentric worldview and sensibilities. Meanwhile, as Kothari et al. note, secular modernity's defenders persist in the presumption that modern science affords the definitive account of nature and reality, while the worldviews of Indigenous peoples are frequently delegitimised as unsophisticated or mere superstition. Accordingly, many Indigenous critics call for today's Indigenous movements globally to challenge the dominance of western 'heteropatriarchal' styles of thinking. They suggest modernity needs to learn from Indigenous movements and traditions, not least for insights into ethical relationality with the animate Earth. Likewise, Arturo Escobar insists that contemporary academic 'theory' needs re-enlivening: bringing it closer to life and the Earth and to the work of those who struggle to defend them. This paper asks how Indigenous decolonization agendas, which struggle in defense of life and the Earth, might inform historiography in the Anthropocene. For example, Beverley Southgate has suggested that history has a utopian and therapeutic purpose – helping us escape the thrall of the past and orientate ourselves towards emancipatory futures. This paper suggests – in an era of ecological emergency – that history's utopian imaginaries will need to be commensurate with that vivid experience of sensed ethical reciprocity with nature, to which indigenous traditional ecological knowledges (ITEK) bear witness. Some western historians question whether a coherent story for humanity is possible, given how systems thinking suggests global feedback and radical uncertainty condition our future. However, systems thinking also highlights the hierarchical nature of human-ecological systems and suggests that the deepest level for intervening in any human-ecological system is at the level of a society's 'mental models' and 'worldview'. This is the level at which interventions have the greatest leverage for radical system transformation and is the level that this essay focuses upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploration of evolving ideas, urgencies, and actions that we have experimented with in our teaching of an environmental sustainability subject with pre-service teachers at an Australian university. It is a work in progress. Through this shared educator-student teaching and learning process we feel the tensions of contradictory forces that disrupt the flow of prior teaching as we all become unsettled by hope and reality, grief, and loss, all mixed in with a sense of urgency and tempered by a set of often unimaginative contemporary pedagogical practices. These tensions often resort educators like us, to perpetuate well-worn and critiqued tropes such as how to 'care for the planet' through 'greening' practices in schools such as recycling and energy conservation. Always inadequate and limited we are experimenting in our pedagogical repertoire with new ways to teach as we could no longer keep up the charade of agitating for change in the same way. In this paper we explore some of the opening and closures that effect environmental sustainability teaching. We consider how through a reimagining of sustainability education with new pedagogical openings of 'making kin' we first attend to these emotional tensions as a means of waking up to who we are in the Anthropocene and then find ways to identify relational ethico-onto-epistemologies in our teaching. By disrupting humanist paradigms and embracing critical posthumanist sensitivities the educators and students nuzzle into new ways of knowing and being in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The GeoCapabilities project asks how powerful geographical knowledge can be brought into a curriculum to enhance students' capabilities to be free to make choices for a life they value. This paper reports on the GeoCapabilities phase 3 project which explored the social justice dimension of GeoCapabilities by working with teachers and students in challenging schools. The capabilities lens, made practical through tools for curriculum making and evaluation, shows how geographical knowledge (of migration in this case) can enhance a person's capabilities to make real choices about how to live. It also shows that the affective dimension is strongly connected to geographical knowledge including feelings, moral standpoints and values. The inequalities, injustices, fears and hopes raised when students engage with migration geography, open a space for thinking about problems, causes and alternative futures, inviting a critical lens to how political economy shapes the world. The literature and the project of GeoCapabilities have focussed on powerful disciplinary knowledge. Whilst geographical knowledge is a crucial component, I argue that an exclusive attention to disciplinary knowledge may be misleading and the concept of geographical capabilities should broaden to attend to how knowledge across disciplines, feelings, attitudes and values operate together for futures-oriented capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the future of education, especially the future changes in education and the people that will occupy the field. What kind of people are we educating for the future? To answer this question, I will analyze the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of people-yet-to-come by taking into account the new perception and explanation of time and space as well as the context of the Anthropocene. In the empirical part, interviews with experts from non-educational fields are used to discuss time and space in education. Statements about the new features of people in the future reveal the picture of the future of education in the eyes of the experts and its correspondence to theoretical considerations and prognoses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will map out the geographical contours of life in the Anthropocene borne out of the ruins produced by the particular relations of globalized capitalism and modernizing aspirations in Iceland. The focus on Iceland is in recognition of islands as scenes where these relations play out with particular intensity and visibility. Therefore, the paper will outline the island scene upon which our earthly entanglements can be readily scrutinized. Secondly, our planetary state of emergency will be outlined in relation to the logic of the Moderns, translating into the Anthropocene, setting up for the third part wherein the time of islands will be introduced and their particular relevance for analysis. The paper then proceeds to exemplify the emerging earths of the Anthropocene through a topo-ecological mapping of geothermal living in Iceland. As such, the paper argues for the need to realize two things: (a) the Earth per se does not care and (b) life will go on. Under the current state of planetary emergency, change is inevitable and will be drastic, but the emerging Earth(s) will necessarily reside in geographically specific responses, evolving from the ruins of what is, in this case, the geothermal landscapes of Iceland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annals of the American Association of Geographers is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper discusses new types of naturecultural heritage that have emerged during the Anthropocene. The authors trace and analyze novel records of the ongoing geological event and propose a method of surface-oriented ethnography to investigate heritage in the Anthropocene. We argue that rethinking history in the Anthropocene means to think through new forms of heritage that emerge in the course of ecological processes of decomposition, decay and loss. The case studies analyzed in the article focus on matzevahs colonized by lichens and mosses, and on plasticrusts, a new form of tangible heritage characteristic for the Anthropocene. By investigating these two examples, the paper considers the significance of future heritage for studies in the history of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Otto Fenichel, whose era coincided with a time of immense social and political upheaval, was well known for his engagement in social as well as clinical spheres. In recent years, several psychoanalytic thinkers (e.g., Lertzman, 2015) have similarly crossed into the social by attempting to address perhaps the defining challenge of our own time: climate change and the environmental crisis. Human effects on planetary systems now rival the great forces of nature, with scientists proclaiming a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The psychological causes and consequences of this momentous fact are in urgent need of psychoanalytic investigation. This paper seeks to articulate the legacy of Fenichel and his ideas through a reading of several key papers and to layer his thinking onto the emerging psychoanalytic approaches to the climate crisis. Particular reference is made to Harold Searles, who provides a theoretical counterpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood studies scholars have increasingly sought to examine the complex entanglements of children's lives with nonhuman materials, animals, plants and earthly processes. Doing so has enabled new insights into children's relationships with global challenges such as climate change. Now, researchers from many disciplines are reflecting critically upon whether such challenges can be obviously ascribed to human activity, suggesting that we are entering a new (geological) epoch: the Anthropocene. The present collection of papers offers a range of empirically-informed, critical and theoretical analyses of the (possible) relationships between children and the Anthropocene. This paper frames the key debates covered in the symposium, introducing recent scholarship in childhood studies and opening out critical reflections on the term 'Anthropocene'. It also provides an introduction to the papers making up the symposium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term 'Anthropocene' refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthropological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthropocene. Only Entropocene breaks with the humanistic tradition. Comparing Tsui Hark's 2014 The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu weihu shan), the second adaptation of Qu Bo's adventure novel of the People's Liberation Army, with the 1970 film of the Peking Opera version directed by Xie Tieli, demonstrates the stakes in imaginations of mountains separated by 45 years. This paper argues that the later film evolves from the failure of the Cultural Revolution's imagination to encompass the landscape of its setting. The increased incoherence of the later film derives from its increased engagement in technical mediations, which in turn enable a complex interaction between utopian Revolution and dystopian Anthropocene imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singer-songwriter Jack Johnson is known for his laid back, inoffensive and seemingly uncontroversial music; however (perhaps paradoxically), he is also known for his environmental activism and accountability measures, measures that may seem at odds with his relaxed personality and musical output. In the 2016 short documentary film The Smog of the Sea, Johnson partakes as a citizen scientist in an expedition to the Sargasso Sea. Here he comes to the realization that the ocean is no longer this pristine wilderness; instead, the effects of human action (in the form of plastic) can be seen everywhere. In this short film, we see the coming together of Johnson's laid-back aesthetic with a keen and urgent message to effect positive environmental change, amounting to what some commentators have referred to as a kind of 'quiet activism.' In this paper we critically explore the role and value of quiet activism in contradistinction to other modes typically associated with ecomedia, especially the trope of the apocalypse. We argue that the hope associated with such quiet activism may be an effective approach to environmental politics in the epoch of the anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an integrated study on the effects of human activity, climate change and crustal movement on the changes of the middle reaches of the Tarim River in China. Remote sensing images and rainfall data from 38 stations from 1970 to 2021 were used for the research. The precise point positioning (PPP) approach was applied to ascertain the crustal movement of the study area using 256 Global Positioning System (GPS) station data of the recent 20 years. The results show that in the past 50 years the studied reaches of the river has moved north at maximum 2940 m or 57.9 m on average, and human activity may have played a dominant role in this change though extreme events of climate may have also taken a part in it. However, before the Anthropocene, its northeast migration is likely associated with crustal movement as the basin bottom inclines to northeast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Claerbout is a contemporary artist working in the field of photography, film and digital animation, employing a range of aesthetic strategies to address shifting ideologies of vision: attention to light and time; the erasure of narrative in cinematic representation. This paper considers the political import of such strategies from an Australian perspective, in light of recent environmental catastrophe and extinction in the Anthropocene, whereby the depiction of worlds without humans occupies a space in the collective imagination signifying ruination. The paper examines Claerbout's recent works, Olympia (the Real-Time Disintegration into Ruins of the Berlin Olympic Stadium over the Course of a Thousand Years) (2016) and The pure necessity (2016). It argues for the relevance of his work to posthumanist writings on extinction; for instance, Claire Colebrook and Joanna Zylinska, whereby the human desire to visualize 'the world without us' is problematized as an overtly anthropocentric celebration of human vision. I argue that Claerbout's expanded photo-filmic practice reveals how artistic production might tackle the problem of responsibly providing frameworks to consider the world outside of an anthropocentric viewpoint. Considering his work from such a framework, I ask, what does it take to represent the world without us? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a summary of the Editorial of the 25th Anniversary Special Issue of European Planning Studies. The editorial summarizes three representative articles from planners and economic policy actors published in 1993, the first year of publication of the journal. These write of threats and possibilities from privatized planning, from the European Single Market and the prospects for regional innovation policy. In the second part, nine papers are summarized. These range from an exegesis of the Anthropocene, the rise of populism and the transition in neoliberalist planning, and migration as a city planning issue in European cities. Other papers then analyse aspects of evolutionary change upon city and region policy and process dynamics. Finally a group of papers explore the rise of creative cities, 4.0 era industry and services and the role of 'starchitects' in city renewal as well as 4.0 digital settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a philosophy of STEAM education in the current moment, the Anthropocene. Whereas many proponents of STEAM focus on outcomes related to cultivating a more creative and competitive generation of STEM workers, it is, more importantly, an approach to education that can foster spaces for transdisciplinary conversations surrounding critical issues of the Anthropocene – those of ethics, sustainability, and relationality. Thus, the question arises, How might we understand/practice STEAM education differently? This philosophy of STEAM in the Anthropocene is inspired by the guiding notions of Braidotti's affirmative ethics as well as Stengers and Ulmer's conceptions of slow(ing). These perspectives challenge the ideologies and practices that have created and sustained divisions between the arts and sciences, while also promoting different ways of engaging in/with the world. Entangled in this conceptual framework are three concepts that might guide STEAM education moving forward: transdisciplinarity, relationality, and responsibility. With these notions as inspiration, this paper asserts a philosophical vision that takes seriously the realities of our Anthropocenic present and considers how educators might move with, rather than push against, the challenges that continue to present themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a call for educators to respond to the problematics that arise from reducing the Earth to a resource for human activities. The concept of 'Anthropocene' is a burning invitation to rethink education by putting the human to its place. We therefore argue for a spatial-embodied conceptualization of learning, which involves the more-than-human and nonrepresentational. In this effort, we use Latour's concept of 'geostory' to problematize the prevailing anthropocentrism in education. We discuss the power of experimentation by introducing a learning experiment that took place at a pop-up greenhouse in Helsinki. The idea was to encourage upper secondary geography students to playfully discard their human perspective and study the city from the viewpoint of plants: to probe the presumed human/nature divide through brief but moving encounters with 'others'. We argue that through affective encounters with nonhuman others, the Earth speaks: it tells stories with us. If humans let themselves be addressed by these encounters, geostories can temporarily re-place human-centred narrative storytelling practices (histories), voiced by the modernist 'I', and generate alternative forms of knowledge that emerge from our belonging together. These stories emerging from geographical experimentation entail potential to cultivate both knowing and care that exceed the human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are living in damaged landscapes within a new geographical epoch known as the Anthropocene. The COVID-19 outbreak fuels uncertainty, instability, and ambiguity for humans. This viral disaster has been blamed for losing and further exacerbating ecological imbalance, and prompts a need to re-examine multispecies relations and, in particular, human exceptionalism. The authors, by applying a new theoretical assemblage that brings the new materialist turn entangled with Buddhist philosophies into our stories and diffractions of child-virus bodies, have been prompted to raise two questions about how multispecies justice could disrupt environmental sustainability education. The questions we will engage with in the paper include: Can we explore these new theoretical assemblages (east-west) with child-virus relations as a means for raising multispecies justice that critiques the universalisation of human forces in the Anthropocene? What possibilities does the pandemic offer to rethink multispecies relations as an entangled ecological crisis by exploring what a 'new normal' in post-COVID-19 sustainability education could emerge? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little room left for doubt or even debate at the severity of the ecological, indeed planetary crises that we find ourselves in during this period coined the Anthropocene. As educators working in the face of these crises, we have asked ourselves the question 'how do we carry on?' We reflect on a set of sensory, multimodal, meditative and arts-based pedagogical activities that bridge the geographical, biological, sociological and environmental dimensions of learning using the concepts from Hannah Arendt and John Dewey, in a higher-education context in Sweden. The first-cycle (undergraduate level) course in which these activities are conducted—Teaching sustainability from a global perspective - engages students in a range of pedagogical activities designed to encourage greater awareness of sustainability issues in diverse educational settings. In this paper we reflect on pedagogical practices as praxis in a sustainability focused course, and use the theory of practice architectures to question what people do in a particular time and place. We explore how educating for the future using multimodal and arts-based pedagogies could be a strategy to support new ways for reconfiguring environmental sustainability education in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abandonment of urban areas in anticipation of climate change constitutes a kind of ghosting: a veil is drawn that divides spaces of being (that are valued and preserved) from spaces of non-being (that are deemed expendable and 'dead'). These spaces of non-being can be understood as the 'sacrifice zones' of a capitalist worldview that orders the world through simplified dualistic categories. Opposed to this sacrificial logic, David Farrier has proposed a relational way of thinking that haunts the dualisms of capitalist modernity via spectres of human-nonhuman entanglement. Building on existing work from decolonial and Black studies, this paper extends understandings of such entanglements by exposing how they are tied up with racial and colonial logics. It does so by focusing on two Anthropocene imaginaries that 'open up' the city as a place haunted by complex relationality. First, my reading of Jan van Aken's 'Proximale Falanx' (2019) shows how its portrayal of a submerged Amsterdam can be read as an Anthropocene imaginary of relationality but is also haunted by colonial paradigms. Second, my reading of Teju Cole's Open City (2011) expands this narrow understanding of the climate crisis by articulating decolonial ways of being in New York City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we offer a childist reading of school strikes for climate in an overheated world. We argue that school strikes can be understood as offering a dynamic counterweight to formal education, by providing opportunities for children to self-educate, and for others, especially adults, to learn from them. We suggest that taking school strikes seriously as sites of political appearance—which highlight interdependencies and vulnerabilities in the face of crises in Anthropocene neoliberalism requires rethinking the boundaries of democratic participation and education. In particular, we highlight that school strikes for climate serve as an invitation for adults to let children contribute to their own ongoing formation. A childist philosophical attitude that emphasises mutual teaching—i.e. the adult capacity to see and hear what children show and say—can expand through an engagement with, rather than against school strikes. Children's political appearance on streets to influence political priorities from an intergenerational global justice point of view is a gift for adults and adultist structures. It is a passage to grasp deep interdependence and to assume appropriate responsibility. If 'education' is a beacon of hope in times of overheated despair, then the hope is in educational philosophies that have room for mutual teaching. The philosophical assumption that it is adults who must always, and necessarily, teach children to prepare them for a better future would have to be discarded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Karoo is an arid to semi-arid area across the western third of South Africa, comprising the Succulent Karoo and Nama-Karoo biomes. Its environment and people have experienced considerable changes, and now face new challenges as the Anthropocene unfolds. This Karoo Special Issue (KSI) brings together new information in 20 papers, a mixture of reviews, research articles and commentaries, significantly adding to previous syntheses of Karoo knowledge. The KSI comprises several sections focusing on different aspects of change, namely a lead article that provides an overview of social and environmental changes, followed by papers concerning changes over time from deep history to contemporary conditions (Xhaeruh to Karoo), insights from long-term studies at several sites across the area, different perspectives of ecosystem processes, and ending with a set of reflections and proposals for research priorities. We end this introduction by dedicating the KSI to two outstanding scholars of the Karoo: Dr Suzanne J Milton and Dr W Richard J Dean. These KSI papers, many of which were written by their colleagues, friends and former students, represents a Festschrift that celebrates and honours their research as well as the inspiration and leadership they gave to a generation of scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconceiving relations with the more-than-human is a central concern of scholarship in the Anthropocene. In documentary film, entanglements with the more-than-human are expressed through cinematic relationships with subjects such as bees, freeways, Antarctic science, abandoned military bunkers, and emergency firefighting operations. Several recent documentary films use their soundtracks to anchor these engagements. This paper examines the construction of these soundtracks through a comparison between documentary film and phonography. Phonography – broadly defined as creative practices of recording, editing, and listening to sonic environments – foregrounds the material/cultural processes of all sound recording by attending to specific uses of microphones and studio editing techniques. I situate these sonic practices in relation to the foundational poles of soundscape and objet sonore established by R. Murray Schafer and Pierre Schaeffer, work by contemporary practitioners, and recent theorizations in sound studies. Interweaving an account of recent documentary soundtracks with theories and practices of phonography highlights the conceptual implications of specific sound recording techniques and attends to the ethics of sound recording practices. These sonic practices pose new questions about the work performed through documentary film soundtracks' engagements with the more-than-human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-wildlife coexistence has increasingly been known for providing diverse ecological services to humans. However, the global repercussions of the Anthropocene epoch have changed the status and future of human-wildlife relationships. In this paper, we shed light on the significance of a positive attitude towards sharing space with animals in identifying and managing both conflict and ecological aspects of human-wildlife interactions in an agrarian landscape. We tried to understand how interactions between meso-carnivores like jungle cats (Felis chaus) and humans influence their survival in dense human populations. We evaluate the abundance and habitat use by jungle cats seasonally and diet, as well as their interactions with farmers in West Bengal, India. The mean encounter rate of jungle cats was assessed and used as a proxy for their abundance. Using a combination of direct sign surveys, we found that the habitat preference and seasonal distribution of jungle cats were influenced by the change in seasons with respect to different habitats. Our results indicate that jungle cats were more associated with human settlements during the monsoon. Scat analysis revealed the dominance of rodents in the diets of jungle cats. This activity helps to control the rodent population from destroying crops. However, our interactions with farmers showed their negative attitude towards the species due to the instances of livestock (poultry birds) depredation. We suggest that, more interdisciplinary researches are required to address how affectively socioeconomic structures shape up positive human-wildlife interaction. Planning and implementation of conservation education programmes are also necessary to help people for understanding the economic and ecological benefits provided by jungle cats and other wide-ranging carnivores. We chose an agrarian landscape to evaluate threats to jungle cats and their persistence with humans. The encounter rate of jungle cats indicated that the intensity of habitat use varies seasonally in different natural surroundings. People had a generally negative perception of jungle cats, despite the fact that they have been found to feed primarily on rodents in farmlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social & Cultural Geography is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall guides readers through a "theological" exegesis of Genesis chapters 1–3 and was an early manifestation of the "German Church Struggle" (Kirchenkampf) against National Socialism. In this paper, I propose a re-reading of Creation and Fall attentive to contemporary environmental and political conditions. Drawing on the work of William E. Connolly, I outline points of affirmation, critique, and supplementation. Just as Bonhoeffer recognized the need for a "crisis theology" in the face of Nazism, so now global warming and the rise of "aspirational fascism" demands analogous efforts. I argue that Bonhoeffer's focus on biblical myth as a counter to fascist myth, his articulation of a relational ontology and embrace of "incarnational humanism," are all relevant to the task of Christian political theology today. There is a need, however, to transcend Bonhoeffer's anthropocentric bias, supplementing his readings of Eden's mythic symbols to encourage forms of "entangled humanism" that are essential to Creation's defence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of GeoHumanities is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Humans are ‘fire creatures’ that have used fire for millennia to shape local environments to diverse purposes. Our capacity for combustion has also forced global climatic changes and rendered the planet increasingly flammable, creating the conditions for progressively higher impact bushfires now and into the future. Meanwhile, governments in fire-prone countries such as Australia have continued to allow settlements to be established (and re-established) in wildland-urban interfaces. Like other ‘natural hazards’, bushfire is thereby a social phenomenon bound up with human values, practices and decisions. But, while studies of the social dimensions of ‘natural hazards’ are steadily rising, this scholarship has rarely addressed natural hazard management practitioners directly, precisely those authorised and entrusted to intervene in the distribution of hazard probabilities and consequences. This paper seeks to help remediate this research gap, illustrating how cultural, ecological, economic and political factors thoroughly condition hazard management and modes of intervention. Drawing on a case study in the Northern Territory’s Greater Darwin region, this paper suggests not only that examining such sociocultural realities provides new insights into hazards and their distribution, but also that attention to such issues is crucial to understanding our flammable future in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of islands as ‘model systems’ has become particularly relevant for examining a host of important issues in archaeology and other disciplines. As papers in this special issue of the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology demonstrate, islands can serve as critical and ideal analytical platforms for observing human populations in the past and their evolutionary histories within complex and insular human ecodynamics. In this paper we address the issue of how islands are also important models for future sustainability and as corollaries for the survival of humans generally. In a sense, island cultures and ecosystems can be seen as microcosms of the issues we have faced as humans, and provide important insights for understanding the fate of our species, particularly as it pertains to the exploration and colonization of new worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change spells the end of tourism, and tourism is just one, and one of the least important, things to be so very near its end. This situation has emerged because of the global dominance of forms of material engagement that completely misunderstand the distribution of agency in the world. Framing the world as just an external human 'resource' diminishes the many forms of agency that elude, transcend, effect, facilitate and subvert human intentions. Even archetypically inanimate objects, such as stones, are actively constitutive of worlds, thoughts, and lives, including human lives, in myriad transformative ways. This lithic agency is illustrated in terms of the attraction that draws some to visit stone circles, and the atmospheres created by, and felt in, such places. This rather different understanding of a 'visitor attraction' and its ontological and ethical implications exposes some of the inadequate presumptions of our dominant form of life and its destructive atmospheric consequences at local and global scales. The paper employs Material Engagement Theory (MET), originating in archaeology and anthropology, as a way to understand the differences between the reductive assumptions of the Anthropocene and the redemptive possibilities of what it terms a neo-lithic ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Critical pedagogy is in crisis. To address this crisis, this paper reinvents Paulo Freire's concept of utopia in and for our age of the Anthropocene. Understood as a system, postdigital critical utopia provides us with normative foundations and returns agency from invisible data and algorithms to human beings. Understood as a process, postdigital critical utopia unmasks the myth of neutrality and adds an important element of myth, religion, ritual, and faith. Understood as an orientation, postdigital critical utopia needs to be balanced by dystopia, integrate environmental considerations, and act with a combination of epistemical curiosity and hope. Theoretical and practical attempts at introducing advanced technology to reimagine new utopias now take place in media theory, hacking, activism, and small pockets of the academia. To transcend its own crisis and remain relevant, contemporary critical pedagogy movement must urgently join these attempts. However, catching up with technological development is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. In order to take the lead in processes of modernization, critical pedagogy movement needs to actively develop utopian visions and techno-administrative systems which may support these visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unpredictable Anthropocene poses the challenge of imagining a radically different, equitable and sustainable world. Looking 100 years ahead is not easy, and especially as millennials, it appears quite bleak. This paper is the outcome of a visioning exercise carried out in a 2-day workshop, attended by 33 young early career professionals under the auspices of IPBES. The process used Nature Futures Framework in an adapted visioning method from the Seeds of Good Anthropocene project. Four groups envisioned more desirable future worlds; where humanity has organised itself, the economy, politics and technology, to achieve improved nature-human well-being. The four visions had differing conceptualisations of this future. However, there were interesting commonalities in their leverage points for transformative change, including an emphasis on community, fundamentally different economic systems based on sharing and technological solutions to foster sustainability and human-nature connectedness. Debates included questioning the possibility of maintaining local biocultural diversity with increased connectivity globally and the prominence of technology for sustainability outcomes. These visions are the first step towards a wider galvanisation of youth visions for a brighter future, which is often missing in the arena where it can be taken seriously, to trigger more transformative pathways towards meeting global goals [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines colonial legacies in human-nonhuman relations to off-centre empire in the Anthropocene. Imperial methods of collecting, preserving and displaying nature profoundly shaped species perception, which in turn affected the scientific attention and ecological relevance a species was granted. In particular, I reflect on the category of invasibility to show how empire sanctioned the mobility of specific population groups and animal species as border-crossing. This further shows how speciesist logics served to extend, maintain and legitimize imperial power. This analysis is relevant in the Anthropocene where invasibility is mobilised to police movement in the context of increased human and nonhuman migration. Further, I discuss how invasibility is considered as one of main threats for biodiversity, which may misdirect conservation efforts. Overall, the article examines the potential in human-nonhuman encounters to challenge colonial legacies. Based on an ethnographic example of multispecies homemaking with species considered invasive in (hetero)normative modes of intimacy and domesticity, I argue that colonial legacies of racialized, gendered and speciesist hierarchies can be disturbed by human-nonhuman relations of companionship, care and interdependence. Finally, I scale-up the analysis to the landscape, by tracing the transformation of a former imperial wasteland in Vienna's peripheral South from being perceived as economically and aesthetically worthless to a natural monument. Attending to multispecies entanglements is key here to understand the transformative process that led to the recovery of this wasteland. Here I off-centre empire by challenging anthropocentric narrations of how landscape transforms in favour of a narration that re-centres nonhuman agency. I argue that stories of wasteland recovery guided by nonhuman animals are crucial due to the increase in industrial wasteland and environmental degradation in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article gives a critical examination considering the descriptive potential, explanatory limitations, and recent productive problematization of presentism. For several decades, notions of presentist temporality have occupied the forefront of debates about the nature of historical time, challenging the modern dynamic future-oriented temporal imaginary and theorizing the reign of an overwhelming present that assimilates the past and the future within its expanding scope. According particular attention to distinct interpretations from the work of François Hartog, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Hartmut Rosa, the article considers the rise of memory culture and suspension of future-oriented momentum as crucial characteristics of the presentist perspective. Referencing recent interventions by Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Helge Jordheim, however, the paper argues that momentous changes across technological and ecological domains necessitate conceptual innovation capable of exceeding presentism's static temporal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sergei Zalygin's (1913–2000) autobiographical Ekologicheskii roman ('An Environmental Novel', 1993) tells the story of a Soviet water engineer and ecologist Nikolai Golubev between the Russian Civil War and the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The protagonist is repeatedly confronted with state modernization efforts, especially on issues related to harnessing major rivers. My paper examines from an ecocritical point of view how the conflicts and dialogues between the government representatives and the main character relate to the development of Russian environmental thinking. I argue that the protagonist's relationship with his environment follows Lev Berg's almost Schellingian concept of geographical landscapes, while the state authorities typically represent Andrei Grigor'ev's ideas, based on dialectical materialism and the Stalinist interpretation of Engels's dialectics of nature. The failure to understand the significance of Vladimir Vernadskii's concept of the noosphere, the precursor of the Anthropocene, is central in the novel's critique of the Soviet state's so-called amelioration of the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was written in Hong Kong during a protest movement that shows no signs of ending anytime soon. It coincided with a military lockdown of Kashmir that followed the abrogation of key Articles of the Indian Constitution guaranteeing administrative autonomy to the region. There is little to suggest any similarity between Hong Kong and Kashmir. Nevertheless, as the continuing agitations in both regions make any resolution along available theories of political science increasingly impossible, their coincidence opens new questions around Empire, Nation, Colonialism and indeed Modernity. We explore the resurgence of a very modern empire, stretching from Central to North East Asia. Although effectively a Sino-British co-production (as the One Belt One Road project shows in its tacit reiteration of older British demarcations of regional boundaries), empire splits into two genealogies. One is precisely colonial, the other more amorphously despotic. This divide now determines the modernist pedigree of today's nationalisms and provides ethical justifications for extreme state action. As an old imperial divide reinvents itself as a bipolar global order, Kashmir and Hong Kong require conceptual relocating within larger geographies if we are to take seriously the demands of militant protest to force the question beyond the totalitarian nation-state. Both protests are viewed within a growing crisis of the nation-form as they invoke, but also exceed, the languages of conventional politics, moving into a domain variously named apocalypse, endgame and catastrophe. As distinctions grow between rational politics and the experimental "frontline," history itself hangs in the balance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unprecedented and unsustainable impact of human activities on the biosphere threatens the survival of the Earth's inhabitants, including the human species. Several solutions have been presented to mitigate, or possibly undo, this looming global catastrophe. The dominant discourse, however, has a monolithic and Western-centric articulation of the causes, solutions, and challenges arising from the events of the Anthropocene which may differ from the other epistemes and geographies of the world. Drawing on the International Relations (IR) critical engagement with the Anthropocene, this paper situates the Asia-Pacific region in the Anthropocene discourse. The region's historical and socio-ecological characteristics reveal greater vulnerability to the challenges of the Anthropocene compared to other regions while its major economies have contributed recently to the symptoms of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, the region's ecocentric philosophies and practices could inform strategies of living in the Anthropocene. This contextualised analysis aims to offer an Asia-Pacific perspective as well as insights into the development of IR in the age of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a close reading of "The Geology of Morals," the third and possibly most important chapter, or plateau, of Deleuze and Guattari's magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus. I analyse some of the many philosophical and scientific sources informing Deleuze and Guattari's densely argued text. The authors' shift of emphasis from the critique of psychoanalysis to a geological or stratigraphic register is emphasized and explained by situating their project in relation both to contemporary debates surrounding the Anthropocene and to the problem of nihilism as this was articulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari's stratigraphy, a topic that has received comparatively little attention in the secondary literature, helps us to understand the history of nihilism in terms of humanity's planetary impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques of international education policy frequently take issue with how it stabilises neoliberal values at the expense of the progressive aims of education. Yet the humanism underpinning these debates can work to exclude environmental concerns from the remit of educational policy. This article offers a posthuman critique of the Australian Strategy for International Education 2021–2030 that does not take for granted that international education policy should be humanistic but considers how it comes to be affirmed as such. Through a discourse analysis of the Strategy and supporting materials, this article identifies three manoeuvres that affirm the policy as humanistic. Firstly, neoliberal values and notions of wellbeing are wedded together in a shared understanding that the Strategy must be student centred. Secondly, the Strategy reinscribes divisions between humans and nature by casting land as a passive backdrop for human activities. And thirdly, the Strategy makes a claim to perpetuity by linking the acquisition of human skills with a sustainable and prosperous future. The conclusion contends that international education policy cannot ignore the impacts of human activity on the world and must nurture the vast range of interdependencies that sustain life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water governance is central to the crisis of the Anthropocene as climate change, population growth and changing demands for water are predicted to exacerbate threats to food, water and energy security and river functioning. Since 2000 the major policy setting in Europe for the governance of water has been the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). Empirically grounded post-positivist water governance research strongly anchored in interpretivist and constructivist systems' traditions akin to deliberative policy analysis (DPA) is reported. The case is made, based on the UK (England), that an opportunity to transform water governance has been lost because WFD implementation has been prescriptive, top-down and fails to engage with dynamic complexity. Some changes have emerged from the adoption of a Catchment-Based Approach (CaBA), partly triggered by threat to government of a judicial review, but governance praxis and trajectory remain contested. The paper reports on new pathways and options for change emerging from a systemic co-inquiry, a deliberative instrument, which emphasises the importance of institutionalising community action at catchment scale and re-framing the enactment of the Directive as part of an iterative social learning system for water governance. In the light of our findings, implications for future DPA scholarship are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terms such as resilience, vulnerability and adaptation are heterogeneously defined in the contemporary climate-change adaptation literature and, hence, remain difficult to operationalize. In this paper, the authors offer a cultural evolutionary perspective, where these terms are mapped onto the terminology of triple-inheritance theory, which clarifies how risks arise through the complex interplay of social and ecological feedbacks. Studies of past risk, vulnerability and resilience are often conducted within a historical ecological framework. As both ecological (synchronic) and evolutionary (diachronic) understandings of human culture ultimately derive from the same source of inspiration – Darwinian evolutionary theory – they are, the authors argue, readily integrated. They take steps towards such an integration, which not only offers a unified theoretical and conceptual framework for studies of past and present vulnerability and resilience, but also provides explicit mechanisms for how issues of future vulnerability and resilience can be approached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]