Search

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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Langbein and Schumm (1958) connected precipitation to erosion in a right-skewed curve used in earth science textbooks for over six decades, where denudation increases with precipitation on the arid/semiarid limb and decreases in humid regions. Development of the catchment-averaged 10Be denudation method a quarter-century ago led geomorphologists to evaluate this hypothesis using data not influenced by the Anthropocene, with mixed findings. The Sonoran Desert in Arizona, USA, is optimal for investigating the longstanding hypothesis of increased erosion from arid to semiarid climates due to: (i) the modern orographic effect aligning elevated precipitation with altitude, mirroring Neotoma packrat midden paleoecology research for the Holocene and late Pleistocene; (ii) the region has been tectonically quiet for the residence times of analyzed 10Be ranging from ca. 8,000-110,000 years. Our significant finding echoes Langbein and Schumm's work, revealing heightened erosion along an elevation-precipitation gradient from arid to semiarid conditions. Notably, the significance of precipitation-elevation contrasts with the absence of significant correlation between 10Be denudation and attributes like slope, drainage area, relief, or landform type (e.g., alluvial fan, pediment, mountain watershed). Modern faunalturbation, increasing along this gradient, exposes more ground to rainsplash and overland flow at higher elevations, adding complexity to these results. Further insights unveil that (i) catchments in areas with substantial Quaternary base level reduction imitate tectonic effects, tripling 10Be denudation rates; (ii) basaltic boulders and cobbles yield an armoring influence; (iii) historical erosion acceleration due to urbanization and wildfires insignificantly affects 10Be denudation rates in the Sonoran Desert; and (iv) minute desert catchments yield anomalous erosion rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses development into full drafts on Themed Section on ‘History during the Anthropocene' which were submitted early in 2021.

As part of a renewed focus on current environmental concerns, the new geography programs set out for middle schools introduced new subjects on global change in 2015, subsequently replaced by a focus on climate change in 2020. The case study approach to teaching, imposed by official directives, makes it difficult for middle school students to understand these complex notions. This research attempts to analyze how students appropriate these notions and to verify whether they are capable of reasoning in a systemic way, i.e. of adopting the required approach for understanding such complexity. This article explores an epistemological analysis of global change and climate change, a didactic study of school textbooks and an examination of teachers' discourse and students' work in order to address this question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change threatens human well-being and planetary health but is hardly addressed in education. Comparative education research has advised governments about education reforms since the nineteenth century, so what must change to sustain a liveable earth? I use the concept of 'educational space' to understand how comparative knowledge building has steered education. Then I re-read three volumes of the World Yearbook of Education (WYB) to show how comparative education has embedded knowledges that have steered governing, neglected experiences that complicate powerlessness, and constrained learning through measurement. I argue current education compromises humans facing challenging climate futures but could provide knowledges to support 'the other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the southwest of Western Australia, the state Parks and Wildlife Service carry out prescribed burns with the goal of reducing 'fuel loads' and creating landscape patterns that they hope will slow down the spread of bushfires. These practices can contribute to establishing 'a fire regime', a tenuous state, which must be continually upheld, in which the forest tends to burn in certain ways. The regime is a model for human-environment involvement that highlights attempts to be favourably involved with landscapes that are sometimes dangerous and often unpredictable. This shows one example of a complicated pattern of involvement in today's world. Often thought of as a time of distance and forceful disconnection, the Anthropocene also contains numerous examples of complicated attempts to maintain close ties with landscapes. This article develops 'involvements' as a lens for understanding cases like these, where people deliberately attempt to shape landscapes but do not have complete control over or insight into the paths from intention to effect. Involvements can shed light on how people live in the uncertain space between intention, action and effect; how they stretch themselves out across time, how they open themselves to being affected and how they create for themselves certain forms of knowledge and understanding. For fire managers, practices of burning, planning, patrolling and making themselves familiar with the forest all contribute to creating an interface with the fiery and dangerous landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While limitless growth is widely recognized as contradicting sustainability, tourism imaginaries are often overlooked as key agents in the perpetuation of growth-based and extractive development. The experience and consumption of regions being newly developed for tourism are often shaped by entrenched imaginaries of "untouched" nature, which have proven remarkably durable in the face of Anthropocene-era recognition of environmental degradation. Through a case study of the Myeik (Mergui) Archipelago in Myanmar (Burma) informed by participant observation, face-to-face interviews, TripAdvisor reviews and online media, three facets of untouched imaginaries are identified as impeding sustainability. First, the colonial ideology underpinning the untouched fosters an extractive logic, shaping frontiers into resources for tourists to accumulate social capital while obscuring ecological imbalances. Next, despite humanity's ubiquitous impact in the Anthropocene, the "untouched" has in this case persisted, as eco-branded tourism enclaves continue to affirm nature-society binaries in producing pristine spaces. Finally, untouched imaginaries are shown to fuel the imperative for limitless growth, motivating tourist practices upon which industry may continue to capitalize. Amidst debates of how to politically and economically restructure tourism sustainably, sociocultural imaginaries are identified as in urgent need of contestation and replacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic research case study of five early childhood classrooms in rural Appalachia explores how the decline of the coal industry and shift to natural gas fracking impact classroom play spaces in the region. Child development orientations influenced educators' approaches to teaching about the natural world. The children's and teachers' environmental readiness and environmental engagement pedagogies activated possibilities related to nature/culture in classrooms yet also reflected a complicated relationship around denial of the Anthropocene promoted through state science standards policy. Donna Haraway's ideas about 'staying with the trouble' in the Anthropocene inspired the possibility of 'third-way' pedagogies promoting multispecies relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is overcoming an unprecedented challenge with the COVID-19 pandemic's worldwide spread. Epidemics and pandemics are part of history. The oldest records are related to the plague of Athens in 430 BC and throughout times numerous other diseases affected humankind, devastating societies. Nowadays, the global world allows rapid communication and potential spread of new pandemics. The Anthropocene epoch, in which humans significantly interfere in the Earth system, can also accelerate their emergence, forcing us to be innovative and proactive. Our enormous scientific and technological development is a huge advantage, providing us with knowledge and various tools to defeat the new incoming threats. Nevertheless, knowing the historical scientific facts is fundamental to understand the present and anticipating the future. Geoethics reflects on the values underlying behaviours and practices that interfere with the way human beings relate to the Earth system. It conceptualises an interdisciplinary approach within geosciences, history, philosophy and sociology and additionally it is closely related to sustainable development. Enhancing awareness of our role as responsible citizens and improving scientific knowledge are essential goals to achieve quality in education and the preservation of life on Earth. Historical scientific events must be harnessed to provide a more holistic and geoethical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on simultaneous sovereignty and vulnerability characterizing the Anthropocene. Topics include criticizing the erasure of difference in Anthropocene species-universalism highlighting the need for recognizing racial, economic, and historical inequities; and settler colonial genocide to environmental massacre to strategic interventions into the very rhythms and synaptic terrains of individual human bodies.

Why are we failing the environment and our ethico-ontological relationships? I engage Anthropocene studies scholars (for example, Chakrabarty), geologists, environmental-ontologists (for example, Arianne François Conty) to understand human arguments for a hopeful future. While some argue hope, we are continually reminded, by the very scholars giving us hope, that we are failing. I argue an ontological repositioning as a means of saying "fuck-it" in the face of death in order to accept human failure as a positive movement out of the shadow of the nihilistic eternal recurrence of hope. Turning to Arthur Kroker and Heidegger, we can understand why hope as a product of the will can never be anything but a "will of will:" aimlessness. Jairus Grove's work on political pessimism gives us a frame of reference for turning to do otherwise. I derive this project from Thom van Dooren's question: "Should we rape the Whooping Cranes to save them from extinction?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that historical existence in the Anthropocene is constituted by waste. As both act and product waste increasingly dominate natural, social, and political environments. The Anthropocene as a threshold in natural history then is inseparable from the profusion of waste that has accompanied its rise. Our insatiable wastefulness and our reforming of the planet with trash in turn create distinct consequences for historical consciousness and historical theory. Historical thinking and historical writing must reckon with waste in its physical and metahistorical registers. Key to this challenge is the thought of Georges Bataille, who attempted to reorient political economy by centering waste in place of production. With expenditure at the center of human existence, twenty-first-century historians can undertake an analogous restructuring of historical knowledge. Waste constitutes a central experience of sovereignty. In wasting, the consumer attains momentary sovereignty over self, world, and history. This article also examines Jean Baudrillard's articulation of the end of history as a moment of refusal in order to sketch how waste has emerged as a historical condition. As a consequence of this connection, it also considers how the historicity of waste might reshape the self-understanding of historians as they take stock of the Anthropocene. (7724 words) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers three lessons for a post-pandemic democratic politics. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the deep ontological entanglements of human and non-human systems: A submicroscopic agent jumping from an animal to a human host impacts human societies across the world. In the process, the virus has revealed a second lesson: Public responses to the pandemic have exacerbated already existing inequalities and fuelled anti-democratic desires for national and individual fortification. In a world where political emergencies like the pandemic are becoming more prevalent due to climatic and ecological destabilizations, there is an urgent need to promote new countervailing democratic forces. Together, these two insights motivate a third lesson: In order to address the ecological and political challenges of the so-called Anthropocene, democratic activism and political organizing must itself become more like the virus, more viral. Inspired by swarming behaviour in complex systems, a democratic politics of transformative change must give up illusions of simple solutions and central control, and instead rely on dispersed multi-sited actions happening at many scales at once, while working towards the improbable but necessary goal that these actions might, eventually, come together and bring about change at a planetary scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exosomatic memory is a crucial phase in the evolution of humanity because it enables learning to take place across groups and generations rather than exclusively through lived experience or one on one transmission. Exosomatic memory is the attribution of knowledge to objects, such as art or writing, which allows epistemology to be transmitted beyond the individual to subsequent generations of people. Exosomatic memory is the key to the transmission of culture and knowledge, beyond the individual who learns exclusively from personal experience. This places technologies such as writing and art in a key position for the education of culture and knowledge. Stiegler develops these ideas, following Martin Heidegger, Leroi-Gourhan and Derrida from the Palaeolithic to the contemporary. Maori use of natural objects as exosomatic transmission of intergenerational learning exceeds the technological enframing of modernity outlined by Heidegger. For indigenous peoples, exosomatic memory is cultural, technological and ecological. Stiegler argues that the impact of cybernetics on knowledge production is accelerating the technological enframing of knowledge (2018). Consequently, information technologies are leaving the human mind behind, in passive receptivity rather than dynamic creativity. The prefrontal cortex is slower than the internet, exacerbating a widening lag in active understanding, in favour of passive absorption. Alienation and epistemological entropy are trapping us in climate change and the anthropocentric Capitalocene. Maori insight may cut the Gordian knot and sidestep the alienation and determinism of technological modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an understanding of climate crisis as informed by performativity, this article offers an overview of 2010s British climate crisis theatre (or, 'CCT'). While similar surveys of theatre that depict ecological issues have been written before, the approach this article takes is distinct in its application of performativity, as well as its specificity to theatre in 2010s Britain: a time and a place that saw a significant shift in its attitudes towards ecological concerns; not to mention Britain being a 'first-world' culture with high yearly carbon emissions and far-reaching historical legacies of effecting the Anthropocene. First, I demonstrate how performativity is relevant to both ecocritical concerns and theatre that involves itself with issues of climate crisis, illustratively exploring Ella Hickson's Oil (2016) here. I then overview 2010s British CCT through several areas: namely, its depiction of anxieties around overpopulation and children; the use of 'cli-fi'; 'zoomed-out' approaches to representing temporality; issues of Anthropocentrism and articulations of posthumanism; the racialisation of climate crisis concerns; and the tension in CCT between performative affect and material costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay reconceives Deep History as a type of origin myth best understood in the context of its own time, and as an intellectual project with methodological strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on insights from the history of science, Latin American studies, and Indigenous theory, I challenge the Eurocentric periodization of human history (and pre-history). Finally, I conclude with suggestions for collaborative ways that historians in particular can engage in multidisciplinary conversations about time, narrative, subjectivity, and authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This guest editors' introduction to the special issue provides a brief overview of ecological emotions, important philosophical accounts of emotion, the distinctive nature of visual arts and their interplay with affective experience, and the introductory summary of the special issue's articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a series of ideas disturbing the conventional wisdom that decrees education an essential force in saving the world. Taking Morton's descriptions of hyperobjects seriously, we consider his radical idea that the world has ended amidst the eco-political depredations of the Anthropocene. Accordingly, we claim that education in modernity most properly belongs - materially and ideologically - with technological enframing and the rise of biopower. In other words, what is taken almost universally as the sacred realm of education is, in fact, a contributory factor in the global eco-ontological crisis. Morton describes global warming, plastics and nuclear arsenals as hyperobjects: viscous, nonlocal entities that exist in temporal and spatial planes vastly different from our own immediate worlds. They are the threatening, difficult to access entities that express the Anthropocene. While most will propose that education will be vital in combating looming ecological apocalypse, we consider that education is a hyperobject itself. Education, we opine, is aligned with the forces and conditions that have generated the present crisis. This is because education embodies the same qualities as the hyperobjects of modernity; according to any rigorous historical ontology, education as we know it must be seen as the most extensive expression of a dangerous biopower that is beyond control. If this position is to be taken seriously, education is not merely impotent in combatting ecological catastrophe, but is a key apparatus supporting the Anthropocene. Education is thus another element of the end of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides ethnographic insight into the more-than-human relationships enacted through young people's participation in school grounds conservation activities. As a response to the escalating biodiversity crisis, conservation appears well-placed to facilitate young people's development of an environmental ethic of care, and a capacity to work towards addressing environmental issues. Proponents of posthuman pedagogies, however, argue that the 'stewardship' perspective underlying these activities fails to achieve the radical shift in human-environment relations required in response to the Anthropocene, given its apparent reinforcement of a perceived human/nature binary, and narrow 'solutions'-based approach. Considering these critiques, this article demonstrates that where there is openness to unplanned more-than-human encounters and the enactment of young people's own 'lived curricula', conservation activities can nonetheless enable forms of 'collective thinking with the more-than-human world' that transcend any underlying 'stewardship' perspective. We therefore point to the potential role of conservation activities within posthuman responses to the Anthropocene, provided such openness is maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agency has become a key interest in translation studies since the cultural turn in the 1990s. Robinson is the only scholar mentioned above that situated his thoughts on agency in the body of the translator, but he limited it to the affect of the body or the mirror-neurons in the brain. In my view, the third decade of the twenty-first century is an apt time for translation studies scholars to take note of the ways in which the translators they study are embedded in their biology and how the agency that interests translation studies scholars emerges from and through this biology. Biosemioticians and biologists might disagree on some of the arguments, but translation studies and other humanities scholars will find this volume a rich source of information on the biology-phenomenology of agency. [Extracted from the article]

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.)