#Anthropocene Phenomenon

[xtruss]

Illustration by João Fazenda

The Burning of Maui

The governor called the fires Hawaii’s “largest natural disaster” ever. They would more accurately be labelled an “unnatural disaster.”

— By Elizabeth Kolbert | August 20, 2023

The ‘alalā, or Hawaiian crow, is a remarkably clever bird. ‘Alalā fashion tools out of sticks, which they use, a bit like skewers, to get at hard-to-reach food. The birds were once abundant, but by the late nineteen-nineties their population had dropped so low that they were facing extinction. Since 2003, all the world’s remaining ‘alalā have been confined to aviaries. In a last-ditch effort to preserve the species, the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance has been breeding the crows in captivity. The alliance keeps about a third of the birds—some forty ‘alalā—at a facility outside the town of Volcano, on the Big Island, and the rest outside the town of Makawao, on Maui. Earlier this month, the Maui population was very nearly wiped out. On the morning of August 8th, flames came within a few hundred feet of the birds’ home and would probably have engulfed it were it not for an enterprising alliance employee, one of her neighbors, and a garden hose.

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “many factors” contributed to the ‘alalā’s decline, including habitat destruction, invasive species, and the effects of agriculture on the landscape. Owing to these developments, Hawaii’s native fauna in general is in crisis; the state has earned an unfortunate title as “the extinction capital of the world.” Of the nearly hundred and fifty bird species that used to be found in Hawaii and nowhere else, two-thirds are gone. Among the islands’ distinctive native snails, the losses have been even more catastrophic.

Last week, as the death toll from the fires in West Maui continued to mount—late on Friday, the number stood at a hundred and eleven—it became clear that the same “factors” that have decimated Hawaii’s wildlife also contributed to the deadliness of the blazes. Roughly a thousand people have been reported as still missing, and some two thousand homes have been destroyed or damaged. The worst-hit locality, the town of Lahaina, which lies in ruins, was built on what was once a wetland. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, much of the vegetation surrounding the town was cleared to make way for sugar plantations. Then, when these went out of business, in the late twentieth century, the formerly cultivated acres were taken over by introduced grasses. In contrast to Hawaii’s native plants, the imported grasses have evolved to reseed after fires and, in dry times, they become highly flammable.

“The lands around Lahaina were all sugarcane from the eighteen-sixties to the late nineteen-nineties,” Clay Trauernicht, a specialist in fire ecology at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told the Guardian. “Nothing’s been done since then—hence the problem with invasive grasses and fire risk.”

Also contributing to the devastation was climate change. Since the nineteen-fifties, average temperatures in Hawaii have risen by about two degrees, and there has been a sharp uptick in warming in just the past decade. This has made the state more fire-prone and, at the same time, it has fostered the spread of the sorts of plants that provide wildfires with fuel. Hotter summers help invasive shrubs and grasses “outgrow our native tree species,” the state’s official Climate Change Portal notes.

As Hawaii has warmed, it has also dried out. According, again, to the Climate Change Portal, “rainfall and streamflow have declined significantly over the past 30 years.” In the weeks leading up to the fires in West Maui, parts of the region were classified as suffering from “severe drought.” Meanwhile, climate change is shifting storm tracks in the Pacific farther north. Hurricane Dora, which made history as the longest-lasting Category 4 hurricane on record in the Pacific, passed to the south of Maui and helped produce the gusts that spread the Lahaina fire at a speed that’s been estimated to be a mile per minute.

After visiting the wreckage of Lahaina, Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, called the Maui fires the “largest natural disaster Hawaii has ever experienced.” In fact, the fires would more accurately be labelled an “unnatural disaster.” As David Beilman, a professor of geography and environment at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, recently pointed out, for most of Hawaii’s history fire simply wasn’t part of the islands’ ecology. “This Maui situation is an Anthropocene phenomenon,” he told USA Today.

A great many more unnatural disasters lie ahead. Last month was, by a large margin, the hottest July on record, and 2023 seems likely to become the warmest year on record. Two days after Lahaina burst into flames, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a revised forecast for the current Atlantic hurricane season, which runs through the end of November. The agency had been predicting a “near-normal” season, with between five and nine hurricanes. But, because of record sea-surface temperatures this summer—last month a buoy in Manatee Bay, south of Miami, registered 101.1 degrees, a reading that, as the Washington Post put it, is “more typical of a hot tub than ocean water”—noaa is now projecting that the season will be “above normal,” with up to eleven hurricanes. Rising sea levels and the loss of coastal wetlands mean that any hurricanes that make landfall will be that much more destructive.

A few days after noaa revised its forecast, officials ordered the evacuation of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. A wildfire burning about ten miles away would, they feared, grow to consume the city. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation called the evacuation order “extraordinary.” This summer has been Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, and, at times, the smoke has spread all the way to Europe. There are currently something like a thousand active fires in the country.

Two days after the Yellowknife evacuation was ordered, another Pacific hurricane—Hilary—intensified into a Category 4 storm. Hilary was being drawn north by a “heat dome” of high pressure over the central Plains, which was expected to bring record temperatures to parts of the Midwest. The storm’s unusual track put some twenty-six million people in four states—California, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona—under flash-flood watches.

How well humanity will fare on the new planet it is busy creating is an open question. Homo sapiens is a remarkably clever species. So, too, was the ‘alalā. ♦

— Published in the Print Edition of the August 28, 2023, New Yorker Issue, with the Headline “Fire Alarm.”

#Maui #Natural Disaster | Un-natural Disaster #Elizabeth Kolbert #The New Yorker #Alalā | Hawaiian Crow #San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance #U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service #Lahaina #Clay Trauernicht | University of Hawaii at Mānoa #Climate Change Portal #Hawaii’s Governor | Josh Green #David Beilman | University of Hawaii at Manoa #Anthropocene Phenomenon #National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration #Atlantic Hurricane 🌀 #Manatee Bay | South of Miami #Yellowknife | Canada’s 🇨🇦 Northwest Territories #Europe #Pacific Hurricane 🌀 #Mid-West | California | Utah | Nevada | Arizona #Fire 🔥 Alarm 🚨

[deepdrearn]

Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’, EN: Japanese anemone, NL: herfstanemoon

So far I found wild or semi-wild plants in my garden, but I think this one might be a remnant of the original inhabitants of this house, the Baker family. You should know that the Bakers built the house that I now live in, until the municipality designated this to an "industrial harbor area", unsuitable for living. Mr and Mrs Baker were forced to move to another village. The house got a new official destination as "artist studio/office". And now I illegally live in my "office" or what is still sometimes called "the Bakers house". It looks and feels exactly like a family house and still has a massive garden. But walk 200 meters and you can see we're surrounded by oil tankers and coal shipping. It's a very anthropocene vibe.

Now the Bakers really loved living in this house. Mr Baker had built it together with his son, who was a contractor. They used all kinds of leftover materials from the sons construction work. The doors have always been kind of weird and close in awkward angles as a result. My favorite detail is that for piles they used street lanterns.

Mr Baker must be in his eighties now. He occasionally visits and then comes to check "his" house. Mrs Baker passed away thee years ago. She has never been back to visit because their forced relocation had left her heartbroken. What is now our wild paradise, she had carefully crafted into a decorative garden with magnolia trees (still here!), a hedera hedge (still here but very wild!), terraces (that are now completely overgrown but I sometimes hit tiles with my spade) and maybe also Japanese anemones...?

Japanse anemone is a cultivar but once it has established itself it's pretty good at maintaining itself. Not only is it a perennial plant, it also spreads through rhizomes. Fun fact: I did not know that word till I looked up this plant! I had often encountered rhizomes/woodstalks in pesky weeds such as hedge bindweed, but I did not know there was a word or it or that it is a rather common strategy for plants. Rizhomes are now my favorite ecological phenomenon.

Anyway, it seems that this is a plant that is planted for decoration mainly and you can buy it in many garden stores. I like to think Mrs Baker put it here thirty years ago and it has maintained itself since. It's very pretty and blooms up till eight weeks in the late summer/fall. I hope it will maintain itself for a much longer time in our garden.

#local ecology #a little story about my house and my garden #the Bakers house #japanese anemone

[rockislandadultreads]

Read-Alike Friday: In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Centuries before, robots of Panga gained self-awareness, laid down their tools, wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.

Now the life of the tea monk who tells this story is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They will need to ask it a lot. Chambers' series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?

This is the first volume in the “Monk and Robot” series. 

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

In a ruined, nameless city of the future, a woman named Rachel, who makes her living as a scavenger, finds a creature she names “Borne” entangled in the fur of Mord, a gigantic, despotic bear. Mord once prowled the corridors of the biotech organization known as the Company, which lies at the outskirts of the city, until he was experimented on, grew large, learned to fly and broke free. Driven insane by his torture at the Company, Mord terrorizes the city even as he provides sustenance for scavengers like Rachel.

At first, Borne looks like nothing at all—just a green lump that might be a Company discard. The Company, although severely damaged, is rumoured to still make creatures and send them to distant places that have not yet suffered Collapse. Borne somehow reminds Rachel of the island nation of her birth, now long lost to rising seas. She feels an attachment she resents; attachments are traps, and in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet when she takes Borne to her subterranean sanctuary, the Balcony Cliffs, Rachel convinces her lover, Wick, not to render Borne down to raw genetic material for the drugs he sells—she cannot break that bond.

Against his better judgment, out of affection for Rachel or perhaps some other impulse, Wick respects her decision. Rachel, meanwhile, despite her loyalty to Wick, knows he has kept secrets from her. Searching his apartment, she finds a burnt, unreadable journal titled “Mord,” a cryptic reference to the Magician (a rival drug dealer) and evidence that Wick has planned the layout of the Balcony Cliffs to match the blueprint of the Company building. What is he hiding? Why won’t he tell her about what happened when he worked for the Company?

This is the first volume in the “Borne” series. 

Anthropocene Rag by Alexander C. Irvine 

In the future United States, our own history has faded into myth and traveling across the country means navigating wastelands and ever-changing landscapes.

The country teems with monsters and artificial intelligences try to unpack their own becoming by recreating myths and legends of their human creators. Prospector Ed, an emergent AI who wants to understand the people who made him, assembles a ragtag team to reach the mythical Monument City.

In this nanotech Western, Alex Irvine infuses American mythmaking with terrifying questions about the future and who we will become.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other "shepherds" who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.

For as the sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America, the real danger may not be the epidemic but the fear of it. With society collapsing all around them--and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them--the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart--or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

This is the first volume in the “Wanderers” series. 

#science fiction #fantasy #lgbtq characters #readalike #readalikes #Library Books #Reading Recs #reading recommendations #Book Recommendations #book recs #TBR pile #tbr #tbrpile #to read #Want To Read #Booklr #book tumblr #book blog #library blog

[easterncoyoteenthusiast]

The Anthropocene/Conservation Cont.

Individuals across a variety of species alter their environments (e.g., beavers build dams, birds build nests, and earthworms physically/chemically alter soil) in a process called “niche construction.” Humans excel at this kind of activity and often participate in ways that “[use] phenomenal amounts of energy” [1, p. 28]. Unfortunately, this often results in “collateral consequences for climate, species diversity, and landscapes” [1, p. 30]. In response to the acceleration and accumulation of these consequences, it has been proposed that we have left the Holocene and entered into a new geological age called the “Anthropocene.”

Among other things, the Anthropocene is “a tool with which to focus attention on the current role of Homo sapiens in altering the Earth as a whole, and is a shorthand descriptor of that phenomenon” [1, p. 27]. It has become central to many analyses of human-animal relations and has called for us to do away with dualistic thinking of nature/society—with nature existing firmly outside the sphere of human society [2]. Rutherford, for example, has stated that “for all of its conceits around the importance of humans to the stories of the earth, it does invite a recognition that the world only operates via entanglement” [3, p. 215].

In light of this, I would like to acknowledge a study of mammalian movement in response to anthropogenic activity. Tucker et al. have determined that anthropogenic activities are "not only causing the loss of habitat and diversity, but also [affect] how animals move through fragmented and disturbed areas" [4, p. 9; see also 5-8]. Mammalian movements were typically two-to-three times smaller in areas with comparatively high instances of human presence compared to the same movements in areas with lower instances of human presence [4, p. 9]. This was attributed to both (1) an "individual-behavioral effect, where individuals alter their movements relative to" human activity, and (2) "a species-occurrence effect, where certain species that exhibit long-range movement" change their behavior to no longer reside in areas with high instances of human presence [4, pp. 11-12]. In terms of conservation, the authors conclude that animal movements should be considered a key conservation metric and that the goal should be maintaining landscape permeability [4, p. 13].

While most nations have some kind of endangered species legislation in place to prevent the loss of biodiversity, the majority of current conservation policies, practices, and conceptual frameworks are ill-suited to the Anthropocene because they were created "before there was widespread awareness of the unprecedented pace and magnitude of environmental change caused by humans" [9, p. 107]. Kareiva and Fuller recommend that we should instead be anticipating future impacts and "establishing goals that [reflect] the best science as to what is feasible in the future" [9, p. 108]; in short, a review and potential overhaul of current practices and/or conceptual frameworks because "nature is not a business, nor should it be run as one" [9, p. 111].

References:

[1] Boggs, C. (2016). Human Niche Construction and the Anthropocene. RCC Perspectives, 2, 27–32. www.jstor.org/stable/26241355

[2] Fredriksen, A. (2016). Of wildcats and wild cats: Troubling species-based conservation in the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(4), 689-705. doi.org/10.1177/0263775815623539

[3] Rutherford, S. (2018). The Anthropocene’s animal? Coywolves as feral cotravelers. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1-2), 206-223. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618763250

[4] Tucker, M.A., Böhning-Gaese, K., Fagan, W.F., Fryxell, J., Moorter, B.V., Alberts, S.C., … Mueller, T. (2018). Moving in the Anthropocene: Global reductions in terrestrial mammalian movements. Science, 359(6374), 466-469.

[5] Patterson, B.R., Bondrup-Nielsen, S., & Messier, F. (1999). Activity patterns and daily movements of the eastern coyote, Canis latrans, in Nova Scotia. Canadian Field Naturalist, 113(2), 251-257. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285966455

[6] Way, J.G. (2011). Eastern coyote/coywolf (Canis latrans x lycaon) movement patterns: Lessons learned in urbanized ecosystems. Cities and the Environment (CATE), 4(1), Article 2. https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cate/vol4/iss1/2

[7] Way, J.G. (2021). Coywolf: Eastern coyote genetics, ecology, management, and politics. Eastern Coyote/Coywolf Research, Barnstable, Massachusetts. www.easterncoyoteresearch.com/Coywolf/

[8] Way, J.G., Ortega, I.M., & Strauss, E.G. (2004). Movement and activity patterns of eastern coyotes in a coastal, suburban environment. Northeastern Naturalist, 11(3), 237-254. www.jstor.org/stable/3858416

[9] Kareiva, P. & Fuller, E. (2016). Beyond resilience: How to better prepare for the profound disruption of the Anthropocene. Global Policy, 7(Suppl. 1), 107-118. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12330

TL;DR:

Humans are niche constructors who greatly alter the environment

The degree to which anthropogenic alterations occur has led to the suggestion that we have left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a central concept in contemporary human-wildlife analyses and invites a recognition of entanglement

Conservation practices, etc. may need an overhaul to account for the degree of anthropogenic impact on wildlife/the environment

Hybridization | DNA Analyses | Range & Diet | Behavior & Ecology | Attitudes | Conservation

#coywolf #northeastern coyote #eastern coyote #canis latrans var. #canis latrans x canis lycaon #western coyote #eastern wolf #canis latrans #canis lycaon #alternative senior thesis project #the anthropocene #conservation #compassionate conservation #nature/society #interspecific interactions #movement patterns #biodiversity #“nature is not a business nor should it be run as one” #ecology #anthropology #niche construction

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/minimal-ethics-for-the-anthropocene/mode/2up

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life—understood as both a biological and social phenomenon—it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. “Anthropocene” names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe.

#anthropocene #philosophy

[female-malice]

Altered Earth aims to get the Anthropocene right in three senses. With essays by leading scientists, it highlights the growing consensus that our planet entered a dangerous new state in the mid-twentieth century. Second, it gets the Anthropocene right in human terms, bringing together a range of leading authors to explore, in fiction and non-fiction, our deep past, global conquest, inequality, nuclear disasters, and space travel. Finally, this landmark collection presents what hope might look like in this seemingly hopeless situation, proposing new political forms and mutualistic cities. 'Right' in this book means being as accurate as possible in describing the physical phenomenon of the Anthropocene; as balanced as possible in weighing the complex human developments, some willed and some unintended, that led to this predicament; and as just as possible in envisioning potential futures.

#cc

[azdoine]

hot take: humans should literally not exist. could birds create a holocaust? no. they cannot enact that kind of cruelty, and so they cannot experience that sort of suffering. if we can wring joy or kindness from this existence, great, but we're creatures wired for evil, taking over the planet and killing everyone else- all the animals capable of love and enjoyment but not of our depth of cruelty. voluntary human extinction. really truly.

idk, i guess you were prepared to hear this answer, but i'm not feeling it. the idea that the anthropocene human order is fundamentally distinct or unique in the greater biosphere is a key pillar of the rhetoric most people use to justify acts like animal cruelty and environmental extraction - approaching the great problem of evil and suffering in the world while still being informed by the self-serving propaganda and culture of an empire leads to some confused places.

b/c consequentially speaking humanity is just one offender in a greater abattoir of pain and carnage. voluntary human extinction won't stop billions upon billions of animals from ripping into one another for food or starving to death for the lack of it. it won't stop an entire ecosystem of parasites who have to prey on other creatures from within just to reproduce, planting their young within the living and hollowing them out even to the point of undeath. it certainly won't stop the stranglehold of infection and disease that follows every animal on earth to the grave and drives them mad with fevers and worse.

if you want to argue from virtue ethics then that's on somewhat stronger ground, but i just can't bring myself to believe that sadism and cruelty are a uniquely human phenomenon, either. they're just extensions of play behaviors and emotions to domains of life like predation and dominance contests. life, the biosphere, is casually brutal, and if humans are special in any respect it's only in having the metacognition to reflect on that.

i don't think there are any easy one-step solutions to the problem of evil short of total biosphere extinction. and that's even less going to happen than voluntary human extinction is

[sciencelaboratory]

A new way to fight Lyme Disease: Prescribed fire

Tuesday December 5th, 2023

Pinhead-sized parasites might seem to have a remote connection to landscape-changing forest fires. But tick-borne diseases such as Lyme Disease add up to a major and growing health problem. As many as 60,000 cases are reported in a year in the U.S. Such planet-changing forces as global warming are thought to be contributing to the problem, as rising temperatures make more places hospitable for ticks.

When Europeans arrived in North America, eastern forests tended to be spacious, airy landscapes filled with widely spaced pine, oak and chestnut trees. Frequent low-intensity fires set by lightning and indigenous peoples burned off fallen leaves, debris and underbrush.

Such a landscape could pose problems for ticks, who thrive in moist environments with moderate temperatures and lots of underbrush, which they can climb to latch onto passing victims. These forests of old were drier and less overgrown and would have been hotter in the summer and colder in the winter when there was less vegetation to act as insulation, the scientists reported in a recent edition of Ecological Applications.

Tick numbers might have fallen at first as Europeans pushed indigenous inhabitants out of eastern forests. That’s because many of the forests were felled for timber and fuel. But starting in the 20th century, two things happened that would reverse this trend. Eastern forests began to regrow as people left their farms for cities and switched from wood to other fuels such as coal. And land management agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service adopted a policy of extinguishing all wildfires.

Those changes helped created forests that have more built-up detritus, more bushes, and more dense tree canopies. Scientists have a fancy word for this: mesophication. For the purposes of the new research, a better term might be “tick heaven.”

Fire could help reverse this phenomenon, Gallagher and his colleagues argue. They point to past studies, such as an experiment in Georgia and Florida that showed tick numbers fell in parts of a forest that were burned.

Source: Cornwall, Warren. “A New Way to Fight Lyme Disease: Prescribed Fire.” Anthropocene, 26 Oct. 2022, www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2022/10/a-new-way-to-fight-lyme-disease-forest-fires/.

#lyme disease #science

[lost-lycaon]

Watership Down (1979) Film review

Cinema is an empathy machine, famously noted by Roger Ebert, as an audience is confronted with a perspective that may be utterly alien to their own. Over time an understanding is created, arguably the greatest possible goal of art. The natural world is in desperate need for that understanding, given its progressive destruction in an era of climate change, habitat degradation, and the mass extinction of the anthropocene. This is a heavy start to a review of a film about rabbits, but empathy must start somewhere. For me, Watership Down was a gateway to a greater understanding, and an appreciation for the wild.

Beginning life as a series of stories Richard Adams told to his daughters on long car trips, it became a bestseller and cultural phenomenon that was adapted into an animated film. Though there have been stories about animals since before recorded history, this one was unique in terms of being entirely from the perspective of an animal, living in the real world devoid of fantastical elements. When you see through the eyes of a rabbit, you are thrust into the food chain, forced to consider when you may continue eating, and when to flee for your life chased by a Thousand Enemies.

The rabbits are beset on all sides, by carnivores stalking them on the forest edge, raptors impaling them on the wing, and dogs chasing through fields. Being social creatures, there is intense competition within warrens, and without from more powerful groups like Efrafa, led by the aggressive and military-minded General Woundwort. Their greatest enemy is that implacable primate known as Man, ever busy on inexplicable tasks driving their Rhududus, firing guns, and on occasion slaughtering entire warrens en masse to erect shopping centres.

Fangs glisten and blood flows, and the audience is compelled to grasp just how dangerous surviving in the wild can be. To live day to day without expectation is utterly alien to humanity, with our insurance policies and lawsuits at the ready should the unexpected occur. With our abnormally extended lifespans, we are no longer taught how to cope with death, and so we are unable to comprehend the deaths of individuals, and certainly not the extinctions of entire species. Watching a rabbit torn open, blood flooding the dirt of an underground chamber is bracing, but pulls us headlong into a hazardous world.

The rabbits of Watership Down, led by Hazel, his clairvoyant half brother Fiver, the bruiser Bigwig, clever Blackberry, and storyteller Dandelion fight their way through hostile territory to establish a new home on a high Down where people never come. Encountering Cowslip and being invited into a warren supplied with food appears to be a kindness, but the area is snared, teaching them the danger of losing wild instincts. Woundwort provides the rabbits with their most lethal test, as he exacts vengeance on their attempts to help does escape the Efrafa warren. In the end they fight for survival, using brawn and brains to find a solution while an indifferent god watches them all.

This notion of living ever on the edge of death in an indifferent universe struck a chord with its audience, making the book a perennial bestseller decades after it was published. Its universal themes have led to interpretations relevant to any and all issues over the years in the human world. Though the book was not initially meant to function as allegory, much like The Lord of the Rings, there is a deeper truth to be found. Wild things are in the same struggle as humankind, and we share the same desire for survival against impossible odds. With that in mind, as we share the same speck of dust floating through the void, humans may consider sharing that speck with flora and fauna, and accepting humankind's place within that wild.

#watership down #wildlife film #film review

[garudabluffs]

Our 'Scorched Planet' is getting hotter, and no one is immune to rising temperatures

July 3 and July 4, 2023, were on record as the hottest days on Earth for global average.

Our 'Scorched Planet' is getting hotter, and no one is immune to rising temperatures July 12, 2023

"...we have these extreme heat events that are going beyond the boundaries of what anyone anticipated. And one of the questions that I explore in the book is, you know, given just the amount of CO2 that is in the atmosphere now and just, like, where we are today, how hot can it get? I mean, I live in Austin, Texas. It was - you know, it was - we've had heat indexes of 120 degrees here in Texas in the last couple of weeks. You know, could it get to 130? I mean, no one can say, you know, for sure about that. We don't know. Scientists don't know, like, even how hot it can get right now, never mind if we continue burning fossil fuels and add more CO2 to the atmosphere."

"And we know, you know, as - with as much certainty as we understand gravity, that when we burn fossil fuels and put CO2 into the atmosphere, it heats things up. But how fast that happens, what the actual kind of cascading effects of that will be are still very, very unclear. And so the big idea here is that we are not going back to where we were, no matter what we do. We are moving into a different world, and we need to grasp that idea."

"And, you know, one example of that is if you tried to quantify how much heat that is absorbed by the oceans every day just from our warming planet, it's the equivalent of three nuclear bombs every second. I mean, it's hard to bend your mind around that, but it's true. And it goes to a really complicated and important point about this whole conversation, which is how difficult it is to get our minds around, not just the climate crisis more broadly, but even just the impacts of heat and what that means and how much - how big and how powerful this system is that we're messing with."

"The problem is - as far as climate change goes - the problem is too many rich people with highly consumptive habits."

36-Minute Listen READ MORE Transcript https://www.npr.org/2023/07/12/1187038601/our-scorched-planet-is-getting-hotter-and-no-one-is-immune-to-rising-temperature

Scientists call lake in Canada the Anthropocene ‘poster child’ Jul. 12, 2023

A team of scientists say humans have changed the planet so dramatically, that we have created a new geological era on Earth — called the Anthropocene. That team spent years trying to find where a place on Earth best exemplifies this phenomenon. They decided on a lake in Southern Ontario in Canada. The World's host Marco Werman discusses this decision with Francine McCarthy, a professor of Earth science at Brock University in Canada, who is part of the international Anthropocene Working Group.

LISTEN 4:10 https://theworld.org/media/2023-07-12/scientists-call-lake-canada-anthropocene-poster-child

Scientists say new epoch marked by human impact — the Anthropocene — began in 1950s JULY 12,2023

"If you know your Greek tragedies you know power, hubris, and tragedy go hand in hand," said Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes, a working group member. "If we don't address the harmful aspects of human activities, most obviously disruptive climate change, we are headed for tragedy."

READ MORE https://www.ijpr.org/npr-news/npr-news/2023-07-11/scientists-say-new-epoch-marked-by-human-impact-the-anthropocene-began-in-1950s

#extreme heat #Anthropocene

[siriuslygrimm]

Appraised Anthropocene

#BOOKREVIEW - Appraised Anthropocene - #TheAnthropoceneReviewed #blog

The collection of personal essays that rotate between humorous and thought-provoking contained with The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green explores aspects of the human-centered planet on which we reside, ranging from media, scientific advancements or phenomenon, sports, consumer goods, and technology, while offering and reviewing some interesting facts about the topic at hand to ground and…

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#book #book review #john green #reading #review #the anthropocene reviewed

[sharpened--edges]

Within geology, the Anthropocene has generated an impassioned debate concerning its status and chronology, with early efforts dating it to around 1800 with industrialization and the combustion of fossil fuels in England. Likewise, many narratives date with urbanization and proletarianization. Others have proposed that it began in 1610 with the genocide of Native peoples in the Americas while more recently, the “Great Acceleration” has taken precedence, with the Anthropocene Working Group calling for the beginning of the formalization process. Each of these Anthropocene periodizations is important in their own right, and such attempts to measure and demarcate humanity’s stratigraphic impact birthed the important study of technofossils, implicating a wide variety of phenomenon, including the Columbian cataclysm, the first atomic bombs, the proliferation of plastiglomerates, and the settling of soot in some of the world’s most pristine environments. Yet insofar as these proposed dates seek an origin, asking when it began, how long it may last, and outline appropriate metrics, they do not fully capture the strangeness, disruption and temporal transformation of the Anthropocene as phenomenon. As cultural theorist Daniel Hartley has noted in an insightful essay, “the temporality of the Anthropocene as a periodizing category is bizarre … shifting as it does between the present, a retroactively posited past and an imagined future” [“Against the Anthropocene”]. What if this bizarre temporality—the bizarre temporality of our present—is what makes the Anthropocene so powerful both as a conceptual lens and as a historical moment?

Stephanie Wakefield, Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space (Open Humanities Press, 2020), p. 25.

#stephanie wakefield #anthropocene

[carnegiemuseumnaturalhistory]

Cities are Not Biological Deserts

by Nicole Heller

Cities are increasingly important in organizing the experience of people and their interactions with nature. In 1950 there were 2.5 billion people on Earth and 30% lived in cities. Today, there are 7.5 billion people and 55% live in cities. By 2050, there will be an estimated 9.5 billion and 68% will live in cities.

Generally, cities are not good places for other critters to live. The abundance of pavement, buildings, traffic, pollution, pesticides, herbicides, and other hazards make cities really hard places for plants and animals to survive and breed. From a conservation science perspective, cities have long been considered dead spaces, or biological deserts. But more recently researchers are paying more attention to nature in cities. One reason for their interest involves people’s need for nature. Study after study confirms the basic biophilia hypothesis, that people want to associate with nature; they are happier and healthier when they are near plants and animals in their daily lives.

Berlin is recognized as a city that works for people and biodiversity due to its high percentage of green space, variety of habitats, and thoughtful regional planning. Photo by Filipe Varela on Unsplash.

Cities have also drawn the attention of researchers because of some really exciting things are happening within their limits, such as growing populations of peregrine falcons , sightings of rare birds using cities parks during annual migrations, and even discoveries of new species not previously known to science. While cities are overall negative for biodiversity, recent research findings raise important questions: Can human cities be good for non-humans too? Can urban wildlife include a broader spectrum of creatures beyond the common city-adapted species like European sparrows, pigeons, and black rats? What about species special or unique to the regions in which cities are located? How can we make cities work for biodiversity?

A few years ago I posed these questions along with colleagues from the Resilient Landscape program at the San Francisco Estuary Institute. We wanted to learn if there were general lessons that could be distilled from recent and ongoing research projects about what kinds of species can benefit from cities and if so how might city planners utilize this information to prioritize actions that would help cities contribute positively to the resilience of regional biodiversity, or at least do more to diminish the negative impacts.

Earlier this year, some of our findings were published open source in the journal Bioscience, The Biological Deserts Fallacy: Cities in Their Landscapes Contribute More than We Think to Regional Biodiversity, by Erica N Spotswood, Erin E Beller, Robin Grossinger, J Letitia Grenier, Nicole E Heller, Myla F J Aronson.

The study, which includes citations from dozens of regional research projects around the world, identifies five pathways by which cities can help regional biodiversity. “Cities can benefit some species by releasing them from threats in the larger landscape, increasing regional habitat heterogeneity, acting as migratory stopovers, enhancing regional genetic diversity and providing selective forces for species to adapt to future conditions under climate change (e.g., a phenomenon we are calling preadapting species to climate change), and enabling and bolstering public engage­ment and stewardship.”

Each of these pathways is described in greater detail in the study. Four categories of species commonly utilize urban habitat, with varying degrees of success, and the study explores examples of how specific species in specific places demonstrate these five pathways.

Overall, the role of cities in supporting landscape-scale biodiversity is an understudied area of research. As cities continue to grow in number and size, human populations rise, and climate change continues, paying attention to the experience of other critters, and how we can make space for them to survive and thrive in anthropogenic habitats, will be more important than ever. This research identifies opportunities to reconcile cities with biodiversity. Opportunities exist to learn more about the unique resources that cities can provide, which specific types of species can take advantage of these resources, and how this information can be incorporated into city plans for parks and green spaces. The San Francisco Estuary Institute has begun this applied work in their report Making Nature’s City, which presents a science-based framework for increasing biodiversity in cities.

What excites me are possibilities if we really try. For the most part cities have been developed with little or no concern for biodiversity. Often people think that humans and nature just can’t coexist. What if city planners and conservation professionals start applying these lessons from ecology more broadly and work together with citizens to deliberately steward biodiversity in cities? How abundant and rich with diverse life could cities become? How happy would that make humans? I wonder. And I am hopeful.

If you are interested in urban nature, you can help to measure its diversity by participating in the museum’s upcoming City Nature Challenge. You never know what you may find in our city. Our combined observations, coupled with the museum’s collections and records, will provide important benchmarks to help track how local species are doing as the region keeps growing and changing in the 21st century.

Full Article Citation

The Biological Deserts Fallacy: Cities in Their Landscapes Contribute More than We Think to Regional Biodiversity By ERICA N. SPOTSWOOD , ERIN E. BELLER, ROBIN GROSSINGER, J. LETITIA GRENIER, NICOLE E. HELLER, AND MYLA F. J. ARONSON

BioScience, Volume 71, Issue 2, February 2021, Pages 148–160, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa155

Nicole Heller is Curator of Anthropocene Studies at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences working at the museum.

#Carnegie Museum of Natural History #Anthropocene #Biodiversity #Urban nature #City Nature Challenge #City Life #Urban living

[punchyfeeley]

For I long time I hadn’t encountered any literature or media that felt familiar and honest about illness and pain as I have experienced it. Everything I read and saw felt glorified or romanticized or just... flase. It’s disability pride month and to say I feel proud would be a lie. I’m not ashamed, but I am afraid and uncertain and constantly struggling. I thought it may be helpful for some other disabled folks to have access to some literature that, at least for me, feels true about the experience of pain and illness.

From Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill:

“strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to tooth-ache. But no”

“Finally, among the drawbacks of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language.  English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.  It has all grown one way.  The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.  There is nothing ready made for him.  He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.  Probably it will be something laughable.”

Susan Sontag’s Disease as Political Metaphor:

Sontag also has a book called AIDS and its Metaphors

“Widely believed psychological theories of disease assign to the ill the ultimate responsibility both for falling ill and for getting well.”

“Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.”

This one is by far the one that full body slammed me in the chest the hardest- The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry

“many people's experience of the medical community would bear out the opposite conclusion, the conclusion that physicians do not trust (hence, hear) the human voice, that they in effect perceive the voice of the patient as an "unreliable narrator" of bodily events, a voice which must be bypassed as quickly as possible so that they can get around and behind it to the physical events themselves. But if the only external sign of the felt- experience of pain (for which there is no alteration in the blood count, no shadow on the X ray, no pattern on the CAT scan) is the patient's verbal report (however itself inadequate), then to bypass the voice is to bypass the bodily event, to bypass the patient, to bypass the person in pain. Thus the reality of a patient's X-rayable cancer may be believed-in but the accompanying pain disbelieved and the pain medication underprescribed. Medical contexts, like all other contexts Of human experience, provide in stances oft the alarming phenomenon noted earlier: to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt. (The doubt of other persons, here as elsewhere, amplifies the suffering of those already in pain.”

“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”

Finally, there is the “Hawaiian Pizza and Viral Meningitis” episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed. I’ve linked the podcast episode, but it also is available in book form. All three of the previous works are quoted within the pod, but it really is worth it to go ahead and read the entirety of them. Anyway here are my favorite quotes from the episode:

 “I had a headache that made it impossible to have anything else. My head didn’t hurt so much as my self had been rendered inert by the pain in my head.”

“When I had the headache, I felt certain I would have it forever. The pain of each moment was terrible, but what really made me despair was the knowledge that in the next moment, and the next, the pain would still be there.”

“ When I was sick, people would say to me, ‘At least you’re getting a break from all that work,’ as if I wanted a break from my work, or they’d say, ‘At least you’ll make a full recovery,’ as if now was not the only moment that the pain allowed me to live in. I know they were trying to tell me a story that made sense, but it doesn’t work if the story isn’t true. And when we tell those stories to people in chronic pain, or those living with incurable illness, so often we end up minimizing their experience. We end up expressing our doubt in the face of their certainty, which only compounds the extent to which pain separates the person experiencing it from the wider social order. The challenge and responsibility of personhood, it seems to me, is to recognize personhood in others—to listen to others’ pain and take it seriously, even when you yourself cannot feel it. And that, I think, really does separate human life from the quasi-life of an enterovirus.”

I hope these feel true and like relief to others and please feel free to drop your own recommendations :)

#disability #disability pride #chronic illness #chronic pain #ableism #dysautonomia #spoonie #long post

[stdio2020]

Rosi Braidotti “Posthuman Knowledge”

In this lecture Braidottie establishes that the critique of the universal begins not with the postmodernist thinkers but is established and follows parallels to the idea of humanism itself. She confronts the ongoing fixation with defining the term ‘human’ as a process of definition by negation e.g. to be human is to be man. man is not woman, man is not animal, man is not nature. And that really the term only serves to index an axis of power. 

Braidotti postulates a kind of convergence she describes as the Posthuman Convergence Phenomenon: Which is the meeting of post humanism (the critique of man) and post anthropocentrism (the critique of the Anthropos, the idea of species supremacy in which aside from all sociological variables the species grants itself access to every living organism and body)

these two ideas run parallels but don't necessarily intertwine until the convergence which can be seen as a set of interrelations that zig zag, plateau. a nomadic set of events that are carried by the two main events that characterize historicity; the fourth industrial revolution, the knowledge economy AKA cognitive capitalism and on the other hand the sixth extinction, the death of the species, and of the planet. 

“These two events are happening simultaneously, it is not as though we have climate change on Monday and AI and synthetic biology on Tuesday. How do we think about this simultaneity of boom and bust on this scale, multi scale or multi dimensional is the Post Human challenge. It is causing a great deal of panic on the one hand and excitement on the other. These are really the best of times and the worst of times” 

^^This relates to by previous writing about the confusion and contradiction in expression throughout by work caught between optimism and cynicism, irony and sincerity

How to think about such dissonant almost opposite events demands skills of endurance, of imagination, and of transversal connectivity. Transversality is the key term here, you need to draw lines across events that are not at all parallels. the future is in the transversality of almost everything. 

We now need to look at these two phenomena, look at the chain of socialogical, theoretical, political effects that they are causing and draw a course of navigation that provides something productive, propositional to offer. In saying ‘we’ is unitary, we needs to be grounded according to the politics of imminence, grounded in feminism, politics of locations, anti racism, anti facism, indigenous epistemology, perspectives. These are ways that we can ground ourselves against universalism without falling into Relevatism. ‘We’ is not one in the same but ‘we’ are all in the posthuman convergence together. Perspectivsm requires your own analysis of your point of entry. 

Lets do away with the Anthropocene, it has become an Anthropos meme, gone berserk. It is too fluid and misses the point of the convergence effect, that we not only need to pay attention to the extinction, the end, but also the incredible period of growth and amazing scientific revolutions with all the consequences that it entails. 

“Swinging moods is an element of the Anthropocentric landscape. An imaginary disaster that the Hollywood machine pumps out. There is really money in extinction, money in catastrophe. and it is always the same template; White man, dog, rifle, pickup truck. This is a format that codes the social imagining of disaster that prevents us from looking forward at all the other elements of a  complex effective landscape.” We cant do much with the Anthropocene but we take note of the mood, the anxiety, the fear. The melancholia, the “why bother”

Enter the discussion via a critique of the necro political character of cognitive capitalism. The wealth disparity at a time like this causes an enormous ammount of problems, but lets not be sentimental about this, lets take stock of the contradictions of the fourth industrial resolution and the sixth extinction. We owe it to our intelligence to celebrate our technological advancements. 

COGNITIVE CAPITALISM

Cognitive and bio-genetic advanced capitalism and media and information technologies. Capital today = the informational power of living matter itself, its immanent qualities and self organizing capabilities. Profits generated from scientific and economic comprehension of all that lives. re. ‘Bio-piracy’(Shiva, 1997) a system that profits from all living this (this includes death, the necro political) - amongst this, great things are happening, the post human convergence and critical thinking is about this oscillating of ‘yes but’

The posthuman is an indicator of our historicity, and also a navigational tool (as Deleuze would say, a conceptual persona) that helps us illuminate what is happening to us, where we are at. Foucault’s question “what kind of subjects are we becoming?”

Posthuman scholarship has a tremendous focus on the non academic, the aesthetic, design and media for knowledge production. 

The queer, feminist, racial, postcolonial, film, art, subaltern studies do the work of exposing the connection between rationality and violence, reason and exclusion. Theses are ways of showing the knowledge that is being produced by the voices of the excluded. 

The critical posthumanities no longer assume that the knowing subject is homo universalis nor Anthropos but rather a complex embodied and embedded non unitary but relational affective transversal subjects collaboratively linked to a material web of human and non human agents. 

Collaborative morality is the ethics we get from Spinoza. Great introductory research into the kinds of scholarship that is born out of posthumanist thought 

[retentionalfinitude2]

“Considering cement production for a moment longer may help us press upon you what a fundamental role [cement has] played in this geological period marking your species’ impact on the planet. Via cement production alone, we already contribute between 5 and 10 percent of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide may be invisible to the naked eye, but we add more to the earth’s atmosphere than global air transport does. In fact, with one ton of cement per person per year being produced, each ton is releasing up to a ton of carbon dioxide that is warming this planet. Current consumption rates of concrete are only set to rise, perhaps doubling in the next thirty years. Despite this, the stories of our production, use, and impact are not as widely recounted as they could be, considering our many entanglements with you. We are, in fact, a relatively unexplored icon of this era. If the Anthropocene is a register of humanity’s reshaping of the earth, then we are a ubiquitous, almost omnipresent manifestation of this phenomenon.” --Rachel Harkness, Christian Simonetti, and Judith Winter, “Concretes Speak: A Play in One Act,” Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene

Image: Tim Flach, Concretes