Will Steffen et al., “Stratigraphic and Earth System Approaches to Defining the Anthropocene,” Earth’s Future 4 (2016), 324–45
And still they come. Actually, this paper by AWG members came out before the results of the vote on formalization, but I hadn’t had an opportunity to write about it until now. It’s another big overview paper. Continue reading “New Papers from the Anthropocene Working Group (part 4)”
This week’s major contribution to the discourse on the Anthropocene was a cartoon. If you haven’t already seen Monday’s XKCD, an annotated graph of global temperature since the Last Glacial Maximum, you haven’t really got the hang of the internet yet. Continue reading “XKCD on the Anthropocene”
In the first part of this review I worked through five of the seven chapters of Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Despite the various merits of some of those chapters, there was essentially nothing in them to justify the book’s claim to “diagnose the problems of Anthropocene thinking” from a politically radical point of view (a claim repeated in, for instance, this supportive review)
That leaves just two chapters, one by Eileen Crist and one by Jason Moore. Continue reading “A Change of Cene (part 2)”
The 2011 annual report of the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy included the following notification: “The [Anthropocene] Working Group has applied for funding to allow further discussion and networking, and is working to reach a consensus regarding formalisation by, it is hoped, the 2016 IGC [International Geological Congress].” “As if they had so much time and so little money!” sighed Bruno Latour. But then, he admitted, “geologists are used to taking their time.”
The 2016 IGC began in Brisbane on August 29th. The first day’s programme included a paper by Colin Waters, the working group’s secretary, called “The Anthropocene: overview of stratigraphical assessment to date.” The same panel also featured a paper by Stanley Finney, chair of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, on “The mistaken drive to define the ‘Anthropocene’ as an officially recognized unit of the Geologic Time Scale.”
On the same day, the University of Leicester published the results of a series of six votes among 35 members of the working group: Continue reading “The End of the Beginning”
Made Ground 