North America In The Anthropocene

North America in the Anthropocene maintains that human beings have entered a new historical epoch--the Anthropocene--in which our own economic activity has reached such planetary scale and power that we can no longer count on Earth's natural systems and functions to absorb negative human impacts on landscape and biodiversity. Whether we like it or not, we have to assume responsibility for staying within Earth-system boundaries. Climate stability is only one of those boundaries, but it is a critical one. This book attempts to address the question of why, when we clearly know the enormous risks we face, we are still not doing what is necessary to prevent climate disaster. The author introduces contemporary thinking by leading philosophers, ethicists and social scientists who do not believe that more information and greater individual thoughtfulness are necessarily going to be adequate to penetrate the thick skin of the status quo when it comes to addressing the climate threat.

This book provides a conceptually organized framework to understand the phenomenon of biological invasions at the Anthropocene global scale. Most advances toward that aim have been provided from North American and European researchers, with fewer contributions from Australia and South Africa. Here we fill the void from the Neotropics, focusing on the research experience in South American countries, with a strong emphasis on Argentina and Chile. The text is divided into two parts: The first half comprises self-contained chapters, providing a conceptual, bibliographic and empirical foundation in the field of invasion biology, from an Anthropocene perspective. The second half reviews the ecology, biogeography, and local impacts in South America of exotic species groups (European rabbit, Eurasian wild boar, Canadian beaver, North American mink, and Holarctic freshwater fishes), which are shown to be useful models for case studies of global relevance.

In the first book devoted exclusively to the ecopoetics of the twenty-first century, Lynn Keller examines poetry of what she terms the "self-conscious Anthropocene," a period in which there is widespread awareness of the scale and severity of human effects on the planet. Recomposing Ecopoetics analyzes work written since the year 2000 by thirteen North American poets--including Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Ed Roberson, and Jena Osman--all of whom push the bounds of literary convention as they seek forms and language adequate to complex environmental problems. Drawing as often on linguistic experimentalism as on traditional literary resources, these poets respond to environments transformed by people and take "nature" to be a far more inclusive and culturally imbricated category than conventional nature poetry does. This interdisciplinary study not only brings cutting-edge work in ecocriticism to bear on a diverse archive of contemporary environmental poetry; it also offers the environmental humanities new ways to understand the cultural and affective dimensions of the Anthropocene.

Earth now is dominated by both biogeophysical and anthropogenicprocesses, as represented in these two images from a simulation ofaerosols. Dust (red) from the Sahara sweeps west across theAtlantic Ocean. Sea salt (blue) rises into the atmosphere fromwinds over the North Atlantic and from a tropical cyclone in theIndian Ocean. Organic and black carbon (green) from biomass burningis notable over the Amazon and Southeast Asia. Plumes of sulfate(white) from fossil fuel burning are particularly prominent overnortheastern North America and East Asia. If present trends of dustemissions and fossil fuel burning continues in what we call theAnthropocene epoch, then we could experience high atmosphericCO2 levels leading to unusual warming rarely experiencedin Earth’s history. This book focuses on human influences onland, ocean, and the atmosphere, to determine if human activitiesare operating within or beyond the safe zones of our planet’sbiological, chemical, and physical systems. Volume highlights include: • Assessment of civic understanding of Earth and itsfuture • Understanding the role of undergraduate geoscience researchand community-driven research on the Anthropocene • Effective communication of science to a broader audiencethat would include the public, the K-12 science community, orpopulations underrepresented in the sciences • Public outreach on climate education, geoscience alliance,and scientific reasoning Future Earth is a valuable practical guide for scientistsfrom all disciplines including geoscientists, museum curators,science educators, and public policy makers. This volume was made possible with the support of the NationalScience Foundation through the National Center for Earth-surfaceDynamics (EAR-0120914) and the Future Earth Initiative(DRL-0741760). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions orrecommendations expressed in this publication are those of theauthor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NationalScience Foundation.

** Winner of Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2015 ** We live in epoch-making times. The changes we humans have made in recent decades have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.6 billion-year history. As a result, our planet is said to be crossing into the Anthropocene – the Age of Humans. Gaia Vince decided to travel the world at the start of this new age to see what life is really like for the people on the frontline of the planet we’ve made. From artificial glaciers in the Himalayas to painted mountains in Peru, electrified reefs in the Maldives to garbage islands in the Caribbean, Gaia found people doing the most extraordinary things to solve the problems that we ourselves have created. These stories show what the Anthropocene means for all of us – and they illuminate how we might engineer Earth for our future.

From Australia to North America, we need to rethink how our cities resist environmental change in the age of climate catastrophe.

This book offers the first systematic study of how the 'Anthropocene' is reported in mass media globally, drawing parallels between the use (or misuse) of the term and the media's attitude towards the associated issues of climate change and global warming. Identifying the potential dangers of the Anthropocene provides a useful path into a variety of issues that are often ignored, misrepresented, or sidelined by the media. These dangers are widely discussed in the social sciences, environmental humanities, and creative arts, and this book includes chapters on how the contributions of these disciplines are reported by the media. Our results suggest that the natural science and mass media establishments, and the business and political interests which underpin them, tend to lean towards optimistic reassurance (the 'good' Anthropocene), rather than pessimistic alarmist stories, in reporting the Anthropocene. In this volume, contributors explore how dangerous this 'neutralizing' of the Anthropocene is in undermining serious global action in the face of the potential existential risks confronting humanity. The book presents results from media in more than 100 countries in all major languages across the globe. It covers the reporting of key environmental issues, such as the impact of climate change and global warming on oceans, forests, soil, biodiversity, and the biosphere. We offer explanations for differences and similarities in how the media report the Anthropocene in different regions of the world. In doing so, the book argues that, though it is still controversial, the idea of the Anthropocene helps to concentrate minds and behaviour in confronting ongoing ecological (and Coronavirus) crises. The Anthropocene in Global Media will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, media and communication studies, and the environmental humanities, and all those who are concerned about the survival of humans on planet Earth.

This book is devoted to the Anthropocene, the period of unprecedented human impacts on Earth's environmental systems and illustrates how Geographers envision the concept of the Anthropocene.