Tag Archive for: Anthropocene

The anthropogenic transformations in the Unesco Chair Call for the 10WEEC

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The anthropogenic transformations of ecosystems called Anthropocene is forcing scientists to recognize not only the inextricable interfusion of nature and human society (Malm and Hornborg, 2014), but also the fact that it is becoming a perfect marker and multiplier of differences and inequalities. The appropriation of nature under current capitalism conditions, which is at the core of the current geological troubles, is entailing some correlated processes such as the intensification of the processes of labour’s exploitation, the dispossession of peasants’ lands, the indiscriminate extraction of raw materials, and the racialization of all these processes (With the notion of racialization, we mean the process by which different groups or clusters of people are discriminated in some way because of their natural characters – skin color, gender, age – or of cultural features that are naturalized and crystallized – religion, language, dressing).
All this implies a radical fragmentation of the relationship between humans, and between humans and nature. These dynamics reveal a double process: on the one hand we are witnessing deep socio-ecological changes of food, energy, land, water, and raw materials regimes implying wide processes of dispossession, expulsion, and racialization. On the other hand, we are observing an imperious use of racist speeches, claims, public measures and violent practices aimed to galvanize the racial and racist spirit of European and American white populations against migrants and refugees driven by the phenomena formerly recalled.

by Dario Padovan
Unesco Chair in Sustainable Development and Territory Promotion – University of Torino – Italy

WEEC2019, new Call: Patterns of Complexity in an Anthropocene Environmental Curriculum

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We want to analyze how an experimental curriculum in Environmental Education in the era of Anthropocene requires a multi-disciplinary and a multi-scale approach. Through the presentation of examples and case studies, we intend to show how an environmental thinking framework has to include simultaneously:
– a focus on local approach and on the implementation of small scale interventions, aimed at empowering small agents and local minorities;
– a focus on the realization of macro actions, planned in top-down perspective, and effective on a global scale.
Such capability of upscaling and downscaling within the same thinking framework characterizes the patterns of the theory of complexity, in particular reflecting self-similarities and recursive behaviors presented by multiscale systems. Environmental education in fact reveals itself as a complex topic, where multiple patterns of specific localities and macro complexities coexist and converge.
At the same time, the time frame of the Anthropocene we are supposedly living in calls for a strong multidisciplinary approach. No methodology or traditional field of research alone can make sense of the Anthropocene multiple environmental controversies. Anthropocene is both a fully natural and fully cultural construct.
The practice of ethnography typical of anthropological research is particularly fitted to identify and highlight small-scale contexts, and to pinpoint the role of local actors, minority groups and marginal societies, but it shows some limitations when confronted to quantitative information and big data, that are at the basis of all the environmental knowledge in the making. A productive pattern for an Anthropocene Environmental Curriculum has to be able to embrace heterogeneous methodologies and knowledge sources, and at the same time build the epistemological texture where uneven data can dialogue and develop.
The thematic cluster calls for papers that describe local and global scale case studies, used profitably in Environmental Education, which rely on and exemplify multi-scale thinking frameworks and multi-disciplinary approaches.

Call proposed by:
Elena Bougleux – University of Bergamo, elena.bougleux@unibg.it
Jennifer Wells – CIIS San Francisco, jwells@ciis.edu

Trees around literature: a call

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“I’m interested in the particularity of each Tree – it’s ‘thisness’ (haecceitas)”, claims Canadian land-artist, photographer, and poet Marlene Creates, thus hinting both at the specificity of each singular tree and at the uniqueness of certain species at different latitudes. Literature, among other arts, such as film, photography, the fine arts, is one of those privileged terrains where Trees definitely enter our field of vision, our epistemic knowledge, our sensorial experience. In literary and artistic productions, Trees are ethically and aesthetically called into question (evoked, invoked, iconized, prized, iven attacked), with the aim to identify, describe, or allegorize their singularities and specificities, or to pay homage to their material, literal, cultural, ethnic, and symbolic meaning through a variety of textualities, including the new media.
Similarly, pioneering forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni reminds us that in order to be fully understood and appreciated Trees should be looked at in multiple ways, thus fostering the interplay of science and the humanities. Intertwining the symbolic with the personal, the scientific with the spiritual, the mythic with the functional, Nadkarni invites us to consider a Tree as axis mundi, an imaginary line that connects Earth and Sky, but also the individual with the communal. Trees, in fact, are at once single entities and part of a wider community and environment that secretly communicate with each other (Wohlleben 2016, Mancuso 2017) through their roots and a fungal network nicknamed Wood Wide Web.
Silently and invisibly, trees share information, register pain, learn things, and even protect themselves and each other to the point of becoming arboreal cybercrimes by hijacking the whole system and sabotaging their rivals. Finally, Trees are sites of naturecultural memory: their rings record generations of human and nonhuman encounters and narrations, together with their mutual interference in the shaping of our identities.

The aim of this one-day international and interdisciplinary colloquium is to  attract scholars, artists, experts in various fields to explore and assess the presence, value, and stance of Trees and Tree-like epistemic structures (arborescence vs ryzome, tree-shaped flows) in the Anthropocene.
It is intended that selected papers will be developed as chapters for an international publication.
Proposals from any discipline are invited and may address but are not limited to the following topics:
– Trees and their representations in literatures and the arts
– Metamorphoses of humans and non-humans into trees
– New (invented/fantastic) species vs extinctions of Trees
– Trees and identity, ethnicity, nationality

Politics, Ecology and Society in the Anthropocene

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The XII National Conference of Environmental Sociologists in Italy, titled “Politics, Ecology and Society in the Anthropocene”, will be held on 26 and 27 September 2019, at the University of Salerno.
The Conference will be focused on the organization and reorganization of political, social, and ecological relations within the era that some scholars define as Anthropocene.
At the same time, this concept will be critically considered. On the one hand, it is recognized the degree of uncertainty that the general scientific debate highlights about this concept, developing a deep critique. On the other, it is highlighted the geographical, social and political homogeneity implied by this concept, as it places in the background the inequalities which characterize the socio-ecological relations over time – for example those linked to colonial and neocolonial, gender, and human and extra-human natures relations.
The concept of Anthropocene marks a field in movement, both from the point of view of the quality of socio-ecological relationships, and from the point of view of the epistemological and methodological aspects that drive research and knowledge production.
This turbulence is theoretically and empirically important, involving the intertwining of
politics, society and ecology in all the areas of socio-ecological relationships that are
considered relevant.
On this basis and in consideration of the multiplicity of  approaches and research fields that traditionally characterize Environmental Sociology in Italy, a call for panels is opened, in order to organize the Conference in a series of sessions.

We invite all interested scholars to submit proposals for thematic sessions by 25 January 2019, specifying the following contents:
1) Panel title; 2) name or names of organizers; 3) three keywords; 4) an abstract to present panel aims (max 3,000 characters).
Proposals can be submitted in Italian, Spanish, or English, sending them to the following e-mail address: 12congresso.sociologiambiente@gmail.com.

Panel proposals will be evaluated and published by 5 February 2019, followed by a call for Conference presentations until submission deadline (25 April 2019). Presentations (title, proponents, 3 keywords, and a 3,000 characters abstract) will be sent both to the Conference address (12congresso.sociologiambiente@gmail.com) and the thematic session organizers.
Accepted presentations will be notified by 15 May 2019. Conference program will be published by 30 May 2019.

Conference Scientific committee: Alfredo Agustoni, Aurelio Angelini, Marco Castrignanò, Enrico Ercole, Alfredo Mela, Giorgio Osti, Luigi Pellizzoni, Lauro Struffi, Enrico M. Tacchi, Anna Maria Zaccaria. Local Conference organizer: Gennaro Avallone

Facebook Conference page

Madrid, Reinventing the horizon: science and art in the face of climate change

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Reinventing the horizon, that’s the title of the international symposium organised in Madrid,  April 18-19 by the Fundacion Ramon Areces .

A symposium to connect together science and art in a new interpretation of climate change. In the scenario of environmental destruction and uncertainty, it is essential to reinvent a horizon of hope. Humanity is now entering a new unwanted geological period – the Anthropocene – which is characterized by the fact that human beings are changing the vital cycle of the planet, altering its natural variability. Our species has become a force capable of changing some ecological processes, in an escalation of the primacy of cultural evolution over biological evolution.

Reinventing the horizon supposes co-evolving with nature and cooperating in terms of equity with the rest of the human species. But also recognizing ourselves as beings who dream, who imagine a sustainable future, capable of devising and carrying out the great revolution of change towards sustainability. We need ways of life in which the future is seen as a space of good living for all human species and respect for the rest of the world both living and no living. We need a hope that is not simply empty optimism but a commitment to the enormous creative capacity of the human being. A capacity that, as President Kennedy once said, is able to face every challenge.

The responsibility of scientists and artists is to generate new models of life in line with the Sustainable Development Goals promulgated by the United Nations. Thera are numerous and simultaneous drivers of global change: global warming, transformations in land uses, overexploitation of resources …, which has brought with it the destruction of ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity.

It becomes fundamental to seek solutions and creative proposals that allow us to glimpse new ways of organizing personal and collective life, respectful of the ecological integrity, the well-being of humanity as a whole and the dignity of every human being as unique and unrepeatable.

Among these problems, we have focused on human-induced climate change by its status as an epitome that synthesizes and expresses the irreversibility of some of these environmental phenomena of anthropocentric origin.  We have already started non-return processes, such as global warming, the melting of the Arctic, the rise in sea level … Processes that demand decisive action by the governments of the world to tackle the causes that generate them, mitigating its consequences and creating mechanisms of adaptation to the new historical circumstances that, in the present and in the immediate future, humanity must face.

What kind of knowledge is needed to face the enormous challenges we face? How to interpret the complex reality of a challenge that is new in the history of humanity? What role does Science play? And the Art, what clues can it give us?

With this philosophy, the Symposium wants to create a transdisciplinary space in which scientific analysis and artistic considerations converge will be able to articulate information, dialogue, imagination and creativity that are needed for the change, from the confidence in the innovative capacity of the human being. According to the words of the frontrunners, the future is on the way. Our responsibility is enormous. We are the first generation that is aware of this problem and perhaps the last one with capacity and time to solve it.

Mario Salomone, Secretary General of the WEEC Network, speaks on Thursday, 19. the title of his speech is Imagination and creativity in the Anthropocene: the role of education and art

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