Week 11 - The Apocalyptic Anthropocene Flashcards
Identify, define, and summarize the Anthropocene.
Identify, define, and explain the central features and timeline of the Anthropocene.
Identify and recognize the central challenges (pros and cons) of the Anthropocene.
-The Anthropocene is a break from the Holocene.
-Anthropocene: marks a significant shift from natural forces, to human forces as the driver of change. (mostly due to improved technologies that led to the industrial revolution)
-Humans did have an impact on the environment during the Holocene, but not to the extent of the Anthropocene.
-The term “The Anthropocene Reviewed” is a phrase created and used by the writer and public intellectual, John Green.
John Green has created a podcast called The Anthropocene Reviewed
- geological term given to the current period, where humans have unprecedented control over fate of the environment and other species on the planet.
- first identified and named in 2000 by the chemist Dr. Paul Crutzen.
- describes a new period of human alteration of the environment and Earth, there is a debate over when it officially began
Pro - Since 1970, manufacturing jobs have lifted approximately 600 million people out
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of poverty, modern technologies can now feed and clothe more humans than ever before.
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Con - More people in the developing world are forced from traditional ways of life and
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into factory jobs with poor safety standards, long hours and measly wages. And a lot of
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the goods that they produce go overseas to enhance the standard of living of a prosperous
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and wealthy developed world. And while the ratio of impoverished to wealthy countries
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in 1820 was about 3:1, today it’s closer to 72:1. Standards of living may be increasing
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on average, but the wealth inequality gap is getting wider and wider.
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But pro - we have managed to harness a lot of energy, our use of coal and oil and nuclear
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power. These energy flows have allowed us to generate an astounding amount of complexity
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in our little corner of the universe and improved people’s standards of living.
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Yeah, but con - current modes of production rely heavily on non-renewable resources that
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are not great for the environment. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past twenty years,
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you will probably have heard of climate change and the potentially devastating effects it will have.
Pro - collective learning’s advances in medicine, agriculture and genetic engineering have in
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the past 200 years lowered the death rate and freed billions of people from the cycles
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of starvation and famine that affected agrarian civilizations.
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Con - the tremendous expansion of populations in India and China have created a severe problem
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for the infrastructures of those countries.
Add to this the likelihood that climate change will reduce the amount of arable cropland
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on the Earth by 10-25%
Identify the holocene
geological period spanning back approximately 12,000 years before present time (BPT).
Identify the central features of apocalyptic rhetoric and recognize how it has shaped human stories.
Fears over the ‘end of days’, that is apocalyptic rhetoric, have also been a mainstay of human stories since time immoral.
uses narrative to express an inherent sense of pessimism and the message that if humans don’t get their act together, and make a change, that it may precipitate the end of the world as we know it
Recognize the role of globalization in the creation, spread, and risks of infectious diseases.
The risk of diseases spreading from animals to humans is in fact the greatest when the animals concerned are endangered and in decline owing to trafficking and habitat destruction, a recent study found. The climate crisis and human population growth are “disease amplifiers”, according to the World Health
Organization.
Research on both SARS and zoonotic avian influenza identified infection spillover pathways that most often included ‘wet markets’ where live animals are frequently sold and slaughtered on site. In the case of zoonotic influenza, the spread of the virus to people was from poultry at live bird markets (i.e. wet market). For SARS, the initial spillover event occurred at a wet market containing wildlife when people were exposed to civets that were shedding the SARS coronavirus (Webster 2004). Although there has been work in trying to change wet markets (FAO 2015) and in some countries stop wet markets—especially where many species, including wildlife mix—this change has been difficult due to a range of social, economic and cultural factors
Identify and recognize the four possible future solutions outlined by Inayattullah & Black (2020) in the wake of the pandemic.
a global ban on wet markets and trade in wildlife
sensitivity to the issue that cross-cultural difficulties of telling specific nations and cultures what food they are permitted to harvest
better policies and interventions for infectious disease management
increased efforts to detect disease, even earlier, especially in areas of increased risk of emergence and disease spillover.
Recognize and identity the three recommendations and conclusions made by Inanattullah & Black (2020) in order to prevent another global pandemic.
first, a global ban on wet markets and trade in wildlife with real help to transition sellers so they are not impoverished
increased interest in detecting disease, even earlier, especially in areas of increased risk of emergence and disease spillover
increased investment in real prevention strategies that acknowledge that the majority of zoonotic pathogens have emerged as a result of changes to food production, agriculture, land use and contact with wildlife
Recognize the environmental contradictions and costs of air conditioning.
sheer irony to the fact that air conditioners cool our indoor spaces at the expense of a warming climate. As the climate warms, we will need more air conditioning to escape from the blistering heat that we have in fact contributed to.
Identify the central framing devices in the documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, including waste and plastic accumulation in the world’s waterways.
Make a list of the visuals you see, and then ask yourself: how is the Anthropocene represented visually by this documentary?
- fire, sparks,ashes
What are the consequences of human enacted change in the Anthropocene?
(refer to card 10)
Who are the people featured and what are they doing?
kenya - elephant tusk hunters
extraction - norlesk russia metal mining, metallurgy day
carrara, italy - marble
atacama desset, chile - lithium for EV batteries
terraforming
immerth, germany -hambach coal mine
bc - deforestation
lagos, nigeria
What are techno-fossils and the techno-sphere? Can you think of, or list, other examples of techno-fossils not provided in the documentary?
- techno-fossils - human created objects such as plastic, concrete, and aluminum that persist in biosphere and end up in the rock layers of the earth
- technosphere - aggregate of human created or altered material
List and identify the features of an empathic society.
act of seeing the world through another person’s, or creature’s, perspective. To empathize means to put yourself in another person’s shoes or mindset, to see things from their position in society by considering the challenges they might be facing, and also acknowledging the struggle and turmoil that may not be visible on the surface of the communication.
solve our collective problems with more empathy. Empathy not just for other humans, but for all of our fellow sojourners here on spaceship Earth
we are soft wired to experience another’s plight as if we are experiencing it ourselves, sociability, affection, companionship
grounded in acknowledgement of death and celebration of life
ability to show solidarity to other humans and all creatures and biosphere
List, identify, and recognize some of the environmental risks of the Anthropocene.
global warming from increased carbon in the atmosphere;
depletion of the ozone;
widespread deforestation;
persistent pollution in the air and water;
a loss of biodiversity, including mass extinction events, and other kinds of environmental crisis, like the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef;
infectious diseases, an issue that also intersects with climate change, air pollution, and habitat encroachment, which can trigger the transmission of zoonotic disease like COVID-19.
