CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Though it remains contested, the move to introduce a new epoch called the Anthropocene has been endorsed by a working group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the formal body charged with the keeping of geological time. Agreement on a start date may be coalescing around the mid-twentieth century, when a global dusting of plutonium isotopes from widespread nuclear weapons testing began to settle into the earth’s crust. Questions remain, however, concerning the work of “assigning historical responsibility” in respect to numerous other human actions that have profoundly affected the environment, including the domestication of fire and the shift to large scale agricultural communities (Lewis and Maslin, 2015).
Several academic journals devoted to the Anthropocene have been launched since the introduction of the construct at the turn of the 21st century, and scholars from a diverse array of disciplinary backgrounds now Timothy Morton (2007, 2013) a prolific philosopher of the Anthropocene, speaks of the “traumatic loss of coordinates” that results from having to live daily with the knowledge that homo sapiens are disrupting the Earth’s atmospheric cycles and are adding immense quantities of new materials, many of which are known to be toxic, to its sedimentary layers. deliberate upon the construct’s existential implications.
In the face of these realities and their implicit existential threat, Martha Nussbaum (2018) describes humans as maintaining a “culpable obtuseness...[to] the unearned privileges that have been used to dominate and exploit” (para. 3) other species and the planet’s resources. The great majority of us avoid pondering too deeply the ongoing ecological collapses and extinctions unfolding around us, choosing rather to skirt the looming implications of what remain unimaginable realities. This failure may be related to the fact that it is indeed difficult to bear witness to a vast and distributed phenomenon to which the commonplaces of our modern lives continue to contribute in countless quotidian ways.
Questions we ask in seeking proposals include but are not limited to:
-
What is our personal stance in relation to the threatening changes our species has wrought for life on earth? How might/should this stance manifest in our scholarship and teaching?
-
In what ways are we investing our time and attention in systems that are serving to perpetuate the use and abuse of natural life and planetary rhythms? What is our responsibility as educators to lift up and study the workings of these systems?
-
To what extent and in what ways shall we hold ourselves responsible for grappling with the ethical dimensions of our impulse to look away?
References
Lewis, S. L. and Maslin, M. A. (2015). Defining the Anthropocene. Nature. 519, 171-180.
Nussbaum, M. (2018). What does it mean to be human? – Don’t ask. The New York Times. Retrieved
from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/opinion/what-does-it-mean-to-be-human-dont-ask.html
International Commission on Stratigraphy. (2019). Results of binding vote by AWG, Retrieved from
http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/
Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without nature: Rethinking environmental aesthetics. Harvard University Press.
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press
