Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing contemporary global change

The Anthropocene is the scientific label given by earth scientists to the current epoch of unprecedented anthropogenic planetary change. The Anthropocene is also a political label designed to call attention to this change and evolving notions of agency and responsibility in contemporary life. This article critically explores what I call ‘the Anthropocene idea’ and the condition of ‘Anthropocene spaces’ through selected anthropological writing about recent planetary change and through analysis of current events in a specific ‘vulnerable’ location. By considering recent events in The Bahamas, I arrive at an orientation that I call simply Anthropocene anthropology. Rather than advocating for the creation of a new subfield of research, this mode of engagement offers an open‐ended conceptual framework for the critical examination of the Anthropocene idea as it influences the symbolic and material realities of contemporary Anthropocene spaces.     

The Industrial Ecology of Emerging Technologies

The modern world increasingly reflects human activities, to the point that many scientists are referring to this era as the "Anthropocene," the Age of Humans. A major domain of human activity involves sociotechnical systems, which can be characterized as occurring in constellations of coevolving technological, cultural, institutional, economic, and psychological systems lasting over many decades. The current constellation, still in its early stages of development, brings together five powerful technology systems—nanotechnology, biotechnology, robotics, information and communication technology, and cognitive science—that are even more complex than historical precedents because they enable not just far more powerful capabilities to design domains external to humans but also the potential to design individual humans themselves. Understanding the implications of this sociotechnical landscape for industrial ecology suggests profound theoretical challenges as well as important new areas of research.     

The Biology of Time and Death

The steady flow of solar energy through prebiotic chemical systems forced them to undergo material cycles, and this cycling was inherited by living organisms. Organisms whose cycling synchronized with periodic phenomena, such as day/night and seasonal variations were favored. At a later stage, evolution also favored organisms that, besides of a synchronized cycling, developed a ‘sense of time’ to cope with non-cyclic and unique events in the environment. In the case of human beings, this ‘sense of time’ was used to detect causal chains (cause → effect), combine them to produce dynamic models of reality, and transform real time scales into mental time scales (it takes a moment to remember a year-long phenomenon). The ‘sense of time’ constituted a decisive evolutive advantage, because it enables humans to analyze a multitude of future possibilities, and choose the most promising one. Yet ‘sense of time’ is just an empty metaphore, because it is not a true ‘sense’, and we ignore what ‘time’ really is. Most scientific disciplines simply take for granted that there is a ‘time flowing from future to past’. Biologists instead, cannot adopt this attitude because ‘time’ may very well be an intrinsic property of our mind, i.e., a peculiar aspect of brain physiology.     

The Anthropocene narrative and Amerindian lifeworlds: anthropos,agency, and personhood

Based on the observation that the Anthropocene narrative signifies a departure from the Cartesian nature/culture division dominant within modernist science, this article explores notions of personhood and agency among Amerindian peoples in the Amazon, the Andes, and Mesoamerica in comparison to the corresponding notions in modernist discourses. We discuss the differences in conceptualizations in relation to diverging understandings of climate change and the Anthropocene, focusing on perspectives on agentivity both within our respective ethnographical fields and in modernist social sciences. This leads us to stress the significance of new materialists’ disregard for intentionality in relation to agency and the consequences this neglect has for understanding animist perspectives. We examine the different views in relation to their effects on morality and to perceived forms of accountability. In accordance, the modernist ‘global we’, prominent in the Anthropocene debate stressing the role of humanity as a species, is contrasted with what we call a ‘universal we’, which includes both human and other-than-human persons, in conformance with Amerindian animist perspectives on the world. This approach to the issue does not only mean that we challenge the obvious iniquity in blaming all of humanity for climate change but also that we point to the coloniality of reality implicit in the Anthropocene narrative.     

Emerging roles for orphan G-protein-coupled receptors in the cardiovascular system

Despite current drug therapies, including those that target enzymes, channels and known G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), cardiovascular disease remains the major cause of ill health, which suggests that other transmitter systems might be involved in this disease. In humans, ∼175 genes have been predicted to encode ‘orphan’ GPCRs, where the endogenous ligand is not yet known. As a result of intensive screening using ‘reverse pharmacology’, an increasing number of orphan receptors are being paired with their cognate ligands, many of which are peptides. The existence of some of these peptides such as urotensin-II and relaxin had been known for some time but others, including ghrelin and apelin, represent novel sequences. The pharmacological characterization of these emerging peptide–receptor systems is a tantalising area of cardiovascular research, with the prospect of identifying new therapeutic targets.     

Negotiating belonging: plants,people, and indigeneity in northern Australia

This article focuses on human‐plant relations, drawing on ethnographic research from northern Australia's Gulf Country to address the concept of indigeneity. Just as the identities of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non‐Indigenous’ people in this region are contextual and at times contested according to the vernacular categories of ‘Blackfellas’, ‘Whitefellas’, and ‘Yellafellas’, so too the issue of what ‘belongs’ in the natural world is negotiated through ambiguities about whether species are useful, productive, and aesthetically pleasing to humans, as well as local understandings about how plants and animals came to be located in the Gulf region. At the same time, plants’ distinctive characteristics as plants shape their relations with humans in ways which affect their categorization as ‘native’ and ‘alien’ or ‘introduced’. Focusing our analysis on three specific trees, we argue that attention to the ‘plantiness’ of flora contributes significantly to debates about indigeneity in society and nature. At the same time, our focus on human‐plant relations contributes important context and nuance to current debates about human and other‐than‐human relations in a more‐than‐human world.     

Of wildmen and white men: cryptozoology and inappropriate/d monsters at the cusp of the Anthropocene

People on the Indonesian island of Halmahera claim that the hairy and barely human giants that are said to roam the jungle are seventeenth-century Portuguese colonizers. Employing the feminist concept of ‘inappropriate/d’, I show how the appropriation of the Portuguese wildman into village narratives, regional political history, and national development plans as well as into global discourses of science and media in each case inappropriately collapses the boundaries that the white wildman is implicated in maintaining: those between human and animal, the colonial sovereign and ‘the primitive native’, cryptozoology and the politics of the real. The wild-yet-Western figure, I argue, is inappropriate/d – is ‘on the loose’ – across local, regional, and global registers of reality in ways that trouble linear histories of the wildman as fading from reality into allegory. Like so many other monsters of the Anthropocene, the truthlikeness, or verisimilitude, of the white wildman is enhanced rather than attenuated by recent turns in politics and media.     

The swashbuckling anthropologist: Henrich on The Secret of Our Success

In The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich claims that human beings are unique—different from all other animals—because we engage in cumulative cultural evolution. It is the technological and social products of cumulative cultural evolution, not the intrinsic rationality or ‘smartness’ of individual humans, that enable us to live in a huge range of different habitats, and to dominate most of the creatures who share those habitats with us. We are sympathetic to this general view, the latest expression of the ‘California school’s’ view of cultural evolution, and impressed by the lively and interesting way that Henrich handles evidence from anthropology, economics, and many fields of biology. However, because we think it is time for cultural evolutionists to get down to details, this essay review raises questions about Henrich’s analysis of both the cognitive processes and the selection processes that contribute to cumulative cultural evolution. In the former case, we argue that cultural evolutionists need to make more extensive use of cognitive science, and to consider the evidence that mechanisms of cultural learning are products as well as processes of cultural evolution. In the latter case, we ask whether the California school is really serious about selection, or whether it is offering a merely ‘kinetic’ view of cultural evolution, and, assuming the former, outline four potential models of cultural selection that it would be helpful to distinguish more clearly.     

Nocturnal Activity of Caged Resident and Migrant Silvereyes (Zosteropidae: Aves)

Night-activity patterns of individually-caged grey-breasted silvereyes Zosterops lateralis of resident and migrant status were investigated. True migratory restlessness or ‘Zugunruhe’ was exhibited by some individuals, but there was also considerable ‘noise’ in the data caused by cageing and neighbouring disturbance. In general, ‘Zugunruhe’ took place from about 2 h before, to about 4 h after ‘sunrise’, and both the daily timing and annual duration of Zugunruhe were consistent with the migration pattern observed in the field. A total of 42 % of resident birds from Tasmania, 77 % of migrant birds from Tasmania and 90 % of migrant birds from the mainland were considered to have exhibited true ‘Zugunruhe’, while none of the resident birds from Brisbane were considered to have displayed it. A few individuals spontaneously developed ‘Zugunruhe’ in the absence of other birds, but many birds (both residents and migrants) displayed no elevated night unrest when placed in a room on their own, although displaying unrest when placed among birds exhibiting ‘Zugunruhe’. The migration of the silvereye probably has a genetic basis, but whether an individual migrates or not is also influenced by social factors which differ in magnitude between individuals.     

The uncertain blitzkrieg of Pleistocene megafauna

We investigated, using meta‐analysis of empirical data and population modelling, plausible scenarios for the cause of late Pleistocene global mammal extinctions. We also considered the rate at which these extinctions may have occurred, providing a test of the so‐called ‘blitzkrieg’ hypothesis, which postulates a rapid, anthropogenically driven, extinction event. The empirical foundation for this work was a comprehensive data base of estimated body masses of mammals, comprising 198 extinct and 433 surviving species > 5 kg, which we compiled through an extensive literature search. We used mechanistic population modelling to simulate the role of human hunting efficiency, meat off‐take, relative naivety of prey to invading humans, variation in reproductive fitness of prey and deterioration of habitat quality (due to either anthropogenic landscape burning or climate change), and explored the capacity of different modelling scenarios to recover the observed empirical relationship between body mass and extinction proneness. For the best‐fitting scenarios, we calculated the rate at which the extinction event would have occurred. All of the modelling was based on sampling randomly from a plausible range of parameters (and their interactions), which affect human and animal population demographics. Our analyses of the empirical data base revealed that the relationship between body mass and extinction risk relationship increases continuously from small‐ to large‐sized animals, with no clear ‘megafaunal’ threshold. A logistic ancova model incorporating body mass and geography (continent) explains 92% of the variation in the observed extinctions. Population modelling demonstrates that there were many plausible mechanistic scenarios capable of reproducing the empirical body mass–extinction risk relationship, such as specific targeting of large animals by humans, or various combinations of habitat change and opportunistic hunting. Yet, given the current imperfect knowledge base, it is equally impossible to use modelling to isolate definitively any single scenario to explain the observed extinctions. However, one universal prediction, which applied in all scenarios in which the empirical distribution was correctly predicted, was for the extinctions to be rapid following human arrival and for surviving fauna to be suppressed below their pre‐‘blitzkrieg’ densities. In sum, human colonization in the late Pleistocene almost certainly triggered a ‘blitzkrieg’ of the ‘megafauna’, but the operational details remain elusive.     

The holotypes of the upper Pleistocene Crocuta crocuta spelaea (Goldfuss, 1823: Hyaenidae) and Panthera leo spelaea (Goldfuss, 1810: Felidae) of the Zoolithen Cave hyena den (South Germany) and their palaeo‐ecological interpretation

The rediscovered holotype skulls of Late Pleistocene Panthera leo spelaea ( Goldfuss, 1810 ) (Felidae) and Crocuta crocuta spelaea ( Goldfuss, 1823 ) (Hyaenidae) from the Zoolithen Cave at Burggeilenreuth, southern Germany, are discussed. The cave became famous mainly due to its rich cave bear bone remains from the late Saalian (OIS 6–8) to Eemian/Weichselian (OIS 3–6) including additionally a third holotype of Ursus spelaeus Rosenmüller, 1794 (Ursidae). The ‘Felis spelaea’ holotype represents an adult male with a strong bite mark on the saggital crest, which was in an early stage of healing. Compared with other European Late Pleistocene lion skulls and skeletons, and with modern African lions, it provides evidence of intraspecific conflict between male Ice Age lions. The holotype of ‘Hyaena spelaea’ is one of several hundred hyena remains from a well‐frequented hyena den cave. The cave was used intensively by Late Pleistocene hyena clans, for collecting lion carcasses in addition to their accustomed prey, as happened in many caves throughout Europe. Ice Age spotted hyena clans might have killed Ice Age steppe lions for many reasons, such as fights over prey and territory, and the protection of cubs, but they did not always scavenge on their carcasses. © 2008 The Linnean Society of London, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2008, 154 , 822–831.     

Understandings of climate change articulated by Swedish secondary school students

This study investigated beliefs about climate change among Swedish secondary school students at the end of their K-12 education. An embedded mixed method approach was used to analyse 51 secondary school students’ written responses to two questions: (1) What implies climate change? (2) What affects climate? A quantitative analysis of the responses revealed that ‘Earth’, ‘human’ and ‘greenhouse effect’ were frequent topics regarding the first question, and ‘pollution’, ‘atmosphere’ and ‘Earth’ were frequent regarding the second. A qualitative analysis, based on a ‘conceptual elements’ framework, focused on three elements within responses: atmosphere (causes and/or consequences), Earth (causes and consequences) and living beings (humans and/or animals and their impacts on climate change). It revealed a predominantly general or societal, rather than individual, perspective underlying students’ responses to the second question. The ability to connect general/societal issues with individual issues relating to climate change could prompt students to reflect on the contributions of individuals towards climate change mitigation, thereby constituting a basis for decision-making to promote a sustainable environment. Although the students did not discuss climate changes from an individual perspective, their statements revealed their understanding of climate change as a system comprising various components affecting the overall situation. They also revealed an understanding of the difference between weather and climate.     

Wild justice and fair play: cooperation,forgiveness, and morality in animals

In this paper I argue that we can learn much about ‘wild justice’ and the evolutionary origins of social morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living animals, and that interdisciplinary cooperation will help immensely. In our efforts to learn more about the evolution of morality we need to broaden our comparative research to include animals other than non-human primates. If one is a good Darwinian, it is premature to claim that only humans can be empathic and moral beings. By asking the question ‘What is it like to be another animal?’ we can discover rules of engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. When I study dogs, for example, I try to be a ‘dogocentrist’ and practice ‘dogomorphism.’ My major arguments center on the following ‘big’ questions: Can animals be moral beings or do they merely act as if they are? What are the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality? What do animals do when they engage in social play? How do animals negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, to develop trust? Can animals forgive? Why cooperate and play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does ‘being fair’ mean being more fit – do individual variations in play influence an individual's reproductive fitness, are more virtuous individuals more fit than less virtuous individuals? What is the taxonomic distribution of cognitive skills and emotional capacities necessary for individuals to be able to behave fairly, to empathize, to behave morally? Can we use information about moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? I conclude that there is strong selection for cooperative fair play in which individuals establish and maintain a social contract to play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may be also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. I also claim that the ability to make accurate predictions about what an individual is likely to do in a given social situation is a useful litmus test for explaining what might be happening in an individual's brain during social encounters, and that intentional or representational explanations are often important for making these predictions.     

Lakes in the era of global change: moving beyond single-lake thinking in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services

The Anthropocene presents formidable threats to freshwater ecosystems. Lakes are especially vulnerable and important at the same time. They cover only a small area worldwide but harbour high levels of biodiversity and contribute disproportionately to ecosystem services. Lakes differ with respect to their general type (e.g. land-locked, drainage, floodplain and large lakes) and position in the landscape (e.g. highland versus lowland lakes), which contribute to the dynamics of these systems. Lakes should be generally viewed as ‘meta-systems’, whereby biodiversity is strongly affected by species dispersal, and ecosystem dynamics are contributed by the flow of matter and substances among locations in a broader waterscape context. Lake connectivity in the waterscape and position in the landscape determine the degree to which a lake is prone to invasion by non-native species and accumulation of harmful substances. Highly connected lakes low in the landscape accumulate nutrients and pollutants originating from ecosystems higher in the landscape. The monitoring and restoration of lake biodiversity and ecosystem services should consider the fact that a high degree of dynamism is present at local, regional and global scales. However, local and regional monitoring may be plagued by the unpredictability of ecological phenomena, hindering adaptive management of lakes. Although monitoring data are increasingly becoming available to study responses of lakes to global change, we still lack suitable integration of models for entire waterscapes. Research across disciplinary boundaries is needed to address the challenges that lakes face in the Anthropocene because they may play an increasingly important role in harbouring unique aquatic biota as well as providing ecosystem goods and services in the future.     

‘Arctic Crashes:’ Revisiting the Human-Animal Disequilibrium Model in a Time of Rapid Change

The paper introduces a new vision advanced by the recent project, Arctic People and Animal Crashes: Human, Climate and Habitat Agency in the Anthropocene (2014–2015) developed at the Smithsonian Institution. Unlike earlier top-down models of polar animal-climate-people connections that tied changes in Arctic species’ abundance and ranges to alternating warmer and cooler temperatures or high ice/low sea-ice regimes, rapid animal declines (‘crashes’) may be better approached at regional and local scales. This approach is close to Arctic peoples’ traditional vision that animals, like people, live in ‘tribes’ and that they ‘come and go’ according to their relations with the local human societies. As the Arctic changes rapidly and climate/sea-ice/ecotone boundaries shift, we see diverse responses by Arctic people and animals to environmental stressors. I examine recent data on the status of three northern mammal species – caribou/reindeer, Pacific walrus, and polar bear—during two decades of the ongoing Arctic warming. The emerging record may be best approached as a series of local human-animal disequilibria interpreted from different angles by population biologists, indigenous peoples, and anthropologists, rather than a top-down climate-induced ‘crash.’ Such new understanding implies the varying speed of change in the physical, animal, and human domains, which was not factored in the earlier models of climate–animal–people’s interactions.     

Crisis of Meanings: Divergent Experiences and Perceptions of the Marine Environment in Victoria,Australia

The oceans of the world are regularly depicted as under threat from human exploitation with the problem portrayed as being of ‘global’ concern. In a world market characterised by the division of labour, many of those who eat fish do so without directly experiencing the ocean as a domain of productive utility. Rather, their encounters are with representations that depict the ‘natural’ world as an aesthetic object of contemplation, and environmentalist discourses that identify human activities as threatening marine ecosystems. So prevalent is this experience that tangible institutions, such as state fisheries management bodies, have emerged, acting to reinforce the ontology of this ‘contemplated’ ocean, giving weight to the illusion that humans can, and should, appreciate it only from afar. In this representation, commercial fishers are regularly depicted as transgressing a ‘natural’ boundary between humans and the environment. It is when the world is simultaneously encountered as an object of consumptive utility and aesthetic utility that the human role in the environment becomes ambiguous and a sense of crisis arises. This paper investigates disjunctions in experiences and understandings that contribute to environmental anxiety, and debates over the appropriate use of the ocean.     

Photoperiodic time measurement in the spider mite Tetranychus urticae: A novel concept

To explain photoperiodic induction of diapause in the spider mite Tetranychus urticae a new theoretical model was developed which took into account both the hourglass and rhythmic elements shown to be present in the photoperiodic reaction of these mites. It is emphasized that photoperiodic induction is the result of time measurement as well as the summation and integration of a number of successive photoperiodic cycles: the model, therefore, consists of separate ‘clock’ and ‘counter’ mechanisms. In current views involvement of the circadian system in photoperiodism is interpreted in terms of the hypothesis that the photoperiodic clock itself is based on one or more circadian oscillators. Here a different approach has been chosen as regards the role of the circadian system in photoperiodism: the possibility, previously put forward by other authors, that some aspect of the photoperiodic induction mechanism other than the clock is controlled by the circadian system was investigated by assuming a circadian influence on the photoperiodic counter mechanism. The derivation of this ‘hourglass timer oscillator counter’ model of photoperiodic induction in T. urticae is described and its operation demonstrated on the basis of a number of diel and nondiel photoperiods, with and without light interruptions.     

Other‐than‐humans and the remaking of the social

This article takes its starting‐point from an elderly Bardi woman's observation that elders ‘used to frighten’ younger generations with stories about various spirit beings. The beings she referred to are a group of malevolent beings inhabiting particular locations in her country, located in the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia. Beginning with her observation that this is something that ‘used’ to happen, I consider the relationship between persons and different kinds of spirit beings amidst historical impetus for change. Political, economic, ecological, technological, and other impacts have occurred within the shifting context of progressive engagements with Western colonialism, capitalism, and the market economy, with implications for local ontologies. I suggest that these spirit beings are becoming less differentiated and consider the implications of this in terms of personhood and the constitution of the social, arguing that the disappearance of some of these beings is suggestive of a contraction of temporal and spatial extensions of personhood, with implications for relations with country.