anthropocenes

Can we stop killer fungi?

BBC The Inquiry | May 29 2025

Warming climates, cooling bodies—and some not so cute fungi.

Who knows? It took some time, but humans have managed to make the wolf guard their flock, after all…

How our environment is making us sick—and what we can do about it

From air pollutants to pesticides in food and cosmetic additives, modern life means constant exposure to environmental chemicals. Picking apart the effects will help us boost the health of humans and the planet.

by Graham Lawton

New Scientist | 26 January 2022

Egyre többen ismerik fel, hogy ha nem változtatunk a globális gazdaságon, mindannyian meghalunk

Horváth Bence

444.hu | November 22, 2020

Az elmúlt évekre végleg világossá vált, hogy a klímaválság nem a távoli jövő problémája, hanem itt van a nyakunkon, és mindannyiunkat érinteni fog. A válság kézzelfoghatósága a legkülönfélébb reakciókat hívta életre: vannak, akik továbbra is tagadni próbálják a klímaváltozás egyértelmű jeleit, hogy fenntarthassák azt az életmódot, amit eddig folytattak. Vannak, akiken a lemondás vagy a szorongás lett úrrá. De nagyon sokan vannak olyanok is, akik a klímaválság hatására azon kezdtek el gondolkozni, hogy hogyan kéne máshogy élni az életünket, hogy minél sértetlenebbül kerülhessünk ki ebből a helyzetből. Interjú Gagyi Ágnes szociológussal.

How many trees are there on Earth? Mission to measure planet's biomass

Trees are our biggest ally against climate change - but we've never been sure how big. New space-based technology is revealing their potential for the first time.

by Christine Swanson

New Scientist | 2 October 2019

Our global food system discards 46 million tonnes of fish each year. Why?

by Sasha Chapman

Hakai Magazine | July 23, 2019

from The Economization of Life by Michelle Murphy (Duke UP, 2017)

In 1905 Begum Roquiah Shekhawat Hossein, a celebrated advocate for women’s education and equality and an elite Muslim woman from what is now called Bangladesh, wrote a story about dreaming technoscience that is now considered the first feminist science fiction story. At sixteen, Begum Roquiah married the deputy magistrate of Bhagalpur, who would die young. With the money left to her, she opened the first school for Mus- lim girls in India, which still exists today. In the portrait gallery of Dhaka’s Pink Palace Museum, Begum Roquiah is the single female face looking out from the gallery walls.

The controversial Gaia hypothesis sees Earth as a superorganism adapted to be perfect for life. A weird type of evolution may finally show how that actually happens.

But there might be another way, says Lenton. What if Gaia works like Ashby’s Homeostat? In other words, he suggests, Earth and the early life on it might have interacted haphazardly at first. Unstable configurations – those, say, with little or no cycling of key elements such as nitrogen – would have failed quickly, requiring life to reboot nearly from scratch. Eventually, though, the system must have stumbled on a stable configuration, with better cycling and tighter regulatory mechanisms. It should be no surprise, then, that the planet of today has strong regulatory systems.

This process, called “selection by persistence”, evades the requirements for competition and reproduction that make natural selection so problematic as a mechanism for explaining the evolution of Earth. “I think of it like a search algorithm,” says Lenton. “[Earth] can undergo repeated trials over time until it falls into a stable configuration. And once it does, that tends to persist.”

…

Prasenjit Duara makes a strong case for the relevance of the humanities in understanding the human dimensions of environmental and climate change. Multiple aspects of the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene, not least questions of environmental justice in efforts to adapt to and mitigate climate change, can be engaged through humanistic inquiry. With a focus on Asia, Duara argues that questions of identity, representation, religion, ethics, knowledge systems, and more—central concerns of the humanities—are deeply embedded in imagining how to respond to present environmental challenges.

The Vertical Farm | The New Yorker, January 2017

Growing crops in the city, without soil or natural light…Plants create themselves partly out of thin air. Salad greens are about ninety per cent water. About half of the remaining ten per cent is carbon. If AeroFarms’ vertical farm grows a thousand tons of greens a year, about fifty tons of that will be carbon taken from the air.

基本から始めよう。

2016年1月8日号の Science の記事では，1960年半ば以降，はっきり人新世（Anthropocene）として分けることが出来るという結論になったようです。この記事を書いているのは，国際地質科学連合の国際層序学会の委員会の中心メンバーです。