Download or read book Life Writing in the Anthropocene written by Jessica White and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life Writing in the Anthropocene is a collection of timely and original approaches to the question of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies in the Anthropocene. This era is characterised by the geoengineering impact of humans, which is shaping the planet’s biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels, production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, and mass extinction. These developments threaten the rights of humans and other-than-humans to just and sustainable lives. In exploring ways of representing life in the Anthropocene, this work articulates innovative literary forms such as ecobiography (the representation of a human subject's entwinement with their environment), phytography (writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (the study of nonhuman poetic forms), providing scholars and writers with innovative tools to think and write about our strange new world. In particular, its recognition on plant life reminds us of how human lives are entwined with vegetal lives. The creative and critical essays in this book, shaped by a number of Antipodean authors, bear witness to a multitude of lives and deaths. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Download or read book The Anthropocene Reviewed written by John Green and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goodreads Choice winner for Nonfiction 2021 and instant #1 bestseller! A deeply moving collection of personal essays from John Green, the author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down. “The perfect book for right now.” –People “The Anthropocene Reviewed is essential to the human conversation.” –Library Journal, starred review The Anthropocene is the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, bestselling author John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale—from the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and Penguins of Madagascar. Funny, complex, and rich with detail, the reviews chart the contradictions of contemporary humanity. As a species, we are both far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough, a paradox that came into sharp focus as we faced a global pandemic that both separated us and bound us together. John Green’s gift for storytelling shines throughout this masterful collection. The Anthropocene Reviewed is an open-hearted exploration of the paths we forge and an unironic celebration of falling in love with the world.

Download or read book Literature and the Anthropocene written by Pieter Vermeulen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anthropocene has fundamentally changed the way we think about our relation to nonhuman life and to the planet. This book is the first to critically survey how the Anthropocene is enriching the study of literature and inspiring contemporary poetry and fiction. Engaging with topics such as genre, life, extinction, memory, infrastructure, energy, and the future, the book makes a compelling case for literature’s unique contribution to contemporary environmental thought. It pays attention to literature’s imaginative and narrative resources, and also to its appeal to the emotions and its relation to the material world. As the Anthropocene enjoins us to read the signals the planet is sending and to ponder the traces we leave on the Earth, it is also, this book argues, a literary problem. Literature and the Anthropocene maps key debates and introduces the often difficult vocabulary for capturing the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in an insightful way. Alternating between accessible discussions of prominent theories and concise readings of major works of Anthropocene literature, the book serves as an indispensable guide to this exciting new subfield for academics and students of literature and the environmental humanities.

Download or read book Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene written by Katherine Gibson and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2015 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The recent 10,000 year history of climatic stability on Earth that enabled the rise of agriculture and domestication, the growth of cities, numerous technological revolutions, and the emergence of modernity is now over. We accept that in the latest phase of this era, modernity is unmaking the stability that enabled its emergence. Over the 21st century severe and numerous weather disasters, scarcity of key resources, major changes in environments, enormous rates of extinction, and other forces that threaten life are set to increase. But we are deeply worried that current responses to these challenges are focused on market-driven solutions and thus have the potential to further endanger our collective commons. Today public debate is polarized. On one hand we are confronted with the immobilizing effects of knowing "the facts" about climate change. On the other we see a powerful will to ignorance and the effects of a pernicious collaboration between climate change skeptics and industry stakeholders. Clearly, to us, the current crisis calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge. Our collective inclination has been to go on in an experimental and exploratory mode, in which we refuse to foreclose on options or jump too quickly to "solutions." In this spirit we feel the need to acknowledge the tragedy of anthropogenic climate change. It is important to tap into the emotional richness of grief about extinction and loss without getting stuck on the "blame game." Our research must allow for the expression of grief and mourning for what has been and is daily being lost. But it is important to adopt a reparative rather than a purely critical stance toward knowing. Might it be possible to welcome the pain of "knowing" if it led to different ways of working with non-human others, recognizing a confluence of desire across the human/non-human divide and the vital rhythms that animate the world? Our discussions have focused on new types of ecological economic thinking and ethical practices of living. We are interested in: Resituating humans within ecological systems Resituating non-humans in ethical terms Systems of survival that are resilient in the face of change Diversity and dynamism in ecologies and economies Ethical responsibility across space and time, between places and in the future Creating new ecological economic narratives. Starting from the recognition that there is no "one size fits all" response to climate change, we are concerned to develop an ethics of place that appreciates the specificity and richness of loss and potentiality. While connection to earth others might be an overarching goal, it will be to certain ecologies, species, atmospheres and materialities that we actually connect. We could see ourselves as part of country, accepting the responsibility not forgotten by Indigenous people all over the world, of "singing" country into health. This might mean cultivating the capacity for deep listening to each other, to the land, to other species and thereby learning to be affected and transformed by the body-world we are part of; seeing the body as a center of animation but not the ground of a separate self; renouncing the narcissistic defense of omnipotence and an equally narcissistic descent into despair. We think that we can work against singular and global representations of "the problem" in the face of which any small, multiple, place-based action is rendered hopeless. We can choose to read for difference rather than dominance; think connectivity rather than hyper-separation; look for multiplicity - multiple climate changes, multiple ways of living with earth others. We can find ways forward in what is already being done in the here and now; attend to the performative effects of any analysis; tell stories in a hopeful and open way - allowing for the possibility that life is dormant rather than dead. We can use our critical capacities to recover our rich traditions of counter-culture and theorize them outside the mainstream/alternative binary. All these ways of thinking and researching give rise to new strategies for going forward. Think of the chapters of this book as tentative hoverings, as the fluttering of butterfly wings, scattering germs of ideas that can take root and grow."--Publisher's website.

Download or read book The Word for Woman Is Wilderness written by Abi Andrews and published by Two Dollar Radio. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE OFFICIAL NORTH AMERICAN EDITION "Beguiling, audacious... rises to its own challenges in engaging intellectually as well as wholeheartedly with its questions about gender, genre and the concept of wilderness. The novel displays wide reading, clever writing and amusing dialogue." —The Guardian This is a new kind of nature writing — one that crosses fiction with science writing and puts gender politics at the center of the landscape. Erin, a 19-year-old girl from middle England, is travelling to Alaska on a journey that takes her through Iceland, Greenland, and across Canada. She is making a documentary about how men are allowed to express this kind of individualism and personal freedom more than women are, based on masculinist ideas of survivalism and the shunning of society: the “Mountain Man.” She plans to culminate her journey with an experiment: living in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, a la Thoreau, to explore it from a feminist perspective. The book is a fictional time capsule curated by Erin, comprising of personal narrative, fact, anecdote, images and maps, on subjects as diverse as The Golden Records, Voyager 1, the moon landings, the appropriation of Native land and culture, Rachel Carson, The Order of The Dolphin, The Doomsday Clock, Ted Kaczynski, Valentina Tereshkova, Jack London, Thoreau, Darwin, Nuclear war, The Letters of Last Resort and the pill, amongst many other topics. "Refreshingly outward-looking in a literary culture that turns ever inward to the self, although it still has profound moments of introspection. Uplifting, with a thirsty curiosity, the writing is playful and exuberant. Riffing on feminist ideas but unlimited in scope, Andrews focuses our attention on our beautiful, doomed planet, and the astonishing things we have yet to discover." —Ruth McKee, The Irish Times

Download or read book Spectrality and Survivance written by Marija Grech and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-05-16 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of the Anthropocene is founded on the premise that traces of human activity on the earth will remain legible in the geological strata for millions of years to come, showing evidence of an anthropogenic ‘signature’ inscribed in the rock by the human species. Spectrality and Survivance shows how embedded in this understanding of the Anthropocene is a speculative and specular gesture that transforms the notion of the future into an anthropocentric reflection of the present, prohibiting any true engagement with the possibility of a non-anthropocentric and post-anthropocenic world. In this volume, Marija Grech develops an alternative conceptual paradigm from which to think the Anthropocene beyond any limited notion of human language, human thought, human systems of meaning, or even a human world. Grech considers how the geological trace of the Anthropocene might be said to ‘survive’ outside of the possibility of any human readership, and how the very survival of the human in and beyond the Anthropocene might necessitate such thought.

Download or read book Living with the Anthropocene written by Cameron Muir and published by NewSouth. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Australia — and the world — is changing. On the Great Barrier Reef corals bleach white, across the inland farmers struggle with declining rainfall, birds and insects disappear from our gardens and plastic waste chokes our shores. The 2019–20 summer saw bushfires ravage the country like never before and young and old alike are rightly anxious. Human activity is transforming the places we live in and love. In this extraordinarily powerful and moving book, some of Australia's best-known writers and thinkers — as well as ecologists, walkers, farmers, historians, ornithologists, artists and community activists — come together to reflect on what it is like to be alive during an ecological crisis. They build a picture of a collective endeavour towards a culture of care, respect, and attention as the physical world changes around us. How do we hold onto hope? Personal and urgent, this is a literary anthology for our age, the age of humans. Contributors include: Michael Adams — Nadia Bailey — Saskia Beudel — Tony Birch — James Bradley — Jo Chandler — Adrienne Corradini — Sophie Cunningham — John Dargavel — Penny Dunstan — Delia Falconer — Laura Fisher — Suzy Freeman-Greene — Andrea Gaynor — Joëlle Gergis — Billy Griffiths — Ashley Hay — Justine Hyde — Lucas Ihlein — Jennifer Lavers — Ian Lunt — George Main — Cameron Allan Mckean — Gretchen Miller — Ruth A. Morgan — Stephen Muecke — Cameron Muir — Jenny Newell — Emily O'gorman — Kate Phillips — Alison Pouliot — Jane Rawson — Annalise Rees — Lauren Rickards — David Ritter — Libby Robin — John Charles Ryan — Katrina Schlunke — Ray Thompson — Angela Tiatia — Ellen Van Neerven — Adriana Vergés — Kirsten Wehner — Gib Wettenhall — Josh Wodak — Kate Wright 'Living with the Anthropocene is an illuminating deep-dive in this 'storm of our own making'. With such a diverse and expansive collection of voices, what makes this book stand out is its unity. Thinking about climate change can be lonely and devastating but here you can be assured of being held, not only in thrall, but in great company.' — Anna Krien 'An important book that speaks to our time.' — Tim Flannery 'With this marvellous book the term Anthropocene loses its academic tinge to become a pervasive and pressing reality. A pantheon of Australia's finest environmental writers reveals the haunting personal costs of living in a world that humans have already turned upside down.' — Iain McCalman 'Scientists originated the term and concept of the Anthropocene. But this work takes a much deeper dive into what the Anthropocene really means for us humans now and into the future, and – importantly – what the Anthropocene means for the rest of life with which we share this planet.' — Will Steffen 'The beauty of this collection is that it walks a tightrope over this chasm of self-disgust and dread without toppling into it...From James Bradley on cuttlefish to Saskia Beudel on the changing soundscape of her mother's garden, the quality of writing in these pieces, their delight in nature and their determination not to give in to despair make for stirring reading despite the grim truths they confront.' — Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald Non-Fiction Pick of the Week 'Stomach-churning figures cast shadows of profound anguish across many of the unexpectedly intimate stories shared by the collection's contributors, an impressive array of scientists, novelists, journalists and essayists...Mostly written prior to both the late 2019–20 bush fires and the Covid-19 pandemic, this anthology is perhaps even more relevant, timely and important now...the writing in each essay is almost without exception heartfelt, thoughtful and compelling. Living With the Anthropocene is both acknowledgment that change is here as well as a quiet warning of the dangerous uncertainty to come.' — Warren Bonett, Books+Publishing

Download or read book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene written by Roy Scranton and published by City Lights Publishers. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History "Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene presents, without extraneous bullshit, what we must do to survive on Earth. It's a powerful, useful, and ultimately hopeful book that more than any other I've read has the ability to change people's minds and create change. For me, it crystallizes and expresses what I've been thinking about and trying to get a grasp on. The economical way it does so, with such clarity, sets the book apart from most others on the subject."--Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy "Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a reimagined humanism that will help us meet our stormy future with as much decency as we can muster. While I don't share his conclusions about the potential for social movements to drive ambitious mitigation, this is a wise and important challenge from an elegant writer and original thinker. A critical intervention."--Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate "Concise, elegant, erudite, heartfelt & wise."--Amitav Ghosh, author of Flood of Fire "War veteran and journalist Roy Scranton combines memoir, philosophy, and science writing to craft one of the definitive documents of the modern era."--The Believer Best Books of 2015 Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought--the shock and awe of global warming. Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter. From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself . . . and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in--the Anthropocene--demands a radical new vision of human life. In this bracing response to climate change, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality. Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that’s true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age--for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization. Roy Scranton has published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media.

Download or read book The Birth of the Anthropocene written by Jeremy Davies and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world faces an environmental crisis unprecedented in human history. Carbon dioxide levels have reached heights not seen for three million years, and the greatest mass extinction since the time of the dinosaurs appears to be underway. Such far-reaching changes suggest something remarkable: the beginning of a new geological epoch. It has been called the Anthropocene. The Birth of the Anthropocene shows how this epochal transformation puts the deep history of the planet at the heart of contemporary environmental politics. By opening a window onto geological time, the idea of the Anthropocene changes our understanding of present-day environmental destruction and injustice. Linking new developments in earth science to the insights of world historians, Jeremy Davies shows that as the Anthropocene epoch begins, politics and geology have become inextricably entwined.

Download or read book Fire Water Stories from the Anthropocene written by Mary Fifield and published by eBookIt.com. This book was released on 2021-08-16 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Sámi woman studying Alaska fish populations sees our past and future through their present signs of stress and her ancestral knowledge. A teenager faces a permanent drought in Australia and her own sexual desire. An unemployed man in Wisconsin marvels as a motley parade of animals makes his trailer their portal to a world untrammeled by humans. Featuring short fiction from authors around the globe, Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene takes readers on a rare journey through the physical and emotional landscape of the climate crisis--not in the future, but today. By turns frightening, confusing, and even amusing, these stories remind us how complex, and beautiful, it is to be human in these unprecedented times.

Download or read book We re Doomed Now What written by Roy Scranton and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and honesty. We’re Doomed. Now What? penetrates to the very heart of our time. Our moment is one of alarming and bewildering change—the breakup of the post-1945 global order, a multispecies mass extinction, and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. Not one of us is innocent, not one of us is safe. Now what? We’re Doomed. Now What? addresses the crisis that is our time through a series of brilliant, moving, and original essays on climate change, war, literature, and loss, from one of the most provocative and iconoclastic minds of his generation. Whether writing about sailing through the melting Arctic, preparing for Houston’s next big storm, watching Star Wars, or going back to the streets of Baghdad he once patrolled as a soldier, Roy Scranton handles his subjects with the same electric, philosophical, demotic touch that he brought to his groundbreaking New York Times essay, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.”

Download or read book Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere written by Elleke Boehmer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-11-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring lives lived, written and narrated in and from the Global South, the far South and the ultimate South, Antarctica, this book asks how life writing from southerly compass points impact both how we understand and read life narratives, and ultimately how we perceive our planet. Southern geographies, histories and lives have often been overlooked and defined by northern perspectives; Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere redresses this North/South alignment in its critical examination of life stories, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies from the southern hemisphere, providing a countervailing and alternative perspective that will unsettle, challenge and enrich the imaginative norms that inform life writing studies. From Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia in South America, through southern Africa, to Australia and New Zealand and as far down as Antarctica, this collection brings together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial, Global South and polar studies, and presents works on human, animal and plant life captured in words, music, performance, visual arts and photography. Interdisciplinary and vast in its comparative range, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere convenes a diversity of perspectives and positions that demonstrate that the south has rich internal knowledge sources of its own, allowing us to better conceptualize the planet 'from below'.

Download or read book Anthropocene Reading written by Tobias Menely and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few terms have garnered more attention recently in the sciences, humanities, and public sphere than the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which a human “signature” appears in the lithostratigraphic record. Anthropocene Reading considers the implications of this concept for literary history and critical method. Entering into conversation with geologists and geographers, this volume reinterprets the cultural past in relation to the anthropogenic transformation of the Earth system while showcasing how literary analysis may help us conceptualize this geohistorical event. The contributors examine how a range of literary texts, from The Tempest to contemporary dystopian novels to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, mediate the convergence of the social institutions, energy regimes, and planetary systems that support the reproduction of life. They explore the long-standing dialogue between imaginative literature and the earth sciences and show how scientists, novelists, and poets represent intersections of geological and human timescales, the deep past and a posthuman future, political exigency and the carbon cycle. Accessibly written and representing a range of methodological perspectives, the essays in this volume consider what it means to read literary history in the Anthropocene. Contributors include Juliana Chow, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Thomas H. Ford, Anne-Lise François, Noah Heringman, Matt Hooley, Stephanie LeMenager, Dana Luciano, Steve Mentz, Benjamin Morgan, Justin Neuman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Derek Woods.

Download or read book Experiments in Life Writing written by Lucia Boldrini and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines innovative intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, bringing together scholars and practicing biographers from several disciplines (Modern Languages, English and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing). It covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures, among them many recent works: texts that test the ground between fact and fiction, that are marked by impressionist, self-reflexive and intermedial methods, by their recourse to myth, folklore, poetry, or drama as they tell a historical character’s story. Between them, the essays shed light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation in modern Europe and will appeal to readers with an interest in the history and politics of form in life-writing: in the ways in which departures from traditional generic paradigms are intricately linked with specific views of subjectivity, with questions of personal, communal, and national identity. The Introduction of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

Download or read book Defiant Earth written by Clive Hamilton and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans have become so powerful that we have disrupted the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, bringing on a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – one in which the serene and clement conditions that allowed civilisation to flourish are disappearing and we quail before 'the wakened giant'. The emergence of a conscious creature capable of using technology to bring about a rupture in the Earth's geochronology is an event of monumental significance, on a par with the arrival of civilisation itself. What does it mean to have arrived at this point, where human history and Earth history collide? Some interpret the Anthropocene as no more than a development of what they already know, obscuring and deflating its profound significance. But the Anthropocene demands that we rethink everything. The modern belief in the free, reflexive being making its own future by taking control of its environment – even to the point of geoengineering – is now impossible because we have rendered the Earth more unpredictable and less controllable, a disobedient planet. At the same time, all attempts by progressives to cut humans down to size by attacking anthropocentrism come up against the insurmountable fact that human beings now possess enough power to change the Earth's course. It's too late to turn back the geological clock, and there is no going back to premodern ways of thinking. We must face the fact that humans are at the centre of the world, even if we must give the idea that we can control the planet. These truths call for a new kind of anthropocentrism, a philosophy by which we might use our power responsibly and find a way to live on a defiant Earth.

Download or read book Mountains Piled Upon Mountains written by Jessica Cory and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mountains Piled upon Mountains features nearly fifty writers from across Appalachia sharing their place-based fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. Moving beyond the tradition of transcendental nature writing, much of the work collected here engages current issues facing the region and the planet (such as hydraulic fracturing, water contamination, mountaintop removal, and deforestation), and provides readers with insights on the human-nature relationship in an era of rapid environmental change. This book includes a mix of new and recent creative work by established and emerging authors. The contributors write about experiences from northern Georgia to upstate New York, invite parallels between a watershed in West Virginia and one in North Carolina, and often emphasize connections between Appalachia and more distant locations. In the pages of Mountains Piled upon Mountains are celebration, mourning, confusion, loneliness, admiration, and other emotions and experiences rooted in place but transcending Appalachia's boundaries.

Download or read book Adventures in the Anthropocene written by Gaia Vince and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A science journalist travels the world to explore humanity’s ecological devastation—and its potential for renewal in this “compelling read” (Guardian, UK). We live in times of profound environmental change. According to a growing scientific consensus, the dramatic results of man-made climate change have ushered the world into a new geological era: the Anthropocene, or Age of Man. As an editor at Nature, Gaia Vince couldn’t help but wonder if the greatest cause of this dramatic planetary change—humans’ singular ability to adapt and innovate—might also hold the key to our survival. To investigate this provocative question, Vince travelled the world in search of ordinary people making extraordinary changes to the way they live—and, in many cases, finding new ways to thrive. From Nepal to Patagonia and beyond, Vince journeys into mountains and deserts, forests and farmlands, to get an up close and personal view of our changing environment. Part science journal, part travelogue, Adventures in the Anthropocene recounts Vince’s journey, and introduces an essential new perspective on the future of life on Earth.