Welcome to the Anthropocene

Environmental anthropologist Gísli Pálsson describes the rationale behind the project “Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene,” One of the first major calls to integrate social science and humanities more fully in global changer research. The general acknowledgement from the scientific community that “humans are the key actors in refashioning the planet, in generating the problems we face from global warming, pollution, etc,” argued Pálsson and his co-authors in this 2013 article, makes the necessity of drawing on the expertise of social sciences and humanities (SSH) specialists more obvious and more urgent than ever. This development has potentially far-ranging implications not only for the SSH research communities, but also for science and the global change research agenda more generally.

Sea-level rise analysis in major centers.

Environmental humanities scholar Joni Adamson reflects on “cli-fi” (climate fiction) in contemporary writing, not so much as a new development but as part of a tradition of storytelling about human relationships to climate and the future reaching back to antiquity.