The Anthropocene, a proposed name for a geological epoch marked by human impacts on global ecosystems, has inspired anthropologists to critique, to engage in theoretical and methodological ...experimentation, and to develop new forms of collaboration. Critics are concerned that the term Anthropocene overemphasizes human mastery or erases differential human responsibilities, including imperialism, capitalism, and racism, and new forms of technocratic governance. Others find the term helpful in drawing attention to disastrous environmental change, inspiring a reinvigorated attention to the ontological unruliness of the world, to multiple temporal scales, and to intertwined social and natural histories. New forms of noticing can be linked to systems analytics, including capitalist world systems, structural comparisons of patchy landscapes, infrastructures and ecological models, emerging sociotechnical assemblages, and spirits. Rather than a historical epoch defined by geologists, the Anthropocene is a problem that is pulling anthropologists into new forms of noticing and analysis, and into experiments and collaborations beyond anthropology.
The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. “Patchy Anthropocene” is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call “modular ...simplifications” and “feral proliferations.” This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; “structure” here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being system characteristics. Indeed, we discuss “systems” as thought experiments, that is, imagined holisms that help make sense of structure. Ecological modeling, political economy, and alternative cosmologies are systems experiments that should rub up against each other in learning about the Anthropocene. We address the misleading claim that studies of nonhumans ignore social justice concerns as well as suggesting ways that ethnographers might address “hope” without rose-colored glasses. This introduction offers frames for appreciating the distinguished contributions to this supplement, and it traces key changes in anthropological thinking from the time of this supplement’s predecessor, the Wenner-Gren Foundation–sponsored 1956 volume, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Rather than interrogating philosophies of the Anthropocene, the supplement shows how anthropologists and allies, including historians, ecologists, and biologists, might best offer a critical description.
Instituting nature Mathews, Andrew S
2011, 20111104, 2011-11-04, 2013-06-26, 20110101
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A study of how encounters between forestry bureaucrats and indigenous forest managers in Mexico produced official knowledge about forests and the state.
ABSTRACT
Phenomenological descriptions of landscapes, trees, and terraces, combined with oral history and historical ecology, find traces of industrialization, plant disease, and forest fires in ...central Italian forests. Plant form, landscape form, and forest structure can be described through drawings that give resolutely partial descriptions of more‐than‐human encounters. This kind of knowledge of the landscape is potentially unstable and remade by the details that it contains. By using multiple methods for attending to more‐than‐human landscapes, we can learn to notice multiple throughscapes, landscape patterns that overlap and lie through each other, but which are linked to different histories. Multiplying histories means that rather than being seen as a single era, the Anthropocene can be understood as having many beginnings and coexisting histories that give rise to multiple futures.
Agropastoral practices that historically reduced the flammability of Mediterranean landscapes are poorly understood due to state prohibitions and lack of scientific interest. Oral histories, analysis ...of agronomical writings, transect walks, and ethnographic study of fire managers and community members in the Monte Pisano of Italy, find legacies of traditional agropastoral practices in present-day landscapes. Forest leaf litter raking, largely carried out by women, combined with fire wood cutting and burning to greatly reduce fire risk. Historic stigmatization of traditional burning and ignoring gendered peasant labor have reduced contemporary scientists’ and fire managers’ understandings of ecological processes and of options for reducing fire risk. Fire managers in the Mediterranean, and in areas around the world affected by rural depopulation, would benefit from a better understanding of traditional agropastoral and fire management practices. Litter raking has been understudied outside Central Europe, is often gendered, and may have important ecological consequences around the world.
Context
Climate change, land use change, invasive species, and pests can combine to cause changes in species distributions. However, unlike climate change, future land use and ecological interactions ...are unpredictable. One strategy for confronting this unpredictability is to use interdisciplinary approaches.
Objectives
In this paper we demonstrate how historical ecology and SDM modeling can be combined to reconstruct the impacts of land use change, invasive pathogens, and climate change upon the landscape of the Monte Pisano of Central Italy over the last two centuries.
Methods
Species distribution and climate modeling are combined with early nineteenth century land use records and oral history, in order to reconstruct changes in species distributions of sweet chestnut and maritime pine on the Monte Pisano (Central Italy).
Results
The extent of pine forest tripled while chestnut forest halved since 1850. Climatic conditions changed, with temperatures increasing by over 1.5 °C. These climatic changes are insufficient to account for the shift in chestnut and pine distribution, which was mainly driven by socioeconomic change that caused changes in land use, a process accelerated by pathogens that eliminated low elevation chestnut groves.
Conclusions
In Mediterranean mountains, where human activities have impacted biota for a long time, changes in land management and climate change interacting on different temporal scales, can affect the magnitude of changes in species distributions. The effects of climate change can be partially addressed through changing land use, including by reducing fire frequency or improved phytosanitary controls.
Over the past 10 years, Mexican officials and scientists have promoted the project of protecting Mexican forests in order to mitigate climate change, forests acting to absorb carbon dioxide from the ...atmosphere. This article compares existing policies around mass reforestation and markets for environmental services, and their relationships to a policy in construction -Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation. Mass reforestation policies collapsed in the face of politicized audits and stories about corruption; markets for environmental services continued with little criticism, stabilized in part by the charisma of Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation policies. I explain the collapse of mass reforestation policies as being due to failed knowledge performances by officials and scientists; such failures are assessed by more or less skeptical publics who expect specific ways of performing credible public knowledge. Areas of nonknowledge can be tamed as calculable uncertainty, or alternatively transformed into ontological indeterminacy, scandals, and stories of corruption. Areas of nonknowledge are not pathological: they may support as well as undermine, climate science, the authority of institutions, or the credibility of carbon accounts.
Officials in the Mexican environmental protection agency, the Secretaria de Medio Ambiente, Recursos Naturales y de Pesca (SEMARNAP), deploy representations of agropastoral fires set by rural people ...to find urban allies, whereas officials and rural people in Oaxaca avoid mentioning fire and firewood cutting. Rigorous fire and firewood regulations are largely unenforced, producing official ignorance of burning and firewood cutting, partially because of the absence of fire and firewood forms within SEMARNAP and partially because of collusion and collaboration at the state level. This is compared with official knowledge of logging in indigenous forest communities in the state of Oaxaca to argue that official knowledge can be the product not of state-imposed projects of legibility but, rather, of alliances and entanglements between the state and politically powerful interlocutors. Practices of silencing and concealment are not the result of inadequate Mexican forestry institutions but are inherent to the process of knowledge production.
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