It brought riches to Britain and many other European nations; played a major role in enslaving more than 10 million Africans; and created the first global markets in cotton, tobacco and sugar. But now colonialism has been accused of having an even greater influence.

The Brain of History or the Mentality of the Anthropocene Föreläsning av Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabous föreläsning har titeln “The Brain of History or the Mentality of the Anthropocene” och handlar om människans villkor och hennes negativa påverkan på jordens geologi såväl som biologi. I föreläsningen kommer Malabou att närmare undersöka de möjliga sambanden mellan traditionell filosofi och “hård” vetenskap.

Catherine Malabou är professor i filosofi vid CREMP (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy) vid Kingston University i London. Hon har omfattande beskrivit samtida fransk och tysk filosofi, men det är hennes filosofiska undersökningar av neurovetenskapen som utmärker hennes forskning.

Föreläsningen ägde rum den 21 januari 2017 på Moderna Museet i Stockholm som en fördjupning av de ämnen som förekommer i utställningen The New Human. Den ingick i ”What is Human?”, två föreläsningar om mänsklighetens villkor i relation till vetenskap och filosofi.

Föreläsningen producerades i samarbete med Art Initiative vid Handelshögskolan i Stockholm.

The Brain of History or the Mentality of the Anthropocene Lecture with Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabou’s lecture is titled “The Brain of History or the Mentality of the Anthropocene” and will explore topics of the human condition and humanity’s disruption of both earth’s geology and biology. The lecture will further explore Malabou’s approach to renewing an interchange between traditional philosophy and the hard sciences.

Catherine Malabou is professor of philosophy at Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University. She has written extensively on contemporary French and German philosophy but it is with her encounter with neuroscience that have distinguished her research.

The lectures was held on Saturday 21 January 2017 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and it was produced on the occasion of the exhibition The New Human in cooperation with Stockholm School of Economics Art Initiative. The lecture was part of “What is Human?”, two lectures on the science and philosophy of the human condition.

The Holocene is dead; welcome to the Anthropocene. Once a controversial stance, the notion that human activities have altered planetary geology adequately enough to warrant the demarcation of another epoch has more traction than the Mars Rover.

It’s our 50th episode!  To celebrate we sit down with four members of the Anthropocene Working Group: the scientists and experts who are deciding whether or not we formally adopt the Anthropocene into the geologic time table.  We discuss what makes the Anthropocene boundary different from all of the other boundaries in geologic history, how they deal with the increased public attention to this particular boundary, and some cultural ripple effects of the Anthropocene dealing with the Law of the Sea.  As we wrap up, the Generation Anthropocene producers take a minute to reflect on all of the rapid changes we’ve witnessed over the past 50 episodes.

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If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like:

1. Conservation in the Anthropocene

2. Welcome to the… Technosphere?

3. The rock hard truth of mass extinctions

Contributors

Jan Zalasiewicz

Jan Zalasiewicz is a Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester, and before that worked at the British Geological Survey.  He is a field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, and researches fossil ecosystems and environments across 500-million years of Earth history.  Jan is also the convenor for the Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ and has published many scholarly works on the topic.  Along with Mark Williams, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

Davor Vidas

Davor Vidas is the director of the Law of the Sea and Marine Affairs Programme at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI).  As an expert dealing with the Law of the Sea, Davor is currently investigating how international laws, all of which were written during our previous and stable geologic epoch, need to adapt to better fit the unstable environment of the Anthropocene.

Mike Ellis

Mike Ellis is the head of climate change science at the British Geological Survey.  Mike has worked all across the world researching the intersection of plate tectonics and landscape evolution, the environmental impacts of climate change, and the Anthropocene.

Mark Williams

Mark Williams is a reader in paleobiology at the University of Leicester.  His work deals primarily with the interactions between the biosphere and other Earth systems.  Mark also studies climate proxies and the application of numerical climate models.  Along with Jan Zalasiewicz, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

Interviewer

Miles Traer

For biographical information on Miles Traer, please click here.

http://web.stanford.edu/group/anthropocene/cgi-bin/wordpress/anthropocene-working-group-roundtable/

There’s a word for this new era we live in: the Anthropocene. This term, taken up by geologists, pondered by intellectuals and discussed in the pages of publications such as The Economist and the The New York Times, represents the idea that we have entered a new epoch in Earth’s geological history, one characterized by the arrival of the human species as a geological force. The biologist Eugene F. Stoermer and the Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen advanced the term in 2000, and it has steadily gained acceptance as evidence has increasingly mounted that the changes wrought by global warming will affect not just the world’s climate and biological diversity, but its very geology — and not just for a few centuries, but for millenniums. The geophysicist David Archer’s 2009 book, “The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate,” lays out a clear and concise argument for how huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and melting ice will radically transform the planet, beyond freak storms and warmer summers, beyond any foreseeable future.

With Ryan Bishop, Sean Cubitt, Jussi Parikka, Denisa Kera

At Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin Sat, 1.2.2014

Afterglow of The Mediatic conference stream

The panel focuses on the effects of electronic and synthetic waste on geological and biological bodies. The tissue and the soil effectively register the residue of scientific and technological processes, acting as inadvertent storage site and archival apparatus for our trash. The panel includes discussions of electronic waste, nuclear fallout as well as the global labour concerning the geology of media: minerals and material sciences. It is in this sense that it aims to address the media of the earth, and the earth as essential to the existence of media: issues which tie organic bodies with the non-organic reality. The speakers represent media and technology studies perspectives to what was often reserved as a territory of the sciences, namely geophysics. A geopolitics that is truly geo-based emerges from these engagements.

A sheet of glass stretches along the entryway of the University of Leicester’s geology department. The glass protects a collection of fossils that are mounted to the wall in swirls, as if spiraling out of primordial time.

"I'm starting to think the strongest signal, one of them, is just nuclear explosions -- the test cases of atomic material," Crutzen said. "There were the first two nuclear explosions in Japan, but then [much more] testing took place, and anytime that radioactive material came into the world, into the sediments, we had an example of a good marker. Now I'm more in favor of declaring the nuclear tests as the real start of the Anthropocene."

Crutzen's shift is a reminder that, while his neologism is all-conquering, it is far from settled as a scientific fact. Indeed, it's only recently come to the attention of geologists. Humans are altering the face of the world, no doubt. But the world has had many faces over its eons. And so the question is set: Is humanity's touch mere makeup, or does it cut to the bone of deep time, in a pattern consistent with geology's demands?

We paired up Britain's most celebrated scientists to chat about the big issues: the unity of life, ethics, energy, Handel – and the joy of riding a snowmobile Sir David Attenborough, 84, is a naturalist and broadcaster. He studied geology and zoology at Cambridge before joining the BBC in 1952 and presenting landmark series including Life On Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984) and, recently, Life. Richard Dawkins, 69, was educated at Oxford, later lectured there and became its first professor of the public understanding of science. An evolutionary biologist, he is the author of 10 books, including The Selfish Gene (1976), The God Delusion (2006) and The Greatest Show On Earth (2009). He is now working on a children's book, The Magic Of Reality.