Hourglass River
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Human-Mineral Classification
In search for the normative elements of technofossil classification, Anna Echterhölter reflects on this history of mineral classification in the European tradition and the thick classification of Pacific totemism. (...)
Ironies of the Anthropocene
Faced with the Anthropocene, Marcia Bjornerud sees a set of grave ironies at play that make it hard for any geologist to capture its real meaning. We can only acknowledge these ironies and use them wisely to restore a lost alliance with the Earth. (...)
Latent Soils
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Modern Political Hopes as Immaterial Markers of the Anthropocene
Constellating three documents that mark a story of changing hopes for a better future, historian Julia Adeney Thomas advocates to recognize the immaterial power of ideas that gave birth to the Anthropocene. (...)
Molecular Mobilization
How can an archaeology of the present address molecules as driving elements of the “Great Acceleration”? Benjamin Steininger contends that the apparatus of catalytic chemistry has triggered a cascade of accelerations which lead to the Anthropocene. (...)
Monitoring the Nuclear Anthropocene
Knowledge of the onset of the Anthropocene is intimately connected to nuclear technoscience on the one hand and to the governance of environmental problems, such as atmospheric pollution, on the other. (...)
Radioactive Fallout as a Marker for the Anthropocene
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Reading the Anthropocene Ocean
How do tropes and images of a changing ocean operate in a larger system of cultural sensemaking? Killian Quigley collects a range of threads to map the disfiguration and deformation of an anthropocenic biosphere that swells below the sea’s surface. (...)
Silurian Harvest
Artists Nina Canell and Robin Watkins recover the deep-time aquatic past of the limestone environment that formed the island of Gotland and delineate the temporal entanglements between ancient life creation and modern-day living. (...)
Small Agency in the Nuclear Anthropocene
Through the case of the nuclear accident at Palomares, Spain, historian of science Xavier Roqué shows the importance of local actants and scarce resources in registering and understanding Anthropocene-scale phenomena. (...)
Some Recovered Taxonomic Fragments
A twenty-second century taxonomy was recently retrieved from a drive in a sealed server room in a flooded area of London. Specialists recovered some intact fragments allowing a glimpse into some aspects of the final stage of late modernity. (...)
Tailings and the Onset of a Chilean Anthropocene
Sebastián Ureta gives a thick description of Anthropocene landscapes where vast, stratified dumps of chemical residues that largely outlive their creators. (...)
The Anthropocene Signal Amidst the Noise
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The Breathable Materiality of Combustion
Air pollution is currently the top environmental killer, but the fleeting nature of atmospheric pollution often keeps it from being observed through a global perspective and being included in the planetary cycles of the Anthropocene. (...)
The Case of Air
Literary scholar Eva Horn unpacks air as an environing medium that has always entangled human life and the environment in very specific ways. (...)
The Critical Environment of the Venice Lagoon
Venice’s critical environment is a paradigmatic case for comprehending socio-environmental history in dialogue with the Earth sciences. (...)
The Japanese Art of Bowing and the Nuclear Anthropocene
Maria Rentetzi shares a personal encounter during a research trip to Hiroshima. What can we learn from the intense humanity inscribed in gestures of respect and apology to the survivors of the atomic bomb, an event at the dawn of the Anthropocene? (...)
The Moment We Visualized the Anthropocene
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The Radioactive Footprint of the Anthropocene
Assessing the effects of artificial radioactivity on human bodies and natural environments has a special place in the history of risk regulation, and has provided a key basis for understanding and defining the anthropogenic danger to life on Earth. (...)