Forest Futures in the Anthropocene: Can Trees and Humans Survive Together? Member of the U.S. Forest Service's Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) assessment team examines damage in a 2013 fire in the Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico. By David Bengston and Michael J. Threats to forests range from mega-fires to urban encroachment. Foresters and futurists share a long-range perspective. The world’s forests range from sparsely populated wilderness to urban forests, from lush tropical rain forests to the vast boreal forests of the North. Despite their importance, the future of forests is by no means clear in what some have called the “Anthropocene,” the epoch we are entering in which the impacts of human activities increasingly dominate Earth’s ecosystems. This article looks at some of the major issues and factors affecting forests in the decades ahead: deforestation, mega-fires, urban forests and growing urban populations, the end of wilderness, and water. Major Issues Shaping Forest Futures • Deforestation and land use change. • Rise of mega-fires. • Water.
untitled untitled untitled maxresdefault Dawn of the Anthropocene Epoch? Earth has entered new age of geological time, experts say -- ScienceDaily Geologists from the University of Leicester are among four scientists- including a Nobel prize-winner -- who suggest that Earth has entered a new age of geological time. The Age of Aquarius? Not quite -- It's the Anthropocene Epoch, say the scientists writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. And they add that the dawning of this new epoch may include the sixth largest mass extinction in Earth's history. Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams from the University of Leicester Department of Geology; Will Steffen, Director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute and Paul Crutzen the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist of Mainz University provide evidence for the scale of global change in their commentary in the American Chemical Society's' bi-weekly journal Environmental Science & Technology. First proposed by Crutzen more than a decade ago, the term Anthropocene has provoked controversy.
untitled Terraforming Earth : Fast Search Results : Open the Future 11 result(s) displayed (1 - 11 of 11): Terraforming the Earth, Taken Seriously It's amazing what can happen in five years. Yesterday, October 13 2010, I delivered a talk on the political and ethical dilemmas surrounding geoengineering at the National Academy of Sciences. I spoke at a meeting organized by the Government-University-Industry Research... Notes for "Battlefield Earth" Foreign Policy has just published a substantially updated version of my article "Terraforming War," on the potential strategic/military use of geoengineering, under the title "Battlefield Earth." Terraforming War No nation that sees itself as a great power is going to be willing to risk having its climate and environment completely in the hands of another nation. The Politics of Geoengineering Geoengineering -- or, as I sometimes call it, re-terraforming the Earth -- is back in the news, with a sobering editorial in today's New York Times by Carnegie's Dr. Tuesday Topsight, May 22, 2007 Open Source Terraforming
Anthropocene: We might be about to move from the Holocene to a new epoch - Science - News - The Independent The term, coined in the 1980s by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer, takes its prefix from the Ancient Greek word for human because its proponents believe the influence of humanity on the Earth's atmosphere and crust in the last few centuries is so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch. The Anthropocene Working Group assembles in Berlin on Friday, an interdisciplinary body of scientists and humanists working under the umbrella of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and "tasked with developing a proposal for the formal ratification of the Anthropocene as an official unit amending the Geological Time Scale". The AWG will examine the shift in the biophysical conditions of the Earth humans have brought about (Picture: Getty) The 30-strong group, which includes a lawyer, has outlined two key questions which it will address during deliberations at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Loading gallery In pictures: Changing climate around the world 1 of 15
First atomic blast proposed as start of Anthropocene Corbis The advent of nuclear weapons left a radioactive signature in the geologic record. For historians, the first atomic bomb blast in 1945 ushered in the nuclear age. But for a group of geologists, the 16 July test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, marks the start of a new unit of geologic time, the Anthropocene epoch. The term Anthropocene was coined 15 years ago to mean the age of widespread human influence over the planet. Now a group of international scientists has thrown its weight behind the latter possibility and suggested using the first nuclear blast as a starting point. Zalasiewicz wrote the study with 25 other members of a stratigraphic working group that is exploring whether to formally define the Anthropocene. The appearance of these radionuclides, such as long-lived plutonium-239, coincide more or less with many other large-scale changes that humans wrought in the years just following World War II. Other researchers argue for a different start of the Anthropocene.
gts1 A Sandbox for the Anthropocene Chaim Gingold/Earth Primer Too often, we specialize. But we don’t have to. One of the fields with the space to embrace generalists and polymaths is video game design. As I’ve written before, there are certain types of video games that are particularly well-suited to interdisciplinary thinking: games like SimCity or Spore or Civilization that require broad knowledge in area after area, from complex systems and astrophysics to history and evolutionary biology. Essentially, these sandbox games are exercises in building a self-contained microcosm and seeing how it works and hangs together. Into this genre of world-building toys steps something new. Earth: A Primer explores the various aspects of our planet’s systems, from water flow to sand dunes. I had a chance to receive a review copy and I can tell you that I was enchanted from the beginning. Once you learn how the individual pieces operate, you can then see how they all fit together. This is much more than a toy.