This thesis explores the scientific controversy over the 'Anthropocene', a putative new epoch of geological time conceived in 2000 by atmospheric chemist and earth system scientist Paul Crutzen. I trace the conception of the Anthropocene and explore its spread through a range of disciplines from the earth sciences to the humanities. Particular attention is paid to the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. This group was tasked with considering whether or not the Anthropocene should be subject to stratigraphic formalisation and be made 'real' insofar as the discipline of stratigraphy was concerned. The group's efforts, and the wide-ranging response to them, reveal the challenge of making sense of knowledge as it moves across different disciplines, settings, and contexts. While the AWG was tasked with producing a specifically stratigraphic response to the rising prominence of the Anthropocene, in performing their investigation the group took on board wide-ranging multidisciplinary expertise. As well as raising questions about the appropriate criteria for the group's investigation, the response to the group's efforts from a diverse range of disciplines illustrates the disunity of interdisciplinary work. The movement of the controversy from scholarly journals into an increasingly public sphere reveals further questions about the relationship between scientific authority and society as a whole. While different communities disagreed about the scientific value of the Anthropocene, many shared in their recognition of the role this scientific framing could play in fomenting a political response to anthropogenic global change. This thesis argues that scholarly debates about the Anthropocene illustrate questions about authority, epistemic privilege, and the relationship between disciplines that have ramifications beyond the controversy itself.

No description available.

Anthropocene, archeology,

Southern Ontario is an exciting place to study our relationship with wetland landscapes, as almost 75% of these ecosystems have been transformed and seized for urban or agricultural development, although the rate of wetland loss may recently be decreasing (Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, 2017; Ontario Biodiversity Council, 2015). This thesis is constructed around fieldwork conducted in Norfolk County during the late summer of 2020 and extensive engagement with various marsh complexes within the region. This research aims to present a more holistic understanding of our current relationship with wetland environments in Southern Ontario. This includes situating the wetland landscapes of Norfolk County within the infrastructures of the local Great Lakes region and the global and affective entanglements of the Anthropocene. Additionally, we explore certain co-constitutive present-day relationships that approximate people to wetland refrains. Finally, this research highlights the political intricacies of wetland management. Through this work, I will describe the complexities of these environments and demonstrate how being attuned to wetland landscape temporalities may be the best way to reterritorialize the wetland landscape.

In this document, I discuss the creative process of a piece for instruments, electronics, and video titled Music for the End of the World in the context of the Anthropocene and music's relationship with it. The document is divided into two parts: Part I, divided into three chapters, is a critical essay and Part II, the score for Music for the End of the World. In the first two chapters, I present the conceptual basis for the creation of the piece and discuss relevant musical references. In the third chapter, I describe the creative process in detail and explain how the aesthetic decisions I made relate to the original concept. The first chapter starts by defining the Anthropocene and pointing out some connections between music, colonialism, and ecology. It also highlights some of the Anthropocene potential implications for the arts through the lens of Timothy Morton's post-humanist philosophy. In the second chapter, three important references for the creation of Music for the End of the World are presented: Luigi Nono's Prometeo; Francisco López La Selva; and João Pedro Oliveira's Neshamah. In the third chapter, I present the creative process of Music for the End of the World in detail. It starts by describing how the piece was created after the composition of shorter study pieces for different chamber ensembles. Regarding electronics, in that chapter, I discuss the use of synthesized sounds in addition to field recordings. For the synthesized part, the paper also describes each of the instruments I developed in Max/MSP. Finally, it explains the creation of the video using AI image synthesis in Midjourney and their implementation in the piece.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Geography / John A. Harrington, Jr. / Clearly, the character of the relationship between humans and their environment has changed over time. Scholars have developed a geologic timeline and a timeline for life, but there is not a human-environment timeline. The proposed new geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is inadequate for encapsulating the diversity of the human-environment relationship throughout history and prehistory. This dissertation initiates conversation about developing an official human-environment timeline. Oriented from the perspective of a geographer, this exploratory research involved the qualitative analysis of human-environment events and ideas from a series of four geographic encyclopedias. A human-environment timeline emerged from this research, as well as a hierarchical typology of time periods: durations, duration revolutions, scenes, scene transitions, and intervals. The timeline was then interpreted according to four “ways of knowing”: normal science, cultural ecology, political ecology, and humanistic geography. This research supports inquiry into how time periods can be employed to better understand and communicate the human-environment relationship through time.

Thesis advisor: Noah P. Snyder / Large-scale human modification of the northeastern U.S. landscape began in the 17th century with forest clearing and milldam construction. In the mid-Atlantic Piedmont region of the U.S., Walter and Merritts (2008) found that millpond deposits persist for centuries after dam breaching, resulting in fill terraces composed of legacy sediment. Stratigraphic observations in the mid-Atlantic indicate that these laminated to massive fine-grained layers typically overly a prominent Holocene hydric soil that overlies a Pleistocene basal gravel. I test whether this set of processes applies to glaciated New England. This study focuses on two New England watersheds: the South River in Massachusetts and the Sheepscot River in Maine. I use stratigraphic analysis and radiocarbon dating to identify legacy deposits, and then use lidar digital elevation models to map planar terrace extents in each watershed. Finally, I use lidar digital elevation models to estimate thickness of legacy sediment found behind breached or removed milldams and estimate volumes of legacy sediment storage in valley bottoms over entire watersheds. The South River watershed has 32 historic dam sites; 18 have been field checked and 14 show evidence for legacy sediment storage. The Sheepscot River watershed has 33 historic dam sites; 13 have been field checked and six show evidence of legacy sediment storage. Stratigraphic analyses of bank exposures in both watersheds show a brown fine sand and silt layer (up to 2.19 m thick in the South River watershed and up to 2.30 m thick in the Sheepscot River watershed) which sometimes is underlain by gravel and/or clay; no buried Holocene hydric soil has been found. Further evidence for legacy milldam sedimentation comes from radiocarbon dating. Three radiocarbon dates from the South River watershed and six from the Sheepscot River watershed are less than 300 years old; no underlying Holocene material has been dated. The maximum volume of legacy sediment estimated using lidar methods for the South River watershed is 2.5 x 106 m3 and for the Sheepscot River watershed the volume is 3.7 x 106 m3. These volumes of legacy sediment can be translated to maximum mean thickness of sediment eroded from each landscape: 37 mm for the South River watershed and 7 mm for the Sheepscot River watershed. The Sheepscot River watershed has most of its legacy sediment terraces in the lower section of the watershed with many lakes and wetlands disturbing sediment transport in the upper section of the watershed. Compared to the Sheepscot River watershed, the South River watershed has more widespread glacial deposits contributing to legacy sediment with few lakes and wetlands. / Thesis (MS) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Earth and Environmental Sciences.

This work is an account of meaning and value in the time of climate change. I use the findings and predictions of scientists to develop a philosophy of living that fits today's concerns. In essence the ideas put forward come from a single question: If humans can change the planet in such a way that it threatens the possibility of human life on Earth what does this mean for the place of humans on Earth? It is this question, which the every chapter hereafter works to answer. Establishing a philosophy of living and explaining a global ecological crisis is a lofty goal. I should warn you know that things are still plenty murky in the conclusion. This work does not attempt to solve all of the problems of climate change. Far from it, my actual goal is to study those problems and learn what they may teach us about our terrestrial home, and humanity in the time of climate change. The title, Nuestro Mundo is a reference to José Martí's seminal work "Nuestra America" (Our America). What you are about to read is an attempt to use the insights of that work to develop ways of thinking about the problems of climate change. In the 1890's Martí wrote to energize Cuba's war for independence. His prescription: throw off foreign ideals, examine what it is to be Cuban, and fight for what is Cuba. Today I write to inform and energize people to act for our planet. My prescription: throw off artificial ideals, examine what it is to be of the Earth, and fight for the planet's survival.

This thesis foregrounds moments from an early childhood centre’s multispecies inquiry to grapple with the question of what pedagogies and practice might need to look and feel like to create the conditions for new ways of thinking and doing with other species in troubling times. Drawing on post-foundational feminist conceptual frameworks, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to challenging dominant narratives about young children’s more-than-human relations in a rapidly changing world. In the first chapter, I discuss tracking with young children as a generative method for cultivating the arts of awareness and opening up our understandings of place relations. In the second chapter, I reconfigure care as a multispecies achievement to explore the question of what it means to care with and not just for the creatures who thrive inside of an early childhood centre’s worm-compost bin. In it, I juxtapose compost inquiry moments with the material consequences of out-of-sight-out-of-mind approaches to managing our untenable food waste in contemporary Canadian society. In the final chapter, I share moments from an early childhood centre’s unexpected encounter with a dying rat to rethink children’s relations with death in an age of accelerated mass extinctions. What does it mean to care with a creature few want to claim, but with whom we are connected in unsettling ways? / Graduate

abstract: Raising future generations is a culturally diverse, universally technological human project. This research brought the everyday work of raising children into the domain of sustainability scholarship, by first proposing a model of childrearing as a globally distributed socio-technical system, and then exploring the model with participants in two nodes – an elementary and middle school, and a children’s museum. In the process, the research objective shifted towards using methods that were less academic and more relevant to childrearing agents. The focus on participatory survey data was abandoned, in favor of autoethnographic documentation of a long-term engagement with a third node of the system, a child welfare setting. This approach yielded unexpected findings that fit the proposed model, identified characteristics of a Zone of Mutual Oblivion (ZMO) that exists between childrearing and sustainability, and clarified ways in which people prioritize their own needs and responsibilities, the developmental needs of children, the potential needs and capacities of future generations, and the functional integrity of ecological systems. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Sustainability 2019