Frameworks for the Future: The Environment, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene
Our planetary crisis can be described in many terms. While they overlap, concepts such as "the environment," "climate change," and "the Anthropocene" arise from different sciences, frame a different problems, and suggest different solutions. This talk takes these distinctions seriously, analyzing the past, present, and future of these frameworks. It argues that the systems-approach of the Anthropocene, drawing on Earth System science as well as stratigraphy, clarifies our predicament and sharpens our understanding of what is to be done. Clear thinking about the nature of our planetary crisis will enable us to recognize that our challenge is far less technological than it is political.
Julia Adeney Thomas grew up in the coal country of southwest Virginia. Her interest in environmental questions comes from her love of those mountains, but much of her research is on Japan. As an intellectual historian, Thomas writes about concepts of nature and the Anthropocene, political thought, and photography as a political practice. Her publications include Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (winner of the AHA John K. Fairbank Prize) and The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach, written with geologists Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz. She is also editor or co-editor of four books, Japan at Nature's Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power; Rethinking Historical Distance; Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right and Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right. Her many essays including three in the American Historical Review: "The Cataracts of Time: Wartime Images and the Case of Japan," "Not Yet Far Enough: The Environmental Turn," and "History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Questions of Scale, Questions of Value." She's currently working on two books: The Historian's Task in the Anthropocene (under contract, Princeton University Press) and What is Anthropocene History? With colleagues around the world, Thomas seeks to bridge the divide between the humanities and the sciences to address our global environmental crisis. She teaches history at the University of Notre Dame.
