Search results for "anthropocene"
showing 10 items of 77 documents
Tra spazi e funzioni. La crisi dello spazio urbano prima, durante e dopo il Covid-19
2022
Fin dagli albori dell'età urbana, i problemi e i valori dell'insediamento urbano sono variati notevolmente nel corso dei secoli, ma l'importanza della struttura spaziale urbana non è mai stata cancellata. Oggi la città è ancora al centro della nostra civiltà, ma le relazioni tra sistemi socio-ecologici nidificati sono più complesse perché le interazioni uomo-ambiente non sono bidirezionali. L'ascesa dell'Antropocene, una nuova era dirompente ed erosiva causata dall'Umanità, comporta una crisi economica, demografica e ambientale, come dimostrano le attuali pandemie. Il mese scorso le notizie ci hanno detto che il nuovo coronavirus non è stato il primo caso di virus che salta la specie, raggi…
An anthropic soil transformation fingerprinted by REY patterns
2009
Abstract This Focus article deals intentionally with modern soil disturbance in situ . This is of interest to archaeologists as after disturbances, both short- and long-term, pedogenesis (re-)starts obliterating previous signs. Soil modifications induced by human activity may be linked to pedogenetic evidence for disturbance with archaeological evidence for the cultural activities. We contrasted two 750-m 3 soil pedons, an Anthrosol and a Kastanozem, from which the Anthrosol is derived, using 77 descriptors of soil properties which have been utilized in archaeological studies (pedo-morphological, routine laboratory, biochemical, metals and rare earth elements plus yttrium, REY) with the aim…
Anthropogenic soils are the golden spikes for the Anthropocene
2011
We propose that the Anthropocene be defined as the last c. 2000 years of the late Holocene and characterized on the basis of anthropogenic soils. This contrasts with the original definition of the Anthropocene as the last c. 250 years (since the Industrial Revolution) and more recent proposals that the Anthropocene began some 5000 to 8000 years ago in the early to mid Holocene (the early-Anthropocene hypothesis). Anthropogenic soil horizons, of which several types are recognized, provide extensive terrestrial stratigraphic markers for defining the start of the Anthropocene. The pedosphere is regarded as the best indicator of the rise to dominance of human impacts on the total environment b…
Augmented Cities in the Neoanthropocene
2021
Contemporary cities could be considered vibrant organisms of places and communities, of data and information, of sensors and actuators, and of actions and reactions generated by people and environment both. Cities must be more responsive to our behavioral changes, enabling devices for enhancing our contemporary life. We would be able to build a more efficient urban environment, able to sense, to understand and to act every day and for everyone. In the post-city age and beyond the smart city, Augmented City is a new paradigm that perceives the demands of more networked, knowledge-based, and creative society that answers to the global change by a new circular metabolism. The Augmented City is…
Climate Change and the Challenges to Democracy
2018
This Article explores the uneasy interaction between climate change and democracy, particularly liberal democracy. Its central claim is that climate change and other problems of the Anthropocene—this new epoch into which no earthly entity, process, or system escapes the reach and influence of human activity—expose and exacerbate existing vulnerabilities in democratic theory and practice, particularly in their currently dominant liberal form; and that both democracies’ failures and their most promising attempts at managing these problems expose democracies to significant legitimacy challenges
Climate Change, Liberalism, and the Public/Private Distinction
2021
In an earlier paper (Jamieson and Di Paola 2016) we explored the ways in which anthropogenic climate change and more generally the Anthropocene—this new epoch in which no earthly place, form, entity, process, or system escapes the reach of human activity—puts pressure on some central categories and concepts of liberal democratic theory. In this chapter we focus on one particular distinction that is at the heart of liberal theory: that between the public and the private (henceforth ‘the Distinction’). Our claim is that climate change puts pressure on the Distinction in ways that are difficult for liberals to relieve. Our purpose is not to write an obituary for liberalism, but to articulate s…
Popular Music and the Anthropocene
2020
International audience; We are at a major turning point, probably irreversible for thousands of years. Despite the continued use of slogans like ‘Save the Planet’, it is living beings, more than the Earth (which has already seen many upheavals) who are threatened with extinction. Although the proponents of the term Anthropocene agree that human activities have become a force that is influencing the geological course of the Earth, and stratigraphers are already finding traces of that process in rocks and sediments (Zalasiewicz 2010), we can however identify two contrasting narratives about the Anthropocene.
BioTIME: A database of biodiversity time series for the Anthropocene
2018
Abstract Motivation The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Main types of variables included The database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, th…
Soil is the best testifier of the diachronous dawn of the Anthropocene
2021
Humans act at worldwide scale as a growing geomorphic agent since mid‐Holocene (8,200–4,200 y BP) through the pervasive impacts of domestication, deforestation, agriculture, urbanization, and mining. The concept of Anthropocene has been introduced exactly to indicate the timespan in which humans have joined with other natural forces in impacting the outermost shell of the planet and the biosphere. Soils, which are the Earth's skin, are sensitive archives of any major human‐induced local to global change. Especially when buried, soils can permanently preserve the primordial traces of a significant impact of man on the environment, which occurred at different times and rates in different area…
Neoanthropocene Raising and Protection of Natural and Cultural Heritage: A Case Study in Southern Italy
2020
Analyzing the human history on the planet, a conflictual relation was raised when humankind had started destroying the natural ecosystem and biota, and consequently, a capacity to induce environmental change has increased throughout human history in the so-called Anthropocene age. A 'noosphere'-centered civilization could produce a non-disruptive new kind of anthropocentrism. This is becoming a new context to define Neoanthropocene based on a renewed homeostatic relationship between Earth and mankind. The potential application of this theoretical approach has been tested in drafting steps of Plan of Lucania Apennines, Valdagri, and Lagonegrese National Park, in southern Italy. Drafting the …