Dec 3, 2018

Urgency in the Anthropocene

Amanda H. Lynch and Siri Veland

Hosted by Lance Thurner

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Summary

Amanda Lynch and Siri Veland’s Urgency in the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating and trenchant analysis of the core beliefs and ideas that motivate current political responses to global warming. Lynch and Veland examine how the ostensible state of constant urgency we live in is identified and addressed in political discourse. With detailed analyses of major climate accords and theories of geo-engineering, they demonstrate how this discourse limits our imagined possibilities for sustainability. Instead, they propose an ethos of co-existence that is receptive to how different societies and cultures interpret catastrophe. A pluralistic approach to the Anthropocene, they suggest, may allow us to achieve environmental sustainability while honoring human dignity and justice. Amanda Lynch is Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Brown University and the director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Siri Veland is Senior Researcher at Nordland Research Institute in Bodø, Norway.

Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.

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Lance Thurner

Lance C. Thurner teaches history at Rutgers Newark. His research and writing address the production of knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Mexico. He can be reached at lancet@rutgers.edu.

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