The Anthropocene and Other Stories: from India to the Globe

In the debate over the Anthropocene, both structure and content matter. In this talk I consider the power of entrenched environmental narratives and outline efforts to evaluate them, first on a more local scale, using archaeological, historical, and paleoenvironmental data from India and using examples from environmental science, public education, and archaeology. Upscaling local and even continent-scale studies requires new strategies; I close by discussing the work of the international scientific working group LandCover6k, which is aggregating, commensurating, and analyzing land use and land cover data from history, archaeology, and paleoecology in order to both improve climate models and facilitate rethinking of our intellectual frameworks for understanding the impacts of our species on the earth. Here, too, in the world of climate modeling, we can see the power of taken-for-granted environmental narratives guiding basic empirical assumptions, a process with significant implications for model outcomes. About the speaker Kathleen D. Morrison is the Sally and Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor in Anthropology and Curator of South Asia at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. Her research focuses on the historical ecology of Southern Asia, especially changes in agriculture, land use, and environment in southern India. This work integrates paleoenvironmental analysis, archaeology, and the analysis of texts and architecture. Particular research interests include the development of elite cuisines, colonialism and imperialism, Holocene hunting and gathering, biodiversity, and the political and biological consequences of irrigation and land use transformations.