Disciplinary Variations on the Anthropocene - Temporality and Epistemic Authority Response to Kyle Nichols and Bina Gogineni

While not directly related to the theme of this workshop, the focal concern of this paper impinges on the issues of nature and value, perhaps a little more urgently and a little more directly.

This is my second encounter with this paper, and I am impressed by the exemplary collaboration between the humanities and the sciences it represents and prefigures. I am also impressed by the illumining analysis of the Anthropocene debates in the geosciences that Gogineni and Nichols provide,
and the concomitant proposal for greater integration of and greater cooperation between the humanities and the sciences, at the level of both problem description and problem solving.

I am very sympathetic to this proposal since it is more or less identical to one I have been making in my own writings on the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene not only names a new geological era that shatters all Holocenic assumptions about the climatic stability of the Earth and its living systems; it
also reveals the entwinement of human history and natural history, of environmental justice and social justice. Under such circumstances it is not enough for academics to carry on their activities as they have done so in the past. The Anthropocene calls for more than an urgent shift of scholarly attention; it calls for an unprecedented degree of cooperation and collaboration across the disciplines of the sciences and the humanities.

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