Dr. Rosalind Warner | Post Anthropocene. | CACOR Zoom Presentation | 2022-07-06

Speaker: Dr. Rosalind Warner

Topic: Post Anthropocene.

Time: Jul 6, 2022 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)

 Summary:

Covid-19 disrupted the world and people’s lives in previously unimaginable ways.  It seems likely that future disasters, whether natural or human-made, will be even more disruptive and challenging.  Some experts argue that human societies have now departed from the comfortable conditions of the Holocene Epoch, the current period of geologic time which dates to approximately 12,000 years ago.  During the Holocene, human civilization has rapidly grown and flourished.  Some experts argue we are now entering a new epoch, termed the Anthropocene, due to the increasing influence of human activity on the earth’s climate and ecosystem.  There is little agreement on what this ‘next epoch’ looks like, but in this talk I will raise some questions about how the Anthropocene concept changes our perceptions of the human-nature relationship, and how we can use our increasing awareness of an Anthropocentric earth to improve policy, governance, and planning.  Taking a ‘long view’ of the history of human-nature relations, this talk will use examples to analyze how our perception of the human place in nature changes and how we can, as a result, learn to better prepare and reduce loss and damage from future disasters.

Biography:

Dr. Rosalind Warner is a Continuing College Professor in Political Science at Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC.  She has almost 30 years of experience teaching subjects including international development, environmental politics, and Canadian government.  She has researched and published on topics like ecological modernization, global environmental governance, protected areas governance in North America, environmental discourses, nature rights, health and security, and environment and trade in Canadian foreign policy.  Dr. Warner is currently a Research Fellow with the Earth System Governance Project, Board member for the BC Council for International Cooperation, Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Board Member of the Canadian Environmental Network, and Board Member of the Okanagan Sustainability Leadership Council.

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