What does the Baltic Sea drill core reveal about microplastics and the difficulty of defining their sources? Part of Unearthing the Present in May 2022.

What is the new geological epoch made of? Unearthing the Present connected the geological analysis of the present with a discussion of the changing scope for social and political agency.

Lakes, seas, estuaries, and wetlands provide important archives of humanity’s reconfiguration of life in the Anthropocene.

In addition to its position as a pillar of New Orleans cuisine, the humble oyster has also taken on another, more troubling role—serving as an indicator of water contamination in the Mississippi River Delta and the Lousiana Gulf.

This seminar brings concepts of time, layers, and sediment into close contact with the human sciences, the arts, and Pierre Part, a community who live according to the movements of the River.

Essays from members of the AWG and other researchers discussing some of the crucial aspects that make the Mississippi River an icon of global Anthropocene transformations.

Is there a chemical shortcut for producing social change?

What does it take for the life sciences to reflect on themselves and their conceptual models in the era of the technosphere?

How does the current notion of “spheres” infiltrate thinking about the bio-techno-sphere, which today seems the best descriptive model for our own habitat?

Historian of science Sabine Höhler explores the technoscientific motives and consequences of experimenting with self-contained ecospheres.

The technological dissolution between internal and external conditions for life is manifest in the way seeds are handled. A series of conversations explores the practices and ideologies behind the collapse of modification and mutation. A subsequent performance of micro-processions will conjure historical and current moments of the agro-industrial technosphere.

Untangling processes of environmental change and extreme environments mediated by and through technology.

Life cannot be coded. With unexpected genetic deviations, matter bites back at the colonizing hand of man.

In his feverish essay concerning the role of these efficient, yet paltry, energy distribution devices called humans, science writer Dorion Sagan exits the Anthropocene in pursuit of epochs, evolutionary constellations and thermodynamic possibilities beyond consensus models.

The historical precursor to the technosphere concept is Vladimir Vernadsky’s holistic delineation of the biosphere, a grand scheme of entangling living and non-living matter.

In his coining of the term “technosphere,” geoscientist Peter Haff attempts to describe the physical properties of a human-technological system that takes on a role equivalent to the biosphere or hydrosphere.

A look into the emergence of the technosphere concept and its implications for environmental governance.

Biology is resilient because it is suboptimal at all scales. The technosphere, however, seems to take the route of increased optimization. Are we doomed?

An exercise in entanglement of Caroline Picard

Within the technosphere, earth becomes energy, people become populations and space becomes sphere. But how to make visible this network of flows coursing through our bodies?

There is no alternative to placing the economy within the limits of the biosphere. This handbook outlines a new meric for the valuation of nature.

The biosphere has budded off a second global “sphere,” the technosphere, a technology-based system on which humans now depend—and which they find hard to control. Which tools are needed to ensure human survival in the technosphere?

The Patagonian fences as political actors of division, limitation, control and order

A critical reflection on the ideology of exponential growth.

A global-resources “rush” has led to chronic socio-ecosystemic deficits, thus creating the conditions for local- and global-state shifts within the biosphere and/or society, with unprecedented loss of resilience at all levels. Assessing our resources and permanently accounting for their usage and allocation are imperative to imagining and designing societies that are socio-ecosystemically resilient.

To avoid normative assumptions of the model builders being implemented into the models, Canadian ecologist Crawford S. Holling developed the concept of adaptive modeling.