One point of discussion about last week’s Anthropocene lecture that particularly caught my attention is when we\u00a0described\u00a0the current era as the “age of humans”. By calling it the age of humans, we actively put ourselves in the center.\u00a0We, so it seems, are the main protagonists of this era. The dominant species on which everything depends on and which undermines\u00a0the presence of anything else around\u00a0us. We do not only “rule” the world but also destroy it through our unsustainable life style.<\/p>\n
The term age of humans does not only remind us of\u00a0the hierarchical\u00a0structure on which we have placed us above everything, but it also carries the\u00a0subliminal message on how evanescent everything is. Once upon a time,\u00a0this very planet was\u00a0primarily inhabited\u00a0by dinosaurs. We describe this era as the “age of dinosaurs”. The\u00a0age\u00a0of dinosaurs ended\u00a0abruptly through the impact of\u00a0a\u00a06-mile-wide asteroid striking\u00a0the Earth. Although extinction is a natural process, human activity increased the extinction\u00a0rate by an estimate of\u00a01,000 – 10,000 times. If we don’t start\u00a0placing us in relation to the environment and stop being so self-centred the “age of humans” will be history\u00a0much sooner than we think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One point of discussion about last week’s Anthropocene lecture that particularly caught my attention is when we\u00a0described\u00a0the current era as the “age of humans”. By calling it the age of humans, we actively put ourselves in the center.\u00a0We, so it… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5675,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[156948],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5675"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions\/324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/humanslashnature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}