Editorial

This edition’s editorial was written by Ken McLeod who wrote a fascinating paper on Learning to Think Like a Planet. Ken was the leader of the Anthropocene movement at the time of writing this paper. This editorial covers the first page of his paper which can be down-loaded free of charge from Academia.edu. (An earlier version of the paper is here.)

“The Anthropocene – literally, the age of humans.

“The term entered popular usage as the proposed designation of a new geological epoch generally held to date from the 1950s. But over recent years it has been widely adopted across the social sciences and humanities to signify a transition in human affairs in response to changes in the earth system triggered by humankind. The Anthropocene transition is about what we do collectively to reshape the most fundamental of our relationships which has become deeply dysfunctional – our place in the Earth's precious web of life. Ultimately it is about what it means to be human in the 21st century and beyond.

“There has never been anything like 7.6 billion humans on planet Earth. There has never been another species able to invade and occupy almost every ecological niche in the biosphere from the equator to the poles. There has never been another species able to force so many of its planetary cohabitants into an unequal contest for habitat and critical environmental resources as to trigger a 6th planetary extinction spasm. And there has never been a single species capable of disrupting the life support systems of the planet.

“From the very earliest chapters of our story humans have altered their immediate environment. But now, for the first time in the evolution of human cultures, our impacts on the Earth System have become inter-connected, systemic, and global.

“This is in part a function of our sheer weight of numbers and of the even greater numbers of the animals we breed for our use, currently estimated as 70 billion each year. It’s also a function of our ever more powerful technologies and the capacity they give us to exploit and manipulate the environment. But most significantly it’s a function of a globalised system of hyper-production and consumption that depends on continuous growth and an unceasing flow of raw materials to maintain its stability.

“We are a species in swarming mode consuming our host, with a technological hubris largely unrestrained by ecological or ethical limitations, driven by a globalised economic ponzi scheme.

“Hence, the Anthropocene – the age of humans.”

Now, to put all that into verse, click the button to watch a song clip from Australian singer songwriter, Mike McLellan.

The following resources on the Anthropocene are available from Academia.edu. (The platform considers them to be related to Ken McLeod’s paper, Learning to think like a planet.) Note that you will need a subscription to this platform to access them.

• Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill (2011). The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. [link]

• Richard Slaughter (2012). Welcome to the anthropocene. [link]

• Henk Oosterling (2015). Ecophilosophy course lecture 1. Our Eco-relationalal condition. In this first lecture on ecophilosophy a genealogy is sketched from Ernst Haeckel via Gregory Bateson to French thinkers of difference like Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. Their core concepts are applied to outline an ecosophy that fits our current anthropocene condition with an emphasis on technology, appl… [link]

• Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016). The shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, history and us. [link]

• Gil Germain (2018). Questioning the Anthropocene: A Critical Assessment of the Age of Humankind. [link]

• Meera Subramanian (2019). Humans versus Earth: the quest to define the Anthropocene. [link]

• Kanika Godara (2019). Welcome to the new time, to our epoch: The Anthropocene. [link]

• Brad Tabas (2021). Outer Space, Expansive Sustainable Development, and the Future of the Environmental Humanities. [link]

• Wiebren Johannes (Wijnand) Boonstra (2021). Closing the gap between knowing and causing the Anthropocene. [link]

• hind sadik (2022). Welcome to The Anthropocene: Humanity's Epoch. [link]

• Ron Nielsen (2023). Towards a better understanding of the Anthropocene. [link]

• André Francisco F Pilon (2023). Reframing Relationships Between Humans and the Earth: The "Anthropocene", a New Ideology to Justify the Status Quo. [link]

Congratulations

We are pleased to confirm that the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC) has registered the AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF ECOLOGICAL AGRICULTURE CO-OPERATIVE LTD (ABN: 90643971996) as a charity.

The effective date of registration is 21/01/2024.

Our thanks to Board Director in 2022-23, Stephen Clarkson, who was instrumental in applying for charity status. We now intend to apply for Tax Deductibility Recipient (TDR) status.

Carbon and agroforestry

The following story is from the USA and is reproduced here from Regenerative News, which is an international newsletter. Despite being about America you may find echoes of thinking in Australia. The story is about carbon but also about agroforestry.

A perspective from Emergence Magazine & Merlin Sheldrake

As we sit here in 2024 looking back over the past couple of hundred years we can gather an impression that life is like lawn bowls – it’s been subjected to a bias that causes the bowl to swing in one direction in particular. This has led us to a road-less-travelled moment where we look back and say “if only we had taken that other road”. Well, what is that road? This question is picked up in the following discussion between biologist Merlin Sheldrake and David Abram. See if you can glean the issue from the following paragraph!

From my perspective as a biologist, interdisciplin-arity is satisfying for other reasons. What we call arts and sciences both arise from our faculties of imagination, wonder, and curiosity – regarding the phenomena unfolding around us and regarding our own ability to meaningfully experience these phenomena. The bifurcation between the “sciences” and the “arts” – itself founded on a centuries-old bifurcation of the world into “primary” quantities and “secondary” qualities – has erected all sorts of confusing boundaries that we stumble over, mistaking them for natural features of our minds. Scientists, lawyers, judges, artists, and philosophers are – and have always been – emotional, creative, and intuitive, whole human beings, navigating worlds that were never made to be catalogued and systematized. All have to interpret and communicate their insights, often ambiguous, uncertain, and contradictory, using imaginative language composed of metaphor and analogy. I think we’d all have much more fun if we could dispel the delusion that these activities belong in entirely different departments of human life.

Text by Merlin Sheldrake, in Honoring the Wild Proliferation of Earthly Perspectives, Emergence Magazine, February 15, 2024. Source.

Timely videos that relate to Regenerative Agriculture

• Video 1 is called Six Inches of Soil. It is about three young farmers and their ambition to farm ecologically, or if you prefer, regeneratively.

• Video 2: Feeding Tomorrow. The film maps the profound problems of industrial farming and its history.

• Video 3: Poisoned – the dirty truth about your food.

These videos are from the UK and the organisation Sustainable Food Trust, and touch on topics relevant to Australian farming. Click the button to read more.

Also highly recommended, a Youtube video on regenerative agriculture from Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA). Click the button to view it.

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Sharing the good oil!

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Editor: Kerry Cochrane
Design & Presentation: Tony McKenzie