Living in the Anthropocene
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Igor Krupnik is a curator of the Arctic and Northern Ethnology collections and the head of the Ethnology Division at the National Museum of Natural History. Trained as a cultural anthropologist and ecologist, he has worked for more than four decades in indigenous communities in Alaska and the Bering Strait region. His areas of expertise include modern cultures, indigenous ecological knowledge, and climate change and its impact on the people of the Arctic. He has written and coedited more than twenty books, catalogs, and heritage source books and was the lead science curator for the 2006 Smithsonian exhibition Arctic: A Friend Acting Strangely.
Thomas E. Lovejoy became fascinated with biological diversity and the natural world at the age of fourteen and now works on the interface of science and public policy. He first went to the Amazon in 1965 and did his graduate work in those rain forests, earning a PhD from Yale University in 1971. In 1980, he was the first both to use the term biological diversity and to make projections of species extinctions. His research program on forest fragments in the Brazilian Amazon is ongoing after thirty-seven years. He has coedited three books on biodiversity and climate change (Global Warming and Biological Diversity, Climate Change and Biodiversity, and a forthcoming work from Yale University Press).
George E. Luber is the chief of the Climate and Health Program at the National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since joining the CDC in 2002, he has served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer and epidemiologist. He is a convening lead author for the U.S. National Climate Assessment and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report.
Joanna Marsh is the senior curator of contemporary interpretation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. From 2007 to 2015, she served as the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art at the museum. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Marsh held curatorial positions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Her most recent exhibitions, The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art (2014) and Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow (2010), focus on the interrelation of art, science, and humanity. She holds a BA from Cornell University and an MA in postwar and contemporary art from Sotheby’s Institute, London.
Douglas J. McCauley began his career as a fisherman in the Port of Los Angeles but ultimately migrated to marine science and now serves as an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has degrees in political science and biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from Stanford University. He did postdoctoral research at Stanford, Princeton University, and UC Berkeley. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in the Ocean Sciences and the director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative.
Sean M. McMahon is a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and the Temperate Program coordinator for the Smithsonian’s Forest Global Earth Observatory. He received an MS in statistics and a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He held a postdoctoral research position at Duke University before joining the Smithsonian in 2010. His research focuses on current and future dynamics of temperate and tropical forests.
J. R. McNeill is a university professor and professor of history at Georgetown University. He has won two Fulbright awards, a Guggenheim fellowship, a MacArthur grant, and a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center. His books include Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World and Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914, which won the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the Toynbee Prize for “academic and public contributions to humanity.” He has served as the vice president of the American Historical Association and the president of the American Society for Environmental History.
Karen E. Milbourne has been a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art since 2008. Previously, she was an associate curator of African art and the department head for the Arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific Islands at the Baltimore Museum of Art and, prior to that, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Kentucky. Her expertise includes the arts and pageantry of western Zambia and contemporary African art. Milbourne received her PhD in art history from the University of Iowa in 2003 and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship.
Rob Nixon is the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University. From 1999 to 2015, he held the Rachel Carson Professorship in English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His writing and teaching have a strong focus on struggles for environmental justice in the Global South. His most recent book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, received four prizes, including an American Book Award.
Ari Novy is the executive director of the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, DC, and a research collaborator in the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Botany. He is trained as an evolutionary ecologist and has research experience in a variety of plant-related areas, including invasion biology, conservation, horticultural improvement, beekeeping management, plant evolution, and agricultural economics and policy.
Rick Potts is a paleoanthropologist and the director of the Human Origins Program, based at the National Museum of Natural History. Leading field excavations in the East African Rift Valley and in China, he has researched the effect of environmental instability on human evolution, attracting wide attention and stimulating new studies in earth science, paleontology, and experimental and computational biology. He is a curator of the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins and a coauthor of its companion book What Does It Mean to Be Human?
Stephen J. Pyne’s interest in fire began with fifteen seasons as a North Rim Longshot at Grand Canyon National Park, followed by three seasons writing fire plans for the National Park Service. His Cycle of Fire suite is a survey of fire on Earth. His other major books include The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica, How the Canyon Became Grand, and Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery. He is a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University and a past president of the American Society for Environmental History.
Lisa Ruth Rand earned her doctorate in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research examines the environmental history of near-Earth space, focusing on how space junk became a subject of international environmental concern during the Cold War.
Peter H. Raven served as the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and the George Engelmann Professor of Botany at Washington University for thirty-nine years (1971–2010). A well-known student of plant systematics and evolution and a leading conservationist, he is a member of many academies of science (United States, United Kingdom, India, China, Russia, and Brazil among them) and the recipient of the U.S. National Medal of Science. He is the coauthor of the globally best-selling botany text Biology of Plants and the author and coauthor of many other books and papers.
Torben C. Rick is a curator of human environmental interactions and the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. His research focuses on the archaeology and historical ecology of coastal and island peoples, especially on the North American Pacific and Atlantic coasts. He has field projects on California’s Channel Islands and on the Chesapeake Bay, where researchers from a variety of disciplines (including anthropology, biology, and ecology) collaborate and focus on ancient and modern human environmental interactions.
Holly H. Shimizu was the executive director of the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, DC, for more than fifteen years. During that time, in addition to developing major exhibits and programs, she led conservation efforts, including the cofounding of the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES). Shimizu has received numerous awards for her work and is currently a teacher, write
r, horticultural consultant, and leader of botanical tours.
Jeffrey K. Stine is a curator for environmental history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He has served as a book series editor at Resources for the Future Press and the University of Akron Press and is a past president of the American Society for Environmental History. His books include Mixing the Waters: Environment, Politics, and the Building of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, Twenty Years of Science in the Public Interest, and America’s Forested Wetlands: From Wasteland to Valued Resource.
Corine Wegener is a cultural heritage preservation officer in the Office of the Provost/Under Secretary for Museums and Research at the Smithsonian Institution and manages the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative. Since 2010, the SCRI has provided disaster recovery training in Haiti, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Mali, Nepal, and the United States, as well as cultural heritage training for U.S. military and law enforcement personnel.
Edward O. Wilson is a university research professor emeritus at Harvard University. As one of the world’s preeminent biologists and naturalists, he has received more than one hundred national and international awards, including the National Medal of Science and two Pulitzer Prizes for General Nonfiction (for On Human Nature and The Ants). His most recent book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, concludes his trilogy begun by The Social Conquest of Earth and The Meaning of Human Existence.
Scott L. Wing was born in New Orleans and grew up there and in Durham, North Carolina. His childhood interest in fossils was reinforced by fieldwork in Wyoming while he was a student at Yale University. After completing his doctorate there, he was a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey. He moved to the Smithsonian Institution in 1984 and has spent much of his career studying past periods of global warming.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Inspiration for this edited volume sprang from a series of workshops, symposia, and informal discussions organized by scholars and scientists from across the Smithsonian Institution. It has been a pleasure and a remarkable learning experience to work with the dedicated group of colleagues who led the Smithsonian’s Living in the Anthropocene initiative, and we are deeply grateful to the entire team, which included, besides us, Bill Allman, Kelly Chance, Pierre Comizzoli, Michelle Delaney, Christine France, Eric Hollinger, Tim Johnson, Christine Jones, Liz Kirby, Robert Leopold, Odile Madden, Sean McMahon, Jennifer McMillan, Karen Milbourne, Jane Passman, Rick Potts, Barbara Rehm, Torben Rick, Corine Wegener, and Scott Wing.
Many others within the Smithsonian contributed to the initiative, among them Martin Collins, Catherine Denial, Bill DiMichele, Bert Drake, Emmett Duffy, Jessica Faison, William Fitzhugh, Johnny Gibbons, Elizabeth Kennedy Gische, Brian Gratwicke, Peter Haydock, Kristofer Helgen, the late Len Hirsch, Peter Jakab, Andrew Johnston, Justin Kasper, Jonathan Kavalier, Igor Krupnik, Erin Kuprewicz, Joanna Marsh, Patrick Megonigal, Whitman Miller, Steven Monfort, Suzan Murray, Eva Pell, Ira Rubinoff, Melissa Songer, Maggie Stone, Gabrielle Tayac, Kristina Anderson Teixeira, Jonathan Thompson, Jim Wood, and Joe Wright. Contributors from outside the Smithsonian included Thad Allen, Richard Alley, Subhankar Banerjee, Lindsay Clarkson, Elizabeth Cottrell, James Fleming, Thomas Friedman, James Hack, Drew Jones, Chris Jordan, Rachel Kyte, Kimberlyn Leary, Thomas Lovejoy, George Luber, Charles Mann, Humphrey Morris, Donald Moss, Rob Nixon, Sabine O’Hara, Andrew Revkin, Gavin Schmidt, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Woody Turner, Daniel Wildcat, Timothy Wirth, and Lynne Zeavin.
For their ongoing support, we thank Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton, former Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough, Smithsonian Acting Provost Richard Kurin, and the directors of our respective museums: Kirk Johnson of the National Museum of Natural History and John Gray of the National Museum of American History. The Living in the Anthropocene initiative benefited from funds provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In addition, W. John Kress extends his personal thanks to Elizabeth and Phil Ryan for their support of our efforts to understand the Anthropocene and to his wife, Lindsay Clarkson, for her encouragement and engaging discussions. Jeffrey K. Stine is indebted to Jonathan Cobb, Evelyn Hankins, Ezra Heitowit, Lexi Lord, Mark Madison, Harry Rand, Jim Roan, Marc Rothenberg, Michael Brian Schiffer, Roger Sherman, Barbara Stauffer, Deborah Jean Warner, Helena Wright, and—especially—his wife, Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette.