With great interest we have read Ruddiman’s intriguing article which is in favor of placing the start of the Anthropocene at 5–8 millennia BP instead of the late quarter of the 18th century. He shows how land exploitation for agriculture and animal husbandry may have led to enhanced emissions of CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere, thereby modifying the expected changes in the concentrations of these...

www.frontiersinecology.org I derived from a species’ range is central to the science of ecology. Current patterns of species and physiological trait distributions contain important information about plant functional relationships to climate and other environmental controls (Cody and Mooney 1978; Davis 1986; Bonan and Sirois 1992; Kearney and Porter 2009; Rödder et al. 2011). In a foundational p...

Human consumption patterns exceed planetary boundaries and stress on the biosphere can be expected to worsen. The recent “Paris Agreement” (COP21) represents a major international attempt to address risk associated with climate change through rapid decarbonisation. The mechanisms for implementation are yet to be determined and, while various large-scale geoengineering projects have been propose...

Meeting the ever-increasing needs of the Earth's human population without excessively reducing biological diversity is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, suggesting that new approaches to biodiversity conservation are required. One idea rapidly gaining momentum-as well as opposition-is to incorporate the values of biodiversity into decision-making using economic methods. Here, we d...

Though the term ‘Anthropocene’ has become dominant in discourses surrounding climate emergency, its globalising tendencies risk discouraging grassroots action. This article argues, therefore, that order to better understand crisis, a more local approach is needed. Folklore suggested as one such way specific impacts of Anthropocene can be read. To investigate, this analyses folklore Máiréad Ní M...

The Geoscope is an instrument for globally comparative observation and analysis of regions with respect to measurements that have an impact on sustainability. In this sense, the Geoscope is an observation instrument for the anthropocene. This is the era which humankind has just entered and where the tight interlinkages between human and natural environment have become obvious and are taken into...

The complex problems of wildlife conservation during the current stage of the Anthropocene – the ‘Great Acceleration’ – are forcing us to develop an alternative to the traditional (utilitarian und deontological) approaches within animal ethics. I will put forward Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach as a promising alternative to these traditional approaches, with the proviso that the current v...

The fact that nonhuman animals share the power of communication, plus the likelihood that some share our capacity for ideation, demands reevaluation of why human ideas matter, and especially whether they adequately convey a sense of our place within the rest of nature. Nonhuman beings and phenomena may be intrinsically unhuman, but are not necessarily less important than us. Analysis of this di...