Facing the Anthropocene: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Humanities Center Fellows Research Workshop

This Workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from an anonymous donor, former Fellows, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.

The sustainability crisis is one of the most significant existential threats ever to face humanity. Addressing this crisis requires examining many aspects of nature and society, from agriculture, to politics, to ecosystem management, to energy grid construction, to immigration policy, to psychology. Responsible and effective decision-making in all of these areas calls for interdisciplinary collaborations and serious normative discussions. Facing the Anthropocene aims to help facilitate this bridge-building by bringing together scholars from a diversity of disciplines. Speakers include experts in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities who focus on the ethical dimensions of issues such as responsibility for mitigating climate change, climate migration, environmental justice and racial justice within the environmental movement, natural resource exploitation that is just to future generations, managing invasive species, the risks and benefits of adaptive and synthetic biology, and techno-optimism. Methodologically, the series explores relationships between a variety of ideals (moral, political, aesthetic) and scientific evidence in responsible environmental decision-making.