Cymene Howe is a cultural anthropologist and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States. Her research has focused on environment, inequalities and the anthropology of climate change. She has also been active in multi-modal approaches to knowledge and public anthropology through podcasting, documentary filmmaking and installations, most notably the Okjökull memorial.
Howe has conducted anthropological field work in Nicaragua, Mexico, Iceland and the United States and she has been the recipient of several research grants, including from the National Science Foundation and The Fulbright Program. She has been an invited Society Scholar in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University and a visiting fellow at Durham University, U.K. From 2015-2018 she served as co-editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology and was founding faculty of The Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) at Rice University (now the Center for Environmental Studies).[ citation needed ]
With Dominic Boyer, she carried out one of the first major anthropological studies on renewable energy transition.[ citation needed ] The research took place in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec, site of the world’s densest concentration of terrestrial wind parks and became the subject of two books, Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Howe) and Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Boyer). [1] Since 2016, she has also co-produced over 200 episodes of the Cultures of Energy podcast [2] with Boyer.
From 2016-2018, Howe led research in Iceland for “Melt: The social life of ice at the top of the world,” that centered on the cultural impact of Icelandic glacial loss. [3] Based on that project, with Boyer in 2018, she produced and co-directed a documentary film about Okjökull (Ok glacier) the first major Icelandic glacier to be declassified as a glacier due to global warming. The educational film, Not Ok: A little movie about a small glacier at the end of the world, [4] featured the voice of Jón Gnarr as Ok mountain.
In August 2019, Howe and Boyer organized the installation of a memorial to Okjökull, the first of Iceland’s major glaciers to be destroyed by climate change. The memorial event was widely covered by the international news media. [5] [6] [7]
The Anthropocene ( ) was the name for a proposed geological epoch, dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth up to the present day. This impact affects Earth's geology, landscape, limnology, ecosystems and climate. The effects of human activities on Earth can be seen for example in biodiversity loss and climate change. Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, to as recently as the 1960s as a starting date. The biologist Eugene F. Stoermer is credited with first coining and using the term anthropocene informally in the 1980s; Paul J. Crutzen re-invented and popularized the term. However, in 2024 the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) rejected the Anthropocene Epoch proposal for inclusion in the Geologic Time Scale.
The environmental humanities is an interdisciplinary area of research, drawing on the many environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged in the humanities over the past several decades, in particular environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and environmental communication. Environmental humanities employs humanistic questions about meaning, culture, values, ethics, and responsibilities to address pressing environmental problems. The environmental humanities aim to help bridge traditional divides between the sciences and the humanities, as well as between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of relating to the natural world and the place of humans within it. The field also resists the traditional divide between "nature" and "culture," showing how many "environmental" issues have always been entangled in human questions of justice, labor, and politics. Environmental humanities is also a way of synthesizing methods from different fields to create new ways of thinking through environmental problems.
Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings or Angela Marie Rawlings is a Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist-researcher who works with languages as dominant exploratory material. Their practice seeks and interrogates relationality between bodies—be they human, more-than-human, other-than, non.
Gísli Pálsson is an Icelandic anthropologist and academic. He is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Iceland, formerly a professor at the University of Oslo.
Ok is a shield volcano in Iceland, to the west of Langjökull. It erupted during interglacials in the Pleistocene, and is in proximity to the Prestahnúkur and Oddnýjarhnjúkur-Langjökull volcanic systems. The volcano was once topped by the Okjökull glacier, which may now only be represented by isolated patches of ice, even if still shown on current maps. At its top is the crater lake of Blávatn, which can freeze over.
Iceland is a world leader in renewable energy. 100% of the electricity in Iceland's electricity grid is produced from renewable resources. In terms of total energy supply, 85% of the total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources. Geothermal energy provided about 65% of primary energy in 2016, the share of hydropower was 20%, and the share of fossil fuels was 15%.
Iceland has a subpolar oceanic climate near the southern coastal area and tundra inland in the highlands. The island lies in the path of the North Atlantic Current, which makes its climate more temperate than would be expected for its latitude just south of the Arctic Circle. This effect is aided by the Irminger Current, which also helps to moderate the island's temperature. The weather in Iceland is notoriously variable.
Greta Gaard is an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker. Gaard's academic work in the realms of ecocriticism and ecocomposition is widely cited by scholars in the disciplines of composition and literary criticism. Her theoretical work extending ecofeminist thought into queer theory, queer ecology, vegetarianism, and animal liberation has been influential within women's studies. A cofounder of the Minnesota Green Party, Gaard documented the transition of the U.S. Green movement into the Green Party of the United States in her book, Ecological Politics. She is currently a professor of English at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a community faculty member in Women's Studies at Metropolitan State University, Twin Cities.
Environmental issues are disruptions in the usual function of ecosystems. Further, these issues can be caused by humans or they can be natural. These issues are considered serious when the ecosystem cannot recover in the present situation, and catastrophic if the ecosystem is projected to certainly collapse.
Cara Judea Alhadeff is an American photographer, performance artist, writer, activist, and yoga teacher. She has work in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her photographs have been called "unsettling" and "subtly disturbing". In 2009 Alhadeff received the BRIO award. Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological Leadership, Alhadeff has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including the critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era and Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene. Alhadeff's theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for international films and public television. She has been interviewed by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica Radio, NPR, and the New Art Examiner. Alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Karen Barad, Bill McKibben, James E. Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G Humpty Hump, Eve Ensler, Henry Giroux, Alphonso Lingus, Avital Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and artists. Alhadeff's photographs and performance-videos have been defended by freedom-of-speech organizations, and are in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former professor of Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff and her family live in their eco-art installation repurposed school bus where they perform and teach creative-zero-waste living, social permaculture, and cultural diversity.
Ecomodernism is an environmental philosophy which argues that technological development can protect nature and improve human wellbeing through eco-economic decoupling, i.e., by separating economic growth from environmental impacts.
Climate change disproportionately impacts indigenous peoples around the world when compared to non-indigenous peoples. These impacts are particularly felt in relation to health, environments, and communities. Some Indigenous scholars of climate change argue that these disproportionately felt impacts are linked to ongoing forms of colonialism. Indigenous peoples found throughout the world have strategies and traditional knowledge to adapt to climate change, through their understanding and preservation of their environment. These knowledge systems can be beneficial for their own community's adaptation to climate change as expressions of self-determination as well as to non-Indigenous communities.
Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement that envisions and works toward actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community. The "solar" represents solar energy as a renewable energy source and an optimistic vision of the future that rejects climate doomerism, while the "punk" refers to do it yourself and the countercultural, post-capitalist, and decolonial aspects of creating such a future.
Okjökull was a glacier in western Iceland on top of the shield volcano Ok.
The term collapsology is a neologism used to designate the transdisciplinary study of the risks of collapse of industrial civilization. It is concerned with the general collapse of societies induced by climate change, as well as "scarcity of resources, vast extinctions, and natural disasters." Although the concept of civilizational or societal collapse had already existed for many years, collapsology focuses its attention on contemporary, industrial, and globalized societies.
Dominic Boyer is an American-born cultural anthropologist, writer, filmmaker and podcaster whose work focuses on relationships between energy and environment, media and politics. He is the son of historian John W. Boyer.
Marinel Sumook Ubaldo is a Filipina climate activist from the Philippines who helped to organise the first youth climate strike in her country. She testified as a community witness for the Philippines Commission on Human Rights as part of their investigation into corporate responsibility and whether the effects of climate change can be considered violations of Filipinos’ human rights.
Project Pressure is a charity with an ecological and climate focus. Their expressed mission is to create impactful projects that triangulating art, science and activism resulting in impactful actions on environmental issues. The global environmental charity was founded in 2008, with the mission of visualizing the climate crisis. Project Pressure uses art as a touchpoint to inspire action and behavioral change. At the time, Project Pressure focused on work surrounding glacier mass loss.
Anna Maria Grear is an English academic, author, and political activist. Grear is the founder of several academic and activist organisations, including the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE) and the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, where she is editor-in-chief. Grear is adjunct professor of law at The University of Waikato, New Zealand and was Professor of Law and Theory at Cardiff University until August 31, 2023. She has written for such international newspapers as The Wire and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The Capitalocene is a proposed epoch of human and natural history, posed as an alternative to the “Anthropocene” era. The Anthropocene is a geologic era defined by the human species' impact on the Earth, as exemplified by deforestation, mass extinction, and the introduction of manmade waste materials into the environment, but above all by anthropogenic global warming. Scholars of the Capitalocene, in contrast, attribute these changes not to humanity as such, but to the capitalist mode of production and its need for infinite growth, its dependence on fossil fuels, and its compulsion of capitalists to seek profit without regard to “external” or long-term consequences.