8 February 2022, h 4:00-6:00 pm
Elena Casetta (University of Turin), “Has climate change ended nature?”
Abstract: In 1989, in a famous book entitled The End of Nature, Bill McKibben claimed that, because of large-scale climate change produced by human technologies, no place on Earth could still be considered natural. In 2000, at a conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Paul J. Crutzen proclaimed that we live in the Anthropocene, a new phase in the history of the planet, in which humankind would have imposed itself as a decisive influence on the global ecology, interfering with its fundamental systems. Is nature really ended? And, if so, are we left with nothing more to do than mourning its end? In this talk, I will shortly reconstruct how humans allegedly ended nature; hence I will analyse two different possible readings of the “end of nature” claim, namely the ontological and the epistemological one, showing that the first one is either false or unfounded, while the second is possibly true. In the light of this analysis and with the help of some excerpts from the latest IPCC assessment report, I will sketchily tackle two questions: which entities and processes are the subject of our environmental concern? Which is the best approach and the current state of our knowledge of those entities and processes?