Anthropogenic Landscapes, Human Action and the Process of Co-Construction with other Species: Making Anthromes in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Abstract:We are in the Anthropocene. For millennia, human actions have been shaping the world to the degree that they are inscribed in the geological and ecological record. Recently, this has been occurring with increasing speed and influence. This means we need to be asking integrative and effective questions about the world and how we relate to and in it. Human niche construction has broad and deep effects not just on landscapes and environments, but on the myriad of other beings sharing space with us. Humans are self-appointed ecosystem managers and lead actors in seeking sustainability for planetary and local ecosystems. In order to accomplish this, we need to better understand how anthromes are shaped, inhabited and altered. To this end, we present two different examples of anthropogenic landscapes; one in Ethiopia and one in Bali, Indonesia. These are landscapes that are co-constructed by multiple species through complex webs of ecologies, economies and histories and represent the way that humans are drawn into relationships with non-humans; relationships which in turn alter landscapes.

A Clear Past and a Murky Future: Life in the Anthropocene on the Pampana River, Sierra Leone

“…The co-evolutionary process of niche construction is argued to have greater explanatory power of species evolution than the standard evolutionary synthesis, which focuses on natural selection as the sole driver of evolution, and is included as part of the extended evolutionary synthesis [56]. This process of interactive co-evolution holds particularly strong for humans due to our immense creativity and capacity for adapting our environment as we respond to the ecological contexts and processes we engage with at local to global scales [6,23,57]. HNCT specifically, then, is the process by which humans proactively modify and reactively respond to the selection pressures we face in everyday life [6,23,30].…”

“…This process of interactive co-evolution holds particularly strong for humans due to our immense creativity and capacity for adapting our environment as we respond to the ecological contexts and processes we engage with at local to global scales [6,23,57]. HNCT specifically, then, is the process by which humans proactively modify and reactively respond to the selection pressures we face in everyday life [6,23,30].…”

“…Ethnographic work, paired with a thorough understanding of the local ecological contexts, can in tandem integrate the complexity of everyday life with evolutionary frameworks, such as HNCT, to better understand both the proximate and potential ultimate outcomes of human-caused disruptive environmental change [6,19,23,34]. We draw on this strength by using multiple lines of evidence including participant observation, interviews conducted by one of the co-authors (RAM), and focus group discussions to understand how the Pampana has changed, how this has affected the human niche of communities that live along the Pampana, and what this may signal about broader trends in human engagement with disruptive environmental change.…”

“…However, due to human activities, the rate and primary source of change now differs in intensity and scale than it did even in the recent past [2,6,[19][20][21]. Accumulated research suggests that we have entered (or created) a new epoch, the Anthropocene, which is defined as the period in which humans and human activities are the primary drivers of planetary change [3,[22][23][24][25][26]. The Anthropocene denotes a global shift, but it is the collective of local processes.…”

Classification and Characterization of Landscapes in the Territory of Adilabad District, Telangana, Deccan Region, India

“…Therefore, it can be accepted that agricultural land uses became dominant in landscapes through time and have replaced the original natural patch types, such as forests, by anthropogenic ones, such as fields, fallow lands, pasture lands or agricultural buildings. Before the invention of agriculture, it is supposed that man lived in equilibrium with its environment and that all landscapes were natural landscapes (natural environments) [7]. Even before the invention of agriculture, anthropogenic effects would have occurred; however, due to the low population density, the local (or even sub-patch) character of the land cover changes and the non-sedentary character of the populations involved, they can be ac- …”