It was a great week at the American Geophysical Union(AGU) Meeting in San Francisco, especially with the many sessions sponsored by IGBP – the international scientific program that brought you the Anthropocene– as part of its transition to Future Earth. I gave a talk on the emergence of humans as a global force in the Earth System based on my recent […]
Why did behaviorally modern humans and no other multicellular species in the history of the Earth gain the capacity to transform an entire planet? Biology alone cannot explain this – Homo sapiens is just another species in the genus Homo with a few distinctive traits- not including stone tools (common to all species in the genus) and fire (common to […]
The Human Landscapes Blog is back! Last year, I began an upgrade to WordPress – and got stuck- much harder than expected. More importantly, after starting to use twitter (@erleellis, @ecosynth, @globalyzer), I’d basically stopped blogging. Yet, I’d been feeling that something was missing – twitter isn’t a real replacement for blogging about the papers we publish and the work of others that […]