A microcosm of the anthropocene

Intervention de Eduardo Brondizio

dans le cadre de l'IHDP (International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change)

There is a way of being in the Amazon that accepts the rhythms of nature, the slow cycle of seasonal flooding and droughts, spaces to expansive to be covered with human footprints. A historical sense of time in the Amazon remembers the recurring stories of development and bust, and unstoppable progression of colonization frontiers. Over the last 40 years, the Amazon is home to a new sense of time: the urgent and overwhelming acceleration of the Anthropocene. Over this period the region has been perhaps the greatest and most dynamic laboratory of policies, views of development, democratization and multiculturalism, political ideologies and environmental agendas. The region is also emblematic of the challenges faced by the social sciences in bridging the gap between what we observe in the field and what we see on the aggregate.