The wood storks of Lake Somerset

Multispecies landscapes of the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary event

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4464870
AutoresZachary Caple (0000-0002-0383-2844, Aarhus University, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume8
Fascículo5
Páginas1518-1537
Data de publicação2025-10-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/25148486251350860
OpenAlexW4412158832
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas33

Challenging the universality of the Anthropocene Epoch, this article argues for a new conceptualization of the planetary situation focused on the landscape complexities of the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary event . I ground this perspective with a historical and ethnographic tour of Lake Somerset, a water-filled phosphate pit in Central Florida that has become habitat for a colony of endangered wood storks. Displaced from their native Everglades, these storks utilize the lake's spoil-pile islands for their rookery. I argue that Lake Somerset, and the Holocene/Anthropocene transition generally, become legible by attending to processes of creative niche destruction: capital-generating disturbances that irreversibly alter the biophysical structure of space. At Lake Somerset, phosphate mining has locally eradicated the Holocene ecologies that came before and replaced them with pits and piles of mutilated soil that recolonize with invasive plants. The diasporic wood storks exemplify what I call a Holocene fragment-- a long-established ecological form that survives in the ruins of the Anthropocene. Utilizing tools of natural history observation, ethnography, and environmental history, I argue that multispecies researchers are uniquely positioned to track the Holocene/Anthropocene transition across the earth's surface--a critical practice for understanding shifting patterns of life and livability in this time of radical change

Anthropocene · Archaeology · Event (particle physics · Geography · Holocene · Archaeological Research and Protection · Ecology and biodiversity studies · Environmental Science · Geology and Paleoclimatology Research · Geology · Paleontology