The wood storks of Lake Somerset

Multispecies landscapes of the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary event

Bibliographic Data

ID4464870
AuthorsZachary Caple (0000-0002-0383-2844, Aarhus University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume8
Issue5
Pages1518-1537
Publication date2025-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/25148486251350860
OpenAlexW4412158832
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited33

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