Planetary Rifting and the Paleogeography of Care

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5014091
AutoresNigel Clark (0000-0003-3738-1583), Richard Whittle (0000-0001-6134-3363, Lancaster University), Rebecca Whittle (0000-0003-1793-0135)
Ano2023
Volume15
Fascículo3
Páginas219-234
Data de publicação2023-11-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEnvironmental Humanities (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2201-1919 • E-ISSN: 2201-1919
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/22011919-10746100
OpenAlexW4389727030
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas23

With their specter of intergenerational betrayal, global environmental crises increasingly entangle politics with matters of care, attachment, and love-especially the unconditional bonds we are so often assumed to share with our offspring. As a contribution to the nascent field of paleoenvironmental humanities, this article's approach to questions of care and responsibility turns from future horizon-scanning to the realm of human origins. It focuses on two broad sets of paleo stories that share a concern with rifts or stress points that complicate originary events and scenes. The first of these is a family of hypotheses which propose that pivotal evolutionary developments took place in the climatically variable and tectonically active terrain of the East African Rift. The second is the cooperative breeding hypothesis, which contends that communally distributed childcare arrangements are a definitive characteristic of the genus Homo, while also highlighting the conditionality and precariousness of human intergenerational care. Taken together, these approaches point to deep-seated fault lines running through both our home planet and our own psychosocial being. Confronting these rifts might help loosen the hold of notions of ontological reconciliation between humans and nature that risk exacerbating the very problems they seek to resolve, while also helping us to seek attachments that are more conducive to living with and through earthly volatility

Political science · Realm · Rift · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Race, Genetics, and Society · Geology · Paleontology