History Workshop for Turbulent Times Locating Geological Agency in a 'Small' Early Modern Anthropocene

What can anthropogenic interventions - set in a wetland backwater of England, long before the industrial era - tell us about the Anthropocene? How might contested interactions with earth, sediment, and water four hundred years ago lead us to reconsider not only when the Anthropocene began, but why and how humans have exerted geological agency in the past? In this article I shift the scale, location, and action of the story to examine a 'small' Anthropocene in early modern England, bringing into focus the human interests and values that gave rise to contested environmental politics and produced geophysical environments in wetlands past

Action (physics) · Agency (philosophy) · Anthropocene · Call to action · Politics · Set (abstract data type) · Wetland · Geology and Paleoclimatology Research · History of Science and Natural History