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A research project on meaning, ecological conflicts and the Anthropocene

Global warming, water crises, sea-level rise, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and the widespread—though uneven—degradation of the planet's habitability. The dramatic transformations that characterize the Anthropocene are not simply about the loss or degradation of particular "natural objects". More fundamentally, they concern the ways in which we make sense of environments, which increasingly seem to lose their status as the stable backdrop against which collective life unfolds, giving way to controversies.
From this perspective, the Anthropocene does not point to a crisis of "nature" itself, but to a crisis of the very categories through which we inhabit environments, including the distinction between nature and culture. Ultimately, what some have called the "new climatic regime" is, above all, a new regime of meaning.
Voices from the Anthropocene. Maps and Frameworks for Ecological Conflicts (VAMP) explores ecological controversies as conflicts of sense-making, developing maps and frameworks to understand their structures and transformations.