Environmental Forum | Weather/Climate and the Non/Human: Environmental Anthropology in the Anthropocene | Nathan Sayre, UCB

Please join us for an Environmental Forum with Nathan Sayre, University of California, Berkeley.

This talk uses pastoralism (extensive livestock production) as a lens to examine recent developments in Environmental Anthropology. I review seemingly disparate lines of scholarship in archaeology and inter-species relations and suggest that they provide mutually complementary and potentially constructive critiques of each other. Among archaeologists, new techniques and methodological advances have enabled detection and interpretation of prehistoric pastoral impacts on vegetation and soils, opening a new front for debates about the Anthropocene. To construe these impacts as anthropogenic, however, implies concurrence with the contention that human and nonhuman entities should be viewed as assemblages or hybrid “actants”—a core element of the ontological turn in animal studies and STS. On the other hand, it is unclear how “the new materialism” adds to empirical understanding of human-environment interactions in the past or the present. Genealogically, the non/human distinction and the weather/climate distinction were co-constitutive, in ways that now problematize the concept of the environment itself. Going forward, clearer notions of relationality and social mediation would benefit both fields of research.

Nathan Sayre is Professor of Geography and Associate Dean of Social Sciences at the University of California-Berkeley. His research centers on the political economy and environmental history of semi-arid rangelands, especially in the southwestern United States: how they have changed, how they have been understood and managed, and the politics and economics of land use change, fire restoration, and endangered species conservation. He has written four books and dozens of articles on these topics. He has also published on scale, carrying capacity, scarcity and the anthropogenic. Nathan is a board member of the Malpai Borderlands Group, and affiliated social scientist with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service-Jornada Experimental Range in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the Jornada Basin Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) and Long-Term Agricultural Research (LTAR) programs, and the USDA’s Southwest Climate Hub. He is also affiliated with UC-Berkeley’s Energy Resources Group, the Berkeley Food Institute, and the UC Natural Reserve System’s Institute for the Study of Ecological & Evolutionary Climate Impacts (ISEECI).