Exploring strategies for survival and renewal in the Anthropocene
(Scroll down for a note on the Anthropocene)
Firebird’s mission is to give our readers an overview of the Anthropocene’s global environmental crisis so they can develop appropriate strategies for current and future actions. This is done by offering articles on a variety of interconnected topics that, considered together, reveal patterns of interactions between different elements of the overall crisis that compound and intensify one another.
Equipped with an overview that connects the dots between “separate” incidents — rather than being confused and overwhelmed by today’s endless stream of media reports on isolated events such as floods, tornadoes or wildfires — we are in a position to devise comprehensive strategies that account for most, if not all of the developments and their variables that confront us.
Those strategies can be personal or collective actions, or both; and they can pertain to the mitigation of the crisis, adaption to changing conditions, or both. Examples of mitigation actions can include lifestyle changes that reduce our personal environmental footprint or involvement in community groups or political movements working to slow the rate of climate change or to address other problems. Adaptive actions, on a personal level, range from preparing a family disaster plan and putting together a survival kit to moving away from high risk disaster zones such as those prone to wildfire or flooding. Collective adaption efforts can involve community or government entities plan and prepare for events such as the influx of climate migrants, floods, wildfires, extreme heat waves and so on.
Comprehensive, as opposed to piecemeal strategizing, increases our chances of individual and collective survival and improves our prospects for healing the planet and ourselves.
What is the “Anthropocene?”
Coined by two scientists in 2000, the term Anthropocene is a combination of the words Anthropo, meaning “human” or “of human,” and -cene, a suffix of words denoting geological epochs, or time periods. Thus it means the geologic epoch dominated by humans and shaped by their activities such as changing the composition of atmospheric and ocean chemistry, causing the Sixth Extinction, and so on. The term Anthropocene is increasingly used in place of “Holocene,” the formal, scientific name of our current geologic epoch.
