Dear friends

The next AURA Slow Seminar "Proliferation amidst Extinction" explores how extinction and species proliferation are odd companions in the Anthropocene. 

The seminar will take place May 22, from 5 PM till 7.30 PM at Jens Christian Schous vej 3, 8000 Aarhus C (1451, 515) in conjunction with the Department of Anthropology at UCSC via video-link.

For this slow seminar we will be reading Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction by conservation biologist Chris Thomas. "Inheritors of the Earth" is a sober but also provocatively contrarian book about speciation in a human age.  It suggests that biological diversification is too often ignored in both public and scholarly debates about conservation and biodiversity loss. Public, scholarly, and conservation-biological debates, Thomas argues, are often blinkered by a "pessimism-laden, loss-only view of the world" that ignores the increasing speciation which - for better and for worse - also accompanies human-driven environmental and climate change. "Inheritors of the Earth" is not a political polemic but a case-based natural history of the biogenesis, hybridisation and speciation that happen alongside species extinctions across the New Pangea of Anthropocene. The book suggests that the Anthropocene may not only be a sixth mass extinction event. Also, and perhaps surprisingly, the Anthropocene is a time of accelerated evolutionary diversification, a "sixth mass biogenesis" of new species which are too commonly discarded out of hand as interlopers, weeds, and pests. The book will challenge and delight friends of AURA.

Reading:

Chris D. Thomas: Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. PublicAffairs. 2017.

The book can be downloaded as ebook online via Amazon.  Hard-copies are also available for purchase in Stakbogladen.

Looking forward to seeing you there! Please you let Mia know if you are attending so she can order enough coffee, fruit and cake.