Le Moyne College Calendar

Eduardo Mendieta, Ph.D.
Penn State University

The Anthropocene names a new geological area, one in which humans are no longer at the mercy of nature, but rather one in which nature is now at the mercy of human recklessness and incontinence. We live in the geological age of what has been called the “Sixth Extinction” and the bumming down of life to a few servile species – what David Quammen called “weedy species.” Life hangs from a thread, one that we are thoughtlessly straining with our chauvinist and anthropocentric ethics of narcissism, relentless consumerism, useless accumulation.

This lecture aims to think through the Anthropocene from the perspective of animal life in an age of megaurbanization and the “end of the wild.” Our hominization ran parallel to the domestication of animals. Our urbanization was the urbanization of many animal companions. What does that mean for an interspecies ethics in the age of the Anthropocenic Urbe?