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Sep 01 2017 - 16:00

MART Sala Conferenze

Welcome to the Anthropocene

AGNÈS SINAÏ

Agnès Sinaï, environmental journalist

Given the systemic instability that characterizes contemporary environmental issues, future scenarios are quite complex. Climate change, industrial waste management, overfishing, deforestation, metal extraction, and the search for new energy sources are all issues marked by great uncertainty. This situation, which can be defined as post-normal, defines our era of the Anthropocene, whose human face is that of migrants who no longer know where to live. The geopolitics of the Anthropocene unfolds between the Arctic and Sudan and is shaped by the nature of this post-Holocene period, which calls for the invention of post-normal policies—those of sobriety, resilience, and supportive relocalization.

Agnès Sinaï is an environmental journalist for Le Monde diplomatique and the web journal Actu-environnement. She is also the author of the documentary Paradis perdus (Arte, 2006) and co-author of books such as Sauver la Terre (Fayard, 2003) and Petit traité de la résilience locale (Charles Léopold Mayer, 2015). Recently, she edited the volume Gouverner la décroissance. Politiques de l’Anthropocène III (Presses de Sciences Po, 2017). She is the founder of the think tank Institut Momentum on the Anthropocene and a lecturer in the master's program on Environmental Sciences and Policy at Sciences Po Paris, focusing on the degrowth of industrial society.