GEOG Spring Seminar Series: Dr. Erle Ellis on Thursday, April 11th

Please join the Department of Geographical Sciences for the 2019 Spring Seminar Series this Thursday, April 11th from 3:45pm - 5:00pm in 1158 Lefrak Hall. The seminar will begin at 4:00pm, with light refreshments and mingling with the speaker at 3:45pm.

Dr. Erle Ellis (UMBC) will present "Deep Anthropocene: the emergence of human societies and land use as a force of nature."

Talk summary: Global models and assessments generally represent the view that anthropogenic global environmental change is mostly recent. Recent theoretical and empirical work challenges this view, revealing a planet transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists by 4,000 years ago. Scientific understanding of anthropogenic global environmental changes past, present and future and their grounding in land system science will require greater attention to a deeper, earlier model of human societies and their use of land as an emerging force capable of transforming a planet.

Biography: Dr. Erle Ellis is a Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) where he directs the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology (http://ecotope.org/people/ellis). His research investigates the ecology of human landscapes at local to global scales to inform sustainable stewardship of the biosphere in the Anthropocene. His recent work examines long-term changes in Earth’s ecology produced by human societies (anthroecology; anthromes). Other projects include online tools for global synthesis of local knowledge (GLOBE) and inexpensive tools for mapping landscapes in 3D (Ecosynth). He is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, a Fellow of the Global Land Programme and a Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute. He teaches environmental science and landscape ecology at UMBC, and has taught ecology at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. His first book, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.