סמינר מחקר 4 בנובמבר: Flavio D'Abramo - The Ecological Dimension of Anthropocene and its Impact on Public Health

Flavio D'Abramo

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

The Ecological Dimension of Anthropocene and its Impact on Public Health

Scientific, technological and industrial enterprises transform the lives of people and their social and material environments on the global scale. These massive transformations have been named the Anthropocene, a term that is also a proposal for a new geologic epoch. The contested global identity implied by the Anthropocene justifies the mitigation of global disruptive effects caused by industrial activities with the same logic that has produced these effects. Activists and critical scholars have widely criticized this logic underpinned by industrial innovation. I analyze the example of antibiotic resistance, a planetary public health issue caused by the resistance developed by bacteria against products of industry to scale up food production and cure diseases. I show that antibiotic resistance is a universal, ecological dynamic. I build on Hannah Landecker, Scott F. Gilbert and Thomas Bosch proposals for a historical enquiry on industrial production within a conception of the environment as composed by multi-species ecologies. In this way, a shared notion of human agency realized by both human and non-human actors is possible. I argue that global planning has to consider and preserve local, relational dynamics that permit all the living beings to exist and to produce the needed novelties for life itself.