报告题目：Ecology in the Anthropocene: Why Humans Transformed Earth
报告人：Erle C. Ellis 教授
主持人： 余柏蒗 教授
讲座时间：11月2日下午3：00
讲座地点：资环楼273
报告人简介：
Erle Ellis is a Professor ofGeography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) where he directs the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology (http://ecotope.org). His research investigates the ecology of human landscapes at local to global scales with the aim of informing sustainable stewardship of the biosphere. Recent work includes evolutionary theory explaining the emergence of human societies as a global force transforming the biosphere, global mapping of human ecology and its dynamics, online tools for global synthesis of local knowledge and inexpensive user-deployed tools for 3D landscape mapping. He is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the Scientific Steering Committee of the Global Land Project. He teaches Environmental Science and Landscape Ecology at UMBC and taught Ecology as Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (2013-2015).
报告内容：
Human societies have emerged as a global force that is reshaping Earth. It is no longer possible to understand or predict Earth’s future without understanding why humans, alone among species, gained the capacity to transform an entire planet, and why different human societies transform ecology in so many different ways. Anthroecology theory aims to explain this unprecedented transformation of Earth’s ecology as the product of sociocultural niche construction, an evolutionary process combining ecosystem engineering, cultural evolution and social change. What are the prospects for humanity and nature on a planet ever more rapidly and completely reshaped by human societies? The challenges are unprecedented and there is no going back. Yet it is possible that massive globalization of human societies and their support systems might also become the greatest planetary opportunities to create better outcomes for both humanity and non-human nature.