نوع مقاله : پژوهشی
عنوان مقاله English
نویسنده English
Humans’ exploitation of natural resources since the industrial revolution has brought the earth to a position in which most of the natural resources were deployed and seven of nine main planetary boundaries were transgressed and finally the sustainability of the earth system was broken. All these processes were accelerated since 1950’s into an extent that the production of humans exceeded the natural production of the earth system and the natural environment was completely replaced by human made environment. As a result, this era was designated Anthropocene indicating the overwhelming conquer of humans to the nature. The international agencies and scientists have approved the sustainable development as the practical solution to this crisis. According to the sustainable development policy the human utilization of natural resources should not endanger their resilience and added waste material to the earth should not exceed its absorption potential. The hazards of Anthropocene era such as global warming and earth subduction are very complex and multifaceted that a single discipline cannot solve them. Thus, most of the scientists tried to tackle with them through the consortiums of different related disciplines. On the other hand, realized that these crises can be understood through the holism approach of their totality. The whole may have especial characteristics such as interactions and associations which are not recognized through the single or partial studies. Accordingly, they have defined new general science called the Earth System Science (ESS). This new discipline should be treated as inter disciplinary and study the world scale hazards and topics. This new science is in fact the geography. Therefore, geography is the most suitable discipline to study the Anthropocene problems as it has been studying the earth system or in other words the system of human and nature for hundreds or years thus having good experience in the patterns and processes of the earth system. It has the holism approach and spatial methodology. In addition, the characteristics of sustainable development such as spatiality and earth characteristics are in complete accordance with geography. Besides, all of the Anthropocene hazards have spatial characteristics.
Geography, in order to tackle these problems should first replace its multibranch approach with the integrated geography at least at the bachelor level
کلیدواژهها English