Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2017
Publication Title
Annual Review of Environment and Resources
Abstract
This review explores what past environmental change in Africa—and African people's response to it—can teach us about how to cope with life in the Anthropocene. Organized around four drivers of change—climate; agriculture and pastoralism; megafauna; and imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism (ICC)—our review zooms in on key regions and debates, including desertification; rangeland degradation; megafauna loss; and land grabbing. Multiscale climate change is a recurring theme in the continent's history, interacting with increasingly intense human activities from several million years onward, leading to oscillating, contingent environmental changes and societally adaptive responses. With high levels of poverty, fast population growth, and potentially dramatic impacts expected from future climate change, Africa is emblematic of the kinds of social and ecological precariousness many fear will characterize the future globally. African people's innovation and adaptation to contingency may place them among the avant-garde with respect to thinking about Anthropocene conditions, strategies, and possibilities.
Keywords
Africa, environmental change, climate, agriculture, megafauna, colonialism
Volume
42
First Page
27
Last Page
54
DOI
10.1146/annurev-environ-102016-060653
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.
Recommended Citation
Hoag, Colin and Svenning, Jens-Christian, "African Environmental Change from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene" (2017). Anthropology: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/ant_facpubs/1
Comments
Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.