Welcome to More Than Human Puget Sound. This is an ongoing effort of students in the Comparative History of Ideas department at the University of Washington to explore planetary developments from the vantage point of specific localities in the Puget Sound. We invite you to explore the exhibits on this site to gain new understandings about place, time, and connectivity in the Anthopocene. But what is the Anthropocene?

Once upon a time, “geological time” and “human history” were imagined on separate planes: the earth had a history shaped by wind and water, and human beings made a history that was social and political in nature—but by no means “natural.” In recent years, however, scientific findings about climate change, deforestation, desertification, ocean acidification, and other human-caused, yet still “natural” processes have resulted in a new conceptualization of both human and natural history: we now live in a geological age that is dramatically impacted by human existence. This epoch—the geological age defined by human influence—is the Anthropocene.

The student exhibits you'll find here explore how the Anthropocene is bound up with human histories of capital and empire. They dive into what it means to simply live and die in the Anthropocene, particularly when that living and dying is disturbed unevenly across lines of species and human difference. And in the face of accelerating, anthropogenic changes to the environment, these exhibits interrogate how the conceptualizations—and stark realities—of the Anthropocene might change the way we understand and enter into its characteristic entanglements of human activities and natural processes.