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The abrupt climate change thesis suggests that climate passes through threshold transitions, after which change is sudden, runaway and unstoppable. This concurs with recent themes in complexity studies. Data from ice cores indicates that major shifts in global climate regimes have occurred in as little as a decade, and that for most of the span of human existence the climate has oscillated much more violently than it has over the last 10,000 years. This evidence presents enormous challenges for international climate change negotiation and regulation, which has thus far focused on gradual change. It is argued that existing social theoretic engagements with physical agency are insufficiently geared towards dissonant or disastrous physical events. Wagering on the past and future importance of abrupt climate change, the article explores a way of engaging with catastrophic climatic change that stresses the inherent volatility and unpredictability of earth process, and the no-less-inherent vulnerability of the human body. Drawing on Bataille and Derrida, it proposes a way of nestling the issue of environmental justice within a broader sense of immeasurable indebtedness to those humans who endured previous episodes of abrupt climate change, and considers the idea of experimentation and generosity without reserve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. Recent theoretical modelling has provided important insights into how habitat loss may affect local populations through impacts on individual fitness (survival, body condition, fecundity). Despite this, attempts to provide empirical evidence of such impacts on displaced individuals have been limited. Using a before-after-control-impact (BACI) approach, we report how a sudden loss of wintering habitat impacted on the body condition and survival of redshank Tringa totanus. 2. The intertidal mudflats of Cardiff Bay, UK, were inundated with freshwater in November 1999 following impoundment by a barrage, resulting in the displacement of c. 300 redshank to adjacent habitat on the Severn Estuary. Movements and the survival of these birds were monitored through observations of colour-marked individuals. Comparative survival rates were calculated for marked populations at the main recipient site, Rhymney, and a control site. 3. Displaced redshank had difficulty maintaining their mass in the first winter post-barrage closure: adults previously only recorded at Cardiff Bay were significantly lighter than those previously recorded at Rhymney. 4. Survival rates of displaced redshank also declined. The estimated annual survival of adult Cardiff Bay redshank fell from 0·846 in the 2 years pre-barrage closure to 0·778 in the 3 following years because of a significant decline in winter survival ( P = 0·0006). In comparison, there was no significant change in the survival of adult Rhymney redshank, and adult survival at the control site was actually greater post-barrage closure than beforehand. The lack of decline in these rates and the similarity between those of Cardiff Bay adults pre-barrage closure and Rhymney adults indicate that the increase in winter mortality of Cardiff Bay birds resulted from their displacement. 5. Synthesis and applications. This study provides the first conclusive empirical evidence that habitat loss can impact individual fitness in a bird population. Adult redshank displaced from Cardiff Bay experienced poor body condition and a 44% increase in mortality rate. Without an increase in the recruitment of first-winter birds, such a change is likely to reduce substantially local population size. The results reported here should help to inform governments, planners and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to understand how developments might impact on animal populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the ecological impact of invasive plants and animals in colonies, particularly in Australia and New Zealand. It comments on the efforts of colonizers to recreate European life and on the influence of feral biota on vegetative cover and on soil stability and composition. Other topics include the relationship between life-form and landform, territorialization, and spatial relations. The author comments on the interest of Australian feminists in biophysical agency and explores the work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler, artist John Lyall, and ethno-historian Greg Dening.

Nanotechnology, or molecular engineering, is a hypothetical productive system based on the precise arrangement of atoms into molecular level devices and macroscale structures. As a response to the current environmental predicament it appears to engage with both long-term, cumulative damage and non-linear runaway accidents. As a complex adaptive system with capacities for self-replication and self-transformation, nanotech has the potential to engage with runaway events on their own terrain, thereby constituting a response to catastrophe which runs the risk of becoming as ecologically tumultuous as the catastrophe itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In all likelihood, terraforming will remain in the realms of science fiction. Even if the enabling technologies existed, the millennia required to establish the right conditions would seem to exceed the contemporary attention span by a near-infinite factor. What remains of interest, however, is the discursive production of a new catastrophism, this will to unleash hyper-life or supercharged evolution--which is surfacing at various sites across the techno-cultural field. Across the board the lion-tamer's whip is being traded in for a ringside seat in a circus of a perpetual surprises. Watch the idiom to be in control one day become a quaint anachronism, a victim of artificial life bids a-life scientist Marek Lugowski. Or as Kevin Kelly puts it: give up control, and we will artificially evolve new worlds and undreamed-of riches. Let go, and it will blossom. Have we ever resisted temptation before? This is not Beck's fear-impelled acknowledgement, but panic ecology, nature being deliberately driven to the verge of a nervous breakthrough. While the digital metamedium does display a particular propensity for the acceleration of events, the desire for virulence overflow into other modalities.