Title: New England's Fieldstone Walls: Folk-Architecture of the Anthropocene Epoch
Description: Professor Robert M. Thorson, Head (Interim) of the Department of Geosciences is a Midwestern native turned Western geologist turned Eastern academic. He will explore the significance of New England's historic stone walls in the context of landscape architecture.
The evolutionary novelty of vascular tissue in plants allowed them to cloak the terrestrial Earth about 400 million years ago, changing its color from gray to green, increasing soil weathering by an order of magnitude, creating mud rock and shale, doubling atmospheric oxygen, and pushing the earth into an ice age.
A comparable transition is taking place within the present Anthropocene Epoch. Biomes have become anthromes, and humans are now the planet's dominant geo-bio-physiochemical agency. Landscape architecture is helping to constrain and beautify this transition. Using New England's fieldstone walls as a touchstone for a larger discussion, I will explore the conflation between the word pairs Earth vs. world, landform vs. landscape, history vs pre-history, wild vs. domesticated, and Nature vs. Environment.
What is a stone wall anyway? Like art itself, they are easier to recognize than define.
Join us via Webex: https://uconn-cmr.webex.com/uconn-cmr/onstage/g.php?MTID=eeda764589de2522c9f2f9804986a56f7
Date: September 11th
Time: 12:00–1:00 pm
For more information, contact: Plant Science and Landscape Artchitecture at rosa@uconn.edu