Italian Landscapes in the Anthropocene

In this project I investigated the historical ecology of peasant landscapes in Italy, to ask how historical legacies of landscape change have shaped landscapes and inform contemporary debates about climate change. Italy is a particularly good place to think about the Anthropocene, our contemporary era where humans have impacted almost every aspect of the global environment, because almost every part of the landscape has been shaped by interactions between people, trees, animals, and soils. The book that came from this project, “Trees Are Shape Shifters How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes”, was published by Yale University Press in 2022.