Surveying Archaeologists Across the Globe Reveals Deeper and More Widespread Roots of the Human Age, the Anthropocene

By Ben Marwick, Erle C. Ellis, Lucas Stephens, Nicole Boivin, The Conversation

Not everyone is sure that today’s industrialized, globalized societies will be around long enough to define a new geological epoch. Perhaps we are just a flash in the pan – an event – rather than a long, enduring epoch. Others debate the utility of picking a single thin line in Earth’s geological record to mark the start of human impacts in the geological record. Maybe the Anthropocene began at different times in different parts of the world.

Consuming the Anthropocene

By Alexis Rider, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog

In the basic conception of the Anthropocene, there are two actors: mankind and the environment. This sweeping and seemingly compelling divide at once highlights the separation of the two categories and collapses it: if humans are geologic force, we can no longer imagine ourselves outside of nature.

War, Empire and Racism in the Anthropocene

By Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence

But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.

Why the “Anthropocene” is not “Climate Change”

By Julia Adeney Thomas, Local Futures

The challenges of our altered, unpredictable Earth System cannot be met by technological tinkering within the very systems that pushed it over the edge in the first place. There’s nothing for it but to roll up our sleeves and begin the hard work of transforming our political and economic systems with the aims of decency and resilience.

Patterns of Commoning: Reality as Commons, A Poetics of Participation for the Anthropocene

By Andreas Weber, Patterns of Commoning

How, exactly, do the many, burgeoning posthumanist interpretations of our time fail to grasp the cosmos as a creative reality? Let us begin with the Anthropocene.

Robert Macfarlane: “The Metaphors we Use Deliver us Hope, or they Foreclose Possibility”

By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog

These debates are precisely what makes the Anthropocene so valuable as an idea.  It stops us short.  It buttonholes us.  It head-butts us.  Then it asks us really, really hard questions while we’re reeling.  I think that’s where its value lies. 

Film in the Anthropocene

By Erik Lindberg, Resilience.org

Film is of course the art form of Industrial Civilization and its mass culture, whether as a simple historical fact, a manifestation of technical possibility, or in the various ideologies it is adept at expressing. But it is also the art form of the Anthropocene.  I am overstating the case somewhat, but not entirely, when I note that the prevailing message of film is the power of belief and trust. 

Imagination and Will in the Anthropocene

By Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Open Democracy

This is about building, for the first time in history, a capacity for collective self-awareness, a sense of shared identity, and a political expression of our common will in pursuit of our common interest – not only as nations, tribes and social groups but as the species whose ancestors first ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology

By Jason W. Moore, Raj Patel, ROAR Magazine

Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue that what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene.

Rebranding the Anthropocene

By Langdon Winner, Langdon Winner blog

While there seem to be credible, even noble, reasons for adopting this designation, however, there is some cause for alarm, namely that the enthusiasm behind the campaign to adopt this marker smacks of an obvious, species-centric narcissism.  Human beings naming a whole geological epoch for themselves?  How marvelous!  How fabulously egotistical!  Indeed, how exquisitely Anthropocentric!