The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch

Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, & Francois Gemenne (eds.). (2015). London: Routledge.     

This volume considers how to approach the study of the Anthropocene (a period defined in the opening chapter as an age in which natural history and human history can no longer be completely independent of each other).[1] Its aim is to open up various types of scientific methods (from fields including geology and ecology) to the humanities and social sciences with particular focus on the relationship between environmental, philosophical, and political thought. The first part of the book – “The Concept and Its Implications” – focusses on how humanity has arrived at the Anthropocene (both the era and the name), with emphasis on the development of natural science. Part Two – “Catastrophism in the Anthropocene” – looks at how knowledge of the Anthropocene is communicated and reinterpreted by political movements where the emphasis is less on what the information is and more on how the information can ensure political gains. Following this, the third and final part of the book – “Rethinking Politics” – considers how the Anthropocene can effectively and constructively impact on politics, highlighting the importance of using the Anthropocene as a way of uniting different political factions rather than dividing them.

Example quotation

Reinventing a life of dignity for all humans in a finite and disrupted Earth has become the master issue of our time. If we are entering an era beyond the experience of human beings, it is one for which there has been no biological adaptation and no cultural learning or transmission to prepare us for the kind of environmental/geological changes that loom. This constitutes a new human condition. Nothing could call more insistently for new social sciences and humanities research, for the human being who finds itself in this uncertain and radically new age is above all an assemblage of social systems, institutions and representations.

(p.5)

[1] pp. 3-4.