Christoph Rosol

Introduction: In the machine room of the Anthropocene

The conspicuous term ‘Anthropocene’ has given a bold heading to the profound impact of humanity on the Earth System. It pointedly captures the fact that industrial society has made it into the ranks of deep time, bringing about a geological epoch that has no analogue in Earth’s history. Naming a system-wide and largely irreversible transition of the entire planet, the concept of the Anthropocene dispenses once and for all with romantic ideas of a quasi-stable state of nature to which we should or might eventually return. Humanity does not act on the backdrop of an unchangeable nature but is deeply woven into its very fabric, shaping both its imminent and distant future. Yet for all its provocative force, the Anthropocene is first of all a descriptive concept, taking stock of the many indicators that speak for or against such a transition. It tells us where we are: sitting in a mobile home with few windows, rapidly curveballing down an unknown path at the end of which stands a new state of the Earth (and a finally definitive entry on the chronostratigraphic chart). But it does not tell us how we got on board this wildly moving vehicle, nor what powers and propels it. As a geological terminus technicus, the Anthropocene lacks explanatory power; it does not tell us what the driving forces behind the current, ‘real-time’ exodus from the Holocene are nor how these forces operate and function. Is it the anthropos – man – that has brought us here, as the name suggests? Obviously, it is not the direct and immediate metabolic exchange between Homo sapiens sapiens and the global environment that is responsible for the shifting baselines in the great circulation of matter and energy. But what about humankind as a whole? There is indeed a fierce debate about who or what might be implicated in this term Anthropocene: many scholars have argued that the term problematically assumes an undifferentiated human species that acts on a planetary scale, diverting attention from the historically specific actors and structural processes that have created our current predicament (Haraway, 2015; Malm, 2015; Moore, 2015). The geosciences have not been insulated from these debates, insofar as the question of when and how the Anthropocene began intersects directly with these political questions (Hamilton, 2015, 2016; Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Oldfield, 2016; Zalasiewicz et al., 2015).