31 - America and the World in the Anthropocene

Summary

Since the early 2000s, scholars and environmentalists have used the term Anthropocene to describe a new geological epoch characterized by a discernable human impact on global environmental systems. Within the discipline of geology, the term refers specifically to the ways in which human influence over geophysical systems may leave their mark on the geological record. Almost immediately upon its introduction, however, social scientists, humanists, and activists began to apply the word more broadly to modern humans’ changing relationship to the global environment. Human impact on the natural environment, the term suggests, has reached a sufficient scale to alter long-term geophysical processes on the time scales of human history. Indeed, the industrial era has fundamentally changed the relationships between humans and their material surroundings in ways that we, collectively, are only beginning to understand.