This chapter begins with varying definitions of the Anthropocene and articulates the ways in which essayists have responded to the environmental destruction, contamination, reshaping of the earth’s surface, and exhaustion of shared resources represented by this new geological epoch. In these types of essays, science writing meets nature writing, activism meets lyricism. The essay has always been a space for ethical reflection, and those essays featured in this chapter – by writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Camille Dungy, Donna Harraway, Fred Moten, and Christina Nichol – ponder the ethics of the violence that is part of our new environmental status quo. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the Anthropocene and various bleak contemporary and historical realities: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, appropriation of land, extraction of resources, genocide, and dispossession.

Chapter 4 examines the role played by contemporary capitalism in both massively escalating emissions and creating structural, ideological, and psychological barriers to efforts to cut emissions.

The front matter to “Cities of Hydrocarbon,” the third of three parts of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet pivots from an interview with a rickshaw driver in Delhi about the effects of the city’s smoky air to announce the major themes of modern global urban history. These include the acceleration of growth due to the powerful new way of harnessing geo-solar energy, the growing turbulence of political life due to the rise of revolutionary movements in cities and their enlarged hinterlands, the emergence of a truly planetary city-dominated human habitat, as well as a vastly expanded realm of human impact. It finishes by reminding readers of the growing consequences we face as an urban species in command of the planet, in the form of increased pandemic disease and atmospheric heating.

This piece takes the reader on a virtual trip through the Earth System, using visualisations as a key tool to understand our home planet and our evolving knowledge about it. It begins and ends with trips between the Earth’s surface and space, experiencing the Earth System from above. In between, however, we take an historical tour of the planet, tracking the evolution of humanity’s growing understanding of the Earth and how it functions as a system. The tour wanders through the evolving scientific landscape, beginning with the famous ‘Blue Marble’ image of Earth taken by the Apollo 11spacecraft in 1972, continuing with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and John Schellnhuber’s second Copernican revolution, and finishing with Paul Crutzen’s confronting assertion that the Earth System is now in the Anthropocene, leaving humanity’s comfort zone of the Holocene as a receding memory.