Abstract
A key part of the warrant for naming our era the Anthropocene lies in the stratigraphic record, though the term has become important in many fields outside geology, including the social sciences and humanities as well as hard sciences. Human traces appear in the rocks in the late Pleistocene period and show acceleration relatively very recently, during the Industrial Revolution--the era of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills.” Humans ramped up their alteration of the environment more radically in the middle of the twentieth century with the marked increase in the burning of fossil fuels (see Steffen, 2005). The term shares a prefix, anthropos (“human”), with anthropocentrism, which is more subjective but helpful in tracing the causes of the Anthropocene. This causality is particularly apparent for us living in the era of modern science, which has both enabled humans to transform ecosystems and to better understand our species’ position locally and universally. Anthropocentrism undergirds the basis for trust in human technologies of convenience and profit, some of which operate counter to sound ecology.
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Moore, B.L. (2023). Anthropocentrism. In: Wallenhorst, N., Wulf, C. (eds) Handbook of the Anthropocene. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25910-4_50
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25910-4_50
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