"We live in a period of history that is defined, supposedly, by what it means to be human. If Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Foucault's The Order of Things clarified "the end of man" in theory, culture, and art, recent books like Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens , Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction , or Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement narrate an epic about what it means, historically, to belong to the human species."
"Surprisingly, it was neither writers nor filmmakers, but geologists who have presented the most prominent and accessible narrative about this "age of man." Their story begins after the last glacial period, or about 11,500 years ago, when the Earth entered into a relatively stable climate period known as the Holocene in which human civilization was able to flourish in a temperate climate alongside the rest of the Earth."
"The name and narrative that Stoermer and Crutzen had imprinted upon this new timescale - the Anthropocene, an age of humans or anthrōpoi - would define our understanding of its history by attributing it to the human species as a totality . In a landmark 2009 essay entitled "The Climate of History: Four Theses," the historian and postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty endorsed the implications of this collective human "we" in the context of history and the humanities."
Human actions have produced planetary-scale changes that recast humanity as a geological agent. Geological naming of the Anthropocene contrasts with the Holocene, a roughly 11,500-year period of relative climate stability that supported flourishing human civilizations. Cultural and intellectual narratives about the "end of man" and broad histories of the human species intersect with geological accounts that attribute global environmental change to human collectivity. The Anthropocene concept foregrounds a shared sense of catastrophe, prompting thinking about humans as a unified geological force responsible for climate danger and accelerating extinctions, thereby reframing historical understanding in planetary terms.
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