ABSTRACT
The Anthropocene challenges the humanities to place their knowledge and their methods in relation to the super-sized image of the planet which Earth system science and other scientific disciplines have drawn. It is important to emphasize that the lack of resonance of the Anthropocene concept in Asia does not seem to reflect a general lack of interest in global ecological problems. Wet-rice farming, which has been of essential importance for many Asian civilizations for millennia, changes ecological processes much more profoundly than the traditional forms of agriculture which prevailed in Europe, at a level comparable to ‘modern mono-cropped fields’. The archaeologist Kathleen D. Morrison has pointed out that models of the Earth system frequently underestimate the global effects of agriculture because they use Europe as their benchmark. Like Bruno Latour, Amitav Ghosh understands the Anthropocene as the historical moment when the Western conception of modernity as open-ended progress collides with the finitude of the Earth.
