ABSTRACT
The earliest publications introducing the Anthropocene usually included short genealogies of its conceptual ‘antecedents’. A genealogy of Anthropocene thought must also include anthropological theories addressing the ecological and cognitive distinctiveness of the human being as a transformer of its natural environment. A cultural-historical genealogy of the Anthropocene focuses on the human as a geological force. While the anthropological approach focuses on the distinctiveness of humans as a biological species among others, a genealogy of environmental reflexivity seeks out the documents in which a critical awareness of this force manifests itself. The environmental historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz have to date been the most vocal and prolific proponents of a conceptual history of the Anthropocene. Non-linear dynamics are a hallmark of the Anthropocene, not least in the exponential increases of consumption, population, environmental pollution, and many other indicators as they manifest themselves in the period of the Great Acceleration.
