ABSTRACT
There is a need for practical responses to the obstacles preventing or allowing efforts to establish wider nets of cooperation among the world’s peoples. There is also a need for a framework that can help us analyze and understand the realities of conflict and cooperation in today’s world. The idea of “ecumene” provides such a framework. The history of the emergence and spread of ecumenes, culminating in the rise of a global ecumene, is the history of a new stage in evolution. With increasing knowledge and awareness of the impacts human populations and cultures have had on the planetary system, a new epochal term has entered our vocabulary: Anthropocene. The body of scholars studying this idea has produced from its “left wing” an alternative to the term Anthropocene – Capitalocene. This chapter is a small contribution to the ongoing discussion on how and whether we are in a new geological epoch, perhaps the first (and last?) geocultural epoch designation. Perhaps the “Age of the Social” is the appropriate marker for the beginning of the Anthropocene.
