ABSTRACT
The Anthropocene is not a simply a scientific index of a new geological era typified by rapid environmental change. Nor is it simply a hermeneutic through which to diagnose the ills of homo sapiens, now newly cast as rapacious actors who have disrupted the Rousseauian Edens of the Holocene. On the contrary, the Anthropocene, the ‘human epoch’, is, in fact, the threshold of all human projects. As such, it has a certain relationship to death; it partakes in the great questions of religion and emerges as a religious object itself. The response to these questions is not, however, delimited by the world of ‘organized religion’. It is also articulated from within ‘para-religious’ perspectives, many of which seek neither mitigation nor sustainable forms of redemption, but rather advance a hermeneutics of climate change as an inevitable, and often welcome, Armageddon.
