ABSTRACT
The term Anthropocene was coined by the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen to argue that we no longer live in the Holocene (i.e. a 10,000-year-old geological epoch of relative climate stability compared with the previous period, which was distinguished by regular shifts into and out of ice ages). He argued that we have entered a paradigmatically different epoch, called the ‘age of man’, in which, ‘dam by dam, mine by mine, farm by farm and city by city’ (Economist 2011: 3), humans have remade nature. For the first time in history, human activities have brought about planetary changes, the significance of which is on a par with geological forces. Compelling evidence of this is the reconfiguration of the planet’s carbon cycle by the anthropogenic (human-made) release of quantities of fossil carbon over the past couple of centuries that took the planet hundreds of millions of years to store away, as will be discussed later in this chapter.
