ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains a central argument of it is that an under-acknowledged process of grieving - with all its complexity, diversity and contradiction - is part of the cultural politics of responding to climate change and associated environmental challenges. It focuses on the paradox of the human. The Anthropocene is presented as a time period defined by the activities and impacts of the human, yet it is paradoxically also a period that is now out of human control, due to rapid, unpredictable and non-linear change. Several authors have argued that the emergence of the Anthropocene concept is productively a moment of convergence between 'Earth System natural science and post-Cartesian social science'. The convergence thus provides a historical opportunity to challenge the modernist framing of humans as separate from and superior to nature, and of human history as a process of continuous improvement.
