ABSTRACT
Sociologist Ulrich Beck argued that modernity entered a reflexive phase once societies started to be confronted with the unintended side-effects of their own development. His diagnosis seems to be more valid than ever: the continuous emission of industrial CO2 has destabilised the climate system and is pushing the Earth towards a new state. Thus the claim is that we live now in the Anthropocene, which is a concept proposed by geologists and other natural scientists in order to designate an epoch in which humanity has become a geophysical actor capable of disrupting the Earth functioning. But is the Anthropocene a consequence of modernity, so that only by abandoning the latter will human beings avoid ecological collapse? Or perhaps it is a deepening of modernity what is required in the face of a complex phenomenon that transcends modernity and involves vast scales of geological time as well as the anthropological drive to change the natural environment in order to create a safe space for humans? By dealing with the genealogy of the Anthropocene, this chapter sheds light on modernity's trajectory and contributes to a better understanding of its current predicament, in which the climate disruption plays such a major role.
