Introduction
Literally, Anthropocene may be translated as “the age of humankind.” The notion first appeared among scientists in the Soviet Union, and, thus, the term is a case of entangled history, which has not yet been thoroughly explored at the time of writing (Brookes-Fratto 2020). The still-ongoing academic debate about the existence, content, and consequences of the Anthropocene began with Paul Crutzen’s brief article published in Nature in 2002 (Crutzen 2002). The word reflects the realization that human activity irreversibly altered the way the Earth as a biophysical system functions and that this change has already left stratigraphically meaningful, thus evolutionary and chemical, traces. Thus, Anthropocene is the new geological epoch in which humankind as a species currently lives and is the outcome of human activities.
As a stratigraphic layer, the Anthropocene contains traces showing that: the level of carbon dioxide has nearly doubled in the atmosphere, there is increasing...
References
Austin, G. (Ed.). (2017). Economic development and environmental history in the Anthropocene. Perspectives on Asia and Africa. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Balogh, R. (2018). Was there a socialist type of anthropocene during the cold war? Science, economy, and the history of the poplar species in hungary, 1945–1975. Hungarian Historical Review, 7(3), 594–622.
Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J.-B. (2017). The shock of the Anthropocene. London, New York: Verso.
Brookes, A., & Fratto, E. (2020). Towards Russian literature of the Anthropocene. Introduction. Russian Literature, 114–115, 1–22.
Brown, K. (2015). Dispatches from dystopia. Histories of places not yet forgotten. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Brown, K. (2019). Manual for survival. A Chernobyl guide to the future. London: Penguin.
Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The climate of history: Four theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197–222.
Chakrabarty, D. (2018). Anthropocene time. History and Theory, 57(1), 5–32.
Chernilo, D. (2016). The question of the human in the Anthropocene debate. European Journal of Social Theory, 20(1), 27–43.
Crutzen, P. J. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature, 415(6867), 23–23.
Damodaran, V. (2017). The locality in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on the environmental history of Eastern India. In E. Alexander, J. Cullis, & V. Damodaran (Eds.), Climate change and the humanities. Historical, philosophical and interdisciplinary approaches to the contemporary environmental crisis (pp. 93–116). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Davis, M. (2000). Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño famines and the making of the third world. London: Verso.
Dibley, B. (2012). “Nature is us:” the Anthropocene and species-being. Transformation, 21. http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issues/21/article_07.shtml.
Dukes, P. (2011). Minutes to midnight: History and the Anthropocene Era from 1763. London: Anthem Press.
Gille, Z. (2007). From the cult of waste to the trash heap of history: The politics of waste in socialist and postsocialist Hungary. Bloomington: Bloomington Indiana University Press.
Harari, Y. N. (2016). Homo Deus. A brief history of tomorrow. London: Harvill Secker.
Hedin, G., & Gremaud, A.-S. N. (2018). Artistic visions of the Anthropocene North. Climate change and the nature in art. London: Routledge.
Horn, E., & Bergthaller, H. (2020). The Anthropocene. Key issues for the Humanities. London: Routledge.
Körber, L.-A., et al. (2017). Arctic environmental modernities: From the age of polar exploration to the Era of Anthropocene. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lewis, S., & Maslin, M. A. (2018). The human planet. How we created the Anthropocene. London: Pelican.
Liu, T.-J., & Beattie, J. (Eds.). (2016). Environment, modernization and development in East Asia. Perspectives from environmental history. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Malm, A., & Hornborg, A. (2014). The geology of mankind? A critique of the anthropocene narrative. The Anthropocene Review, 1, 62–69.
McNeill, J. R., & Engelke, P. (2014). The great acceleration: An environmental history of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Moore, J. W. (2014). The end of cheap nature or: how i learned to stop worrying about ‘the’ environment and love the crisis of capitalism. In Christian Suter, Christopher Chase-Dunn (Eds.), Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future of Global Conflict and Cooperation (pp. 285–314). Berlin: LIT.
Robin, L., & Steffen, W. (2007). History for the Anthropocene. History Compass, 5, 1694–1719.
Ruddiman, W. (2010). Plows, plagues, and petroleum: How humans took control of climate. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ruddiman, W. F. (2018). Three flaws in defining a formal ‘Anthropocene’. Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment, 42(4), 451–461.
Simon, Z. B. (2017). Why the Anthropocene has no history: Facing the unprecedented. The Anthropocene Review, 4(3), 239–245.
Simon, Z. B. (2018). The limits of Anthropocene narratives. European Journal of Social Theory, 20(1), 9–38.
Tölgyesi, Cs., Török, P., Hábenczyus, A. A., Bátori, Z., Valkó, O., Deák, B., Tóthmérész, B., Erdős, L., & Kelemen, A. (2020). Underground deserts below fertility islands? Woody species desiccate lower soil layers in sandy drylands. Ecography, 43(6), 848–859.
Varga, A., Demeter, L, Ulicsni, V., Öllerer, K., Biró, M., Babai, D., & Molnár, Zs. (2020). Prohibited, but still present: local and traditional knowledge about the practice and impact of forest grazing by domestic livestock in Hungary. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 16, 51.
Further Reading
Chua, L., & Fair, H. (2019). Anthropocene. In F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez, & R. Stasch (Eds.), The Cambridge encyclopedia of anthropology.
Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165.
Simon, Z. B. (2020). The epochal event. Transformations in the entangled human, technological, and natural worlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tsing, L. A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ulmer, J. B. (2017). Posthumanism as research methodology: Inquiry in the Anthropocene. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(9), 832–848.
Ulmer, J. B. (2019). The Anthropocene is a question, not a strategic plan. Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, 1(1), 65–84.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Balogh, R. (2021). Anthropocene. In: Romaniuk, S., Thapa, M., Marton, P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_647-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74336-3_647-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74336-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74336-3
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Political Science and International StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences