/lit/ - Literature

>The Anthropocene is considered by geologists to be the successor to the Holocene, a geological period which provided a stable earth system for the development of human civilisation.

>The Anthropocene is regarded as a new era— a new axis of time in which human activities influence the earth system in previously unimaginable ways. According to the commentators, there is a rough consensus that the Anthropocene started towards the end of the eighteenth century, marked by the invention of James Watt’s steam engine, which triggered the industrial revolution. Since then, homo industrialis and its technological unconsciousness has become the major force in the transformation of the earth, and the creator of catastrophes, as human beings become elevated to a ‘causal explanatory category in the understanding of human history’. In the twentieth century we observed what the geologists called the ‘great acceleration’, starting from the 1950s, indicated by the economic and military competition during the Cold War, the shift from coal to oil, etc. On the macro-level we have long observed climate change and environmental damage; on the micro-level, geologists have observed that human activities have effectively influenced the geochemical process of the earth.

>In this conceptualisation of our epoch, geological time and human time are no longer two separate systems. The recognition of the Anthropocene is the culmination of a technological consciousness in which the human being starts to realise, not only in the intellectual milieu but also in the broader public, the decisive role of technology in the destruction of the biosphere and in the future of humanity: it has been estimated that, without effective mitigation, climate change will bring about the end of the human species within two hundred years. The Anthropocene is closely related to the project of rethinking modernity, since fundamentally the modern ontological interpretations of the cosmos, nature, the world, and humanity are constitutive of what led us into the predicament in which we find ourselves today. The Anthropocene can hardly be distinguished from modernity, since both of them are situated on the same axis of time.

>In brief, there are two responses to the potential danger of the Anthropocene: one is geo-engineering, which believes that the earth can be repaired by employing modern technology (e.g. ecological modernism); the other is the appeal for cultural plurality and ontological pluralism. It is the second response that we have tried to engage with in this book.

NB: FF6 > FF7 imho, but still. there's all kinds of interesting stuff in FF7 also.