The Anthropocene

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Christian Schwägerl. The Anthropocene

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

PROLOGUE Writing in the Sky

ONE Welcome to the Club of Revolutionaries

TWO The Long March

THREE The End of the Holocene

FOUR Signals of Earth Time

FIVE Apocalypse “No”

SIX The Evergreen Revolution

SEVEN The Invironment

EIGHT Technature

NINE Directing Evolution

TEN Earth Economy

ELEVEN Action Potentials

CHAPTER TWELVE Anthropocene Day

EPILOGUE Deep Future

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

GLOSSARY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO FROM SYNERGETIC PRESS

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THIS BOOK IS A STRIKING MANIFESTATION of the power and potential in the idea of the Anthropocene. A skillful narrator with many years of journalistic experience, author Christian Schwägerl describes how a single species, our own, is irreversibly transforming the Earth’s biological, geological and chemical processes, and thus affecting our very existence. Two hundred years of industrialization bear testimony to humanity’s power of innovation and creativity but also prove our more perilous powers of degradation and destruction. For the first time in Earth’s history, its future is being determined by both the conscious and unconscious actions of Homo sapiens. Schwägerl’s book is a rallying cry for us to recognize our opportunity to build a long-lasting, viable, creative and freedom-loving human civilization. This book is like a navigation system for the new world of the Anthropocene that lies before us.

Paul J. Crutzen, PhD

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As our actions become more global, so does our environmental awareness. The more materials and living things we set in motion, bringing them to new places in new combinations, the more we expand our repertoire to track and influence these changes. And the more our actions reach toward the future, the greater our capacity grows to develop scientific models of change: from making projections about the world climate in fifty years’ time to events like the intergalactic merger of the Milky Way with the Andromeda Nebula due 3.7 billion years from now.84 The very fact that we can classify our collective actions on the scale of Earth’s history is in itself a positive sign. Departure from the Holocene may be happening under some very frightening circumstances, but the Anthropocene is not destined to be a scary thing.

37. The short film of a circumnavigation of Earth by the International Space Station astronauts is a must-see: http://vimeo.com/32001208.

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