The Anthropocene, the designation for a new geological epoch following the Holocene, signifies the tremendous and titanic impact of the human species on Earth, here first and foremost understood as an operative term against any anthropocentric notion. Rather than a solidification of human status and the assumption of a definitive unfolding of its Promethean capabilities, the consolidation of the Anthropocene era is understood here as its ultimate openness and accessibility, its extreme potential to open up to other, as yet unknown, geological eras.
A starting point for the Anthropocene has not yet been fully determined or defined, although it is generally divided into three historical, socioeconomic, and pathological aspects of modernity: the colonial exploitation of humans, animals, and plants through slavery, beginning with the appropriation of territories in the so-called East and West Indies following the colonization of the planet by mercantilist rationality; the Industrial Revolution, propelled by the massification and standardization of labor and the systematic exploitation of all energy and vital resources, beginning in the late 18th century; the Great Acceleration, situated in the second half of the 20th century, an unparalleled increase in industrial, technical-scientific, and capitalist production that contaminates the entire global sphere with its anthropogenic waste.
The recognition of anthropogenic force as the greatest influence on the entire order and information, deformation, and transformation of the planet with its countless ecosystem’s places humanity at the center of responsibility for the first time. For the first time in human history, humanity’s force and appropriative will is perceptible and measurable across the entire global sphere, leaving traces and remnants of its activity everywhere, even in the most remote places, inaccessible to most humans. In 2020, for the first time, the mass built by the human species exceeds the planet’s total biomass.
Anthropos in the Anthropocene era is, finally, the primary agent responsible for the transformations and degradation of the planetary biosphere. There is no longer any transcendental or natural responsibility that can offset the responsibility stemming from humanity, from the species in its entirety—not merely as an idea, but as the sum of all human individuals currently living and those who will live on Earth in the future. For the first time, the extreme loneliness of the human species is also confirmed, a loneliness arising from its anthropocentric and solipsistic stance, expressed in its self-proclamation as the sole conscious being, the sole reflective being, the sole being with language, and the sole being that responds.
Such loneliness, the result of its encapsulation, of its self-limitation, will only be dissolved in the acceptance of its total responsibility before all other (existing and possible) living beings: a conscious life that exists beyond anthropocentric sciences and that has long awaited and deserved an indeterminate multiplicity of sentient responses. The Anthropocene as a final nod and as an operative term, to think about the future of species, human and non-human, in communion with the indeterminate multiplicity of landscapes.
Dirk Michael Hennrich