| Popis: |
This thematic issue responds to the growing demand for ‘more history’ on the part of the earth sciences and environmental politics. The impending climate crisis—the iconic images of which range from the melting poles to the drowning water-city of Venice and the burning of Brazilian and Australian forests—creates a broad, heavily debated and politically explosive field of science in action. Current studies at the crossroads of the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, which run under the label of ‘Anthropocene’, reflect on the origins of the human induced environmental disaster we live in. The essays that are here collected address this timely topic from an early modern point of view and build on recent work that aims to historicize the Anthropocene. They also benefit from perspectives that unravel the multi-layered socio-technical and political-economic dynamics as well as the complex belief systems, which together shape and propel the rather abstract unit of an ‘earth system’. Historicizing the Anthropocene is meant to shed light on the many different institutions, social groups, technologies and belief-systems that power the broad concept of Anthropocene. |
