Vortrag von Eugenio Luciano (Freiburg): The Anthropocene Hypothesis: Revisiting the Relationship between History and the Geosciences

Since its coinage in 2000, the term ‘Anthropocene’ has become an academic buzzword for environmental narratives. From ecocriticism, environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and history to geology, Earth System science, ecology, and evolutionary biology, the term encompasses a range of diverse themes gravitating around the human-Earth relationship. Within this recently developed multidisciplinary research landscape (i.e., the ‘Anthropocene Studies’), particular attention has been given to a multidisciplinary group of researchers forming the Anthropocene Working Group. Established in 2009, this research group was established by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy to find our whether there is sufficient evidence to warrant ratification for an Anthropocene unit in the geological time scale. The hypothesis that humans’ stratigraphic signature could be translated into the domain of geochronological classification has been heavily contested, both by geologists and humanists. Some of this criticism has generated from environmental historians denouncing the term’s implicit blindness towards the historical and social mechanisms that engendered the Anthropocene. Because the proposed epoch has been suggested to commence by the mid-1950s, the coincidence of historical time with geological time has ignited reflections on how the Anthropocene Hypothesis should be conceived and approached. The present contribution reflects on the relationship between human history and geohistory by investigating different research trajectories beneath the history of the Anthropocene as a geological time unit, Earth System singularity, historical moment, and idea.

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