This chapter begins with varying definitions of the Anthropocene and articulates the ways in which essayists have responded to the environmental destruction, contamination, reshaping of the earth’s surface, and exhaustion of shared resources represented by this new geological epoch. In these types of essays, science writing meets nature writing, activism meets lyricism. The essay has always been a space for ethical reflection, and those essays featured in this chapter – by writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Camille Dungy, Donna Harraway, Fred Moten, and Christina Nichol – ponder the ethics of the violence that is part of our new environmental status quo. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the Anthropocene and various bleak contemporary and historical realities: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, appropriation of land, extraction of resources, genocide, and dispossession.