In the year 2000, the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and the American biologist Eugen F. Stoermer first proposed that we use the term “Anthropocene” for our current geochronological epoch, and thereby acknowledge the impact humans now have on fundamental biological, atmospheric, and geological processes on Earth. According to Crutzen (2002), we no longer live in the Holocene, which began some 12,000 years ago, but in a new era that was heralded by the beginnings of industrialization in the 18th century. The proposal was affirmed by an expert group at the International Geological Congress in 2016. We thus now know officially what we have always known: that humanity is disrupting the global ecosystem on a massive scale.

The Anthropocene denotes an ecological meta crisis made up of “such different phenomena as climate change, loss of biodiversity, air pollution, the hole in the atmospheric ozone layer, the proliferation of toxins and microparticles (e.g., microplastics), ocean acidification, changes in the watercycle, and so on” (Horn and Bergthaller, 2019: 20). No longer limited to merely local developments, the consequences of human lifestyles and technologies now assume a global, even a geological dimension. While major interferences with nature can be traced back to the Neolithic revolution in agriculture, only the advent of capitalism, private property, and modern technology brought about the ever-increasing human- made CO2 emissions that are mainly responsible for climate change. Since the end of World War II, we have furthermore experienced a “great acceleration” regarding the pressure on the Earth system (Steffen et al, 2015).

Moreover, we are currently losing approximately a hundred species per day, and if this mass extinction continues, the Anthropocene will destroy half of all species on Earth. The American literary scholar Ashely Dawson (2016) sees this as analogous to capitalism and its destruction of the “commons of nature” (Bollier, 2002: 59ff.): plants, animals, clean air, clean water. When it comes to humans, due to the planetary scope of the Anthropocene it is often overlooked that not all of us suffer from its ramifications to the same degree— and not all of us are responsible for it: it is the Western (colonial) economy and the lifestyles associated with it that got the Earth into this trouble.