Excerpt

In 1925, scholars were able to dismiss the notion of a Psychozoic era—a proposed geologic age, like the Anthropocene, in which human beings function as the primary drivers of global change—as an “atavistic idea from the holocentric philosophy of the Middle Ages,” which had emerged out of the “nationalistic impulse”¹ to posit humans above all other life forms. The suggestion that a conservationist or emancipatory mode of politics could be advanced by conceiving of the earth as a human artifact and human beings as earth shapers seemed ludicrous to intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Today, by contrast, scholars of…