The Anthropocene and its Discontents

Abstract

Recently, the Anthropocene as a concept and as a set of processes and phenomena has been brought to the center of debates in politics, as well as the arts, culture, and academia. Controversially, its more mainstream meaning refers to processes that have been traced back by scholars either to the second or the third industrial revolutions, when human intervention supposedly began having a great impact on the geological, physical, and biological composition of the planet.