The Anthropocene: Where Are We Going?

Abstract

The dominant current in the contemporary environmental movement fails to make the connection between the preservation of the environment and the survival of humans. The fashionable concept of the “Anthropocene” is not fully adequate to get to grips with the full gravity of the situation. Contemporary human society, based on a neo-liberal market economy, is “locked in” to a productivist mode of existence, so that it will be extremely difficult to abandon the goal of “growth” and to achieve a sustainable relationship with the eco-system on which human existence depends. The “TAC” thesis, that “Technology is Anthropologically Constitutive,” has a dark side: technology may be anthropologically destructive.