Understanding the “Anthropocene”

Cameron Gordon

Chapter Chapter 2 in Many Possible Worlds, 2023, pp 9-41 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In the late 1960s, Buckminster Fuller published a book that captured the imagination of an era: Operating manual for spaceship earth (1968). Though not the first person to use such imagery, Fuller’s vision was the most deeply elaborated, putting forth a story about the human race travelling throughout space on a vessel called “Earth”. This was one of number of analytical strains that ultimately coalesced into a characterisation of the past few centuries as the “Anthropocene” in recognition of the tremendous impact that human activity has been having on “Earth Systems”. Two other complementary and sometimes competing paradigms are the “Growth Model”, which sees human impact as primarily economic and generally positive in nature, and “Modernity and Modernisation”, which sees such impact as primarily social and more ambiguous. This chapter compares and contrasts the three approaches, which are not mutually exclusive but do have significant points of difference.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-19-9281-0_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9789811992810

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-19-9281-0_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().