Content area
Full Text
Robert J. Mayhew ponders whether many careless generations have led us into a new geological era
The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene
By Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin
Pelican, 480pp, £8.99
ISBN 9780241280881
Published 7 June 2018
Have we entered an age in which the human impact on the Earth's systems is so large as to demarcate a new geological era?
This question has led to an extraordinary amount of scholarly writing over the past decade or two. Indeed, if intellectual history were stratigraphy, there is no doubt that the sheer quantity of these discussions would amount to a distinct marker for a new era of "anthropocenography" (to coin a neologism in an area already overly choked with them), of writing about our impact on the Earth. It is into this congested and contested territory that Simon L. Lewis and...