Recording the Anthropocene
Origin Story: Industrial Revolution
c. 1800
“The Anthropocene could be said to have started in the late 18th c. when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the … growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane” (Crutzen 2002).
Beginning the story of the Anthropocene with the Industrial Revolution locates the problem in the West, with the invention of technologies that accelerated the growth of populations, prompted global migrations, gave rise to cities, and produced widespread toxic pollutants, ecosystem degradations, large-scale colonialization, and brutal warfare. This story, like that of the Global Acceleration, is commonly suffused with nostalgia for a return to a simpler and ostensibly “natural” lifestyle.
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