By Andreas Weber, Hildegard Kurt, Spring | Summer 2016

A ground-breaking new vision of humankind is quickly spreading into the mainstream of our self-understanding. We are no longer standing apart from nature, so the new belief goes: We are enmeshed in it. Some authors even assert that nature and humans are one and the same. This comes not just as a philosophical claim but rather as an empirical realization. The cultural image man has of himself has become a scientific issue. Traces of pesticides, nuclear fallout, and nitrogen fertilizer can be found in the Arctic ice crystals and in the soils of the Amazon. Climate change has proven that humans are inescapably connected to Earth and its systems.

These are the signs of the ‘Anthropocene,’ or, as some call it, the geological ‘epoch of humankind.’ ‘Anthropocene’ was first coined as a geological term by atmospherical chemist Paul Crutzen.1 He argued that the extent of human domination over the biosphere has abrogated the idea that nature is separate from humans, thus ending the Holocene.

We still need to fully realize that the change in the geologic calendar named by Crutzen has heralded a distinctly new cultural epoch. In this new age, which has just begun, nature and mind are no longer separate. The duality between nature and culture, which stems from Enlightenment thinking, has been overcome, and this is big news. Dualism, which determined our thinking and actions for 250 years, has ended. The Enlightenment is over.²

Technology and science have ironically overcome their dualism through an obsessive insistence of it. Our civilization long believed that the Earth was an object separate from the human. In doing so, it has unwittingly proved the opposite.

In one respect, we should feel relieved. The split in our thinking that opens between nature conceived as soulless resources and human agents as the rational actors was what started the ongoing environmental catastrophe, which includes global warming and the current ‘sixth extinction’ wave of species loss.³

Many claim that the starting point for a new idea of sustainability and nature protection lies in the Anthropocene. Because nature and culture are supposed to be one, humans therefore should become responsible for the Earth-system. As the argument goes, humans must become stewards for the whole natural-cultural Earth because they have totally infiltrated it.⁴ Sustainability from this perspective is thought to be a more attractive and convincing concept: it no longer means protecting the ‘other,’ but cultivating ourselves.

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