Responsibility

Coined in the early 2000s, the term Anthropocene originally emerged from the natural sciences. It refers to a geochronological epoch shaped substantially by humans, which replaced the Holocene and in which humans themselves have become a force of nature. However, the concept is not limited to scientific and technological phenomena. Due to the entanglement between humans and nature implicit in the term itself, the Anthropocene also carries an ethical meaning that manifests itself above all in questions about human responsibility for nature. Despite various criticisms of its descriptive and normative adequacy, and despite its rejection by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in 2024, the term remains interdisciplinarily generative, especially with regard to theological, nature-ethical, nature-aesthetic, and cultural-philosophical questions

• Anthropology