Document Type
Contribution to Book
Publication Date
2017
Abstract
Denoting our current age as the Anthropocene, or the era of planet-wide human impact, scales up human agency beyond the usual biological capacity of all living things to alter their surroundings to a geological force. Human activities have altered vast areas of the Earth's terrestrial surfaces, spread industrial particulates across the globe, and impacted the planetary climate with increased release of carbon dioxide that then increases oceanic acidity bleaching entire coral reefs. The biosphere's land, air, and water have all changed with the increased release and use of energy. Once again, a species of living things has become a large-scale force on planet Earth, as did cyanobacteria during the Archaean and Proterozoic eras and as plants did when they conquered terrestrial spaces, covering much of our world in green. This time, however, a thinking species with a new level of technological intelligence is envisioning and enacting these changes. Hence environmental studies must attend to the human cultural imagination in order to understand what we have been thinking or not thinking, why, and what we might think (and attempt) in the future.
Editor
Caroline Schaumann & Heather I. Sullivan
Identifier
10.1057/978-1-137-54222-9_3
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
City
New York
ISBN
9781137559852
Repository Citation
Sullivan, H. I. (2017). The dark pastoral: A trope for the Anthropocene. In C. Schaumann & H. I. Sullivan (Eds.), German ecocriticism in the anthropocene (pp. 25-44). Palgrave Macmillan.
Publication Information
German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene