The Earth’s burden: Science and myths behind Anthropocene debates (지구의 짐: 인류세 담론의 과학과 신화)

Ji-hyung Park (박지형)

doi:10.22901/trans.2022.15.1.79

The Earth’s burden: Science and myths behind Anthropocene debates

탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities
2022, 15(1), pp.79-106
DOI : 10.22901/trans.2022.15.1.79
Publisher : Ewha Institute for the Humanities: EIH
Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
Received : March 14, 2022
Accepted : April 23, 2022
Published : April 30, 2022

Ji-hyung Park ¹

¹이화여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Recent debates on the Anthropocene have provided opportunities to recognize humans as geological agents, yet leaving large disagreements on the historical context and political implications of the Anthropocene. Using Kipling’s imperialism as a leitmotiv, this cross-disciplinary review aims to crisscross a broad spectrum of discourses on the demarcation, spatiotemporal backgrounds, and political implications of the Anthropocene. Geologists search for the periods when stratigraphic records such as radioactive isotopes derived from nuclear bomb tests concur with attributable human activities, without offering a clear understanding of the historical force and development of those human activities. The American west travelled by Kipling provides a venue for the transformations from the ‘White Man’s burden’ as God’s calling to the ‘Civilization’s burden’ expropriating the nature and humans as tools for capital accumulation to the ‘Earth’s burden’ threatening the biosphere sustainability. Crisscrossing across the time and space of the Anthropocene suggests that recognizing the Earth as commons, not commodities, combined with political actions required for relieving ‘ecological debts’, would facilitate imagining the ‘Post-Anthropocene’.

KEYWORDS

Anthropocene, Capitalism, Columbia River, Earth, Ecological debt, Imperialism

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

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탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

The Earth’s burden: Science and myths behind Anthropocene debates

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

The Earth’s burden: Science and myths behind Anthropocene debates

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KEYWORDS

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