While not “officially” part of “scientific” canon, “rarely has a scientific term moved so quickly into wide acceptance and general use” (Sklair 2017). The term is of course, the Anthropocene. With its genesis in natural sciences, Paul Crutzen and colleagues have argued (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007; Steffen et al. 2011) for rethinking humanity’s relation to nature geologically, locating the pivotal moment of transformation with the Industrial Revolution, thereby emphasizing “the central role of mankind in geology and ecology” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000/2010, n.p.). By contrast, the social sciences have questioned the emphasis on stratigraphic indicators and periodization in establishing this epoch’s distinction from the Holocene. As such, the past decade has seen a wealth of theorizing on this topic in sociology, geography, and anthropology, locating the source of ecological destruction in Enlightenment paradigms rather than the steam engine (Tsing 2016). The literature abounds with cognates and critiques such as Capitalocene (Moore 2016, cf. Deckard 2016; O’Neill 2020), Plantationocene (Murphy and Schroering 2020) Chthulucene (Haraway 2015), Socialocene (Gille 2019), and Anthro-obscenes (Ernstson and Swyngedouw 2018). Scholars both more and less familiar with this work will welcome Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski’s Planetary Social Thought – The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences.

Book Review Published in New Global Studies - https://doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2021-0036