This chapter adopts an Anthropocene framework to contextualize Gerard Manley Hopkins. Placing his work within the epoch of human geophysical agency, I argue, affords new perspective on his radical contribution as an ecological witness. It allows us to see that Hopkins’s depictions of natural entities involved an intuition about their embeddedness in larger systems, many inchoately explained by contemporary science; that his representations of non-human nature seldom avoided the ‘anthropos’ (the ‘human’ in Anthropocene), whether as destructive interloper or divinely privileged steward; and that his life and work included moments of prescience about human activity interfering with Earth-system processes. To recontextualize Hopkins thus is to furnish different ways to interpret his work (in wider conceptual networks and deeper time horizons) and to animate that work’s reception (in light of present concerns). It is also to affiliate Hopkins with ecopoets whose formal innovations might be fruitfully juxtaposed with his poetics.

The chapter explores the dualistic cosmology of Nature/Culture and its influence on individual and collective behavior narratives. It presents various instances of disputes and debates that underscore the indistinct boundaries between Nature/Culture and between determinism and choice. These include the IQ controversy, genetic engineering, human perfectibility, global warming, the Pygmy tribe categorization debate, and the self-definition of groups in organic/biological versus associative/cultural terms. These discussions highlight the complexities in delineating Nature/Culture boundaries. Ezrahi suggests that the inherent ambiguity in demarcating Nature from Culture has, from a liberal open-ended worldview, engendered undecidability between such competing frames. This ambiguity has opened up possibilities to leverage the authority of Nature to either strengthen or weaken that of Culture and politics and vice versa. It has also enabled the blending of both in varying degrees in fields like technology, medicine, and arts. The chapter further explores the ongoing debate on whether the Holocene epoch of an independent Nature is giving way to the Anthropocene era characterized by significant human impact on Nature’s form. Ezrahi proposes a hybrid perspective of Nature as both separate from humans and humanized, questioning the sustainability of modern democracy’s epistemological constitution premised on an autonomous Nature.

The chapter examines the impact of human imprinting on Nature, blurring the boundaries between humans and Nature and diminishing human freedom. Enlightenment ideals granted individuals rationality, emphasizing their will in the realms of science and politics, enabling them to differentiate absolute truth from human-dependent matters. The blurred boundaries challenge rationality as a measure of norms and erode commonsense – the shared understanding of how the political system operates and the comprehension of causality. These developments lead to the “loss of the subject” and threaten the perception of the individual as an autonomous political agent. The erosion of the dualistic cosmology is also due to feminist theories arguing that women were wrongly placed within the realm of Nature rather than Culture. Similarly, postcolonial perspectives contend that Indigenous peoples were dehumanized and considered part of Nature under the dichotomous cosmology. In the postmodern era, there is a tendency towards hybridization and interactive dynamics. Ezrahi asserts that democracies in a hybrid world require “human-like” judgments from machines and algorithms, necessitating an examination of the intentions and interests of their designers. The question that needs to be asked is whether “humanized machines” serve the interests of a politics of freedom.

This chapter tells the story of how a small Stockholm-based team of researchers developed concepts and ideas from a maturing Earth system science into the policy-relevant Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework, thus contributing seminally to an emerging twenty-first century sustainability-focused worldview. Prepared in gradually widening interdisciplinary discussions, including at the 2007 Tällberg Forum where many of the 29 co-authors convened, the first PB article was published in Nature in 2009. It presented critical boundaries for nine Earth System properties that were either already transgressed or threatening to be transgressed in the near future through anthropogenic impact. The chapter investigates the roots of the arguments and lines of thought behind the framework. It also compares the PB framework and thinking with the line of work pursued by the Club of Rome-commissioned Limits to Growth report in 1972, and argues that while Limits to Growth (LTG) stressed the finite nature of resources, the PB framework focused on the overall planetary effects of the expanding human enterprise. This allows in more dynamic ways for human and societal creativity to deal with challenges while staying inside the boundaries.

This chapter describes the continued, still ongoing, trajectory of the Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework and how it has co-evolved with the “Anthropocene,” another concept with Stockholm roots. During the course of the second decade of the new century, ethical aspects were increasingly taken on board. Will Steffen, former Director of the Stockholm-based International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP), was the lead author of a second PB article in Science in 2015. Like the first Nature article in 2009, a sizable share of the co-authors had institutional involvement or other affiliation with Stockholm. This new iteration developed the ethical challenges of sharing the “safe operating space” inside boundaries among regions, nations, and societal groups. Steffen was also a member of the Anthropocene Working Group appointed by the Stratigraphic Committee to make the case for Anthropocene as a new geological era. The chapter articulates the significance of the overlap between the PB and Anthropocene processes and debates. These drew considerable interest from scholars in the social sciences and humanities, which helped make both issues concerns of epistemology and Weltanschauung.

Climate change is the most serious challenge of the Anthropocene, and so climate change communication needs to be taken suitably seriously, enriched with new ways of conceptualising, understanding and imaging the world and its transformations. The lack of understanding and seeing the gravity of the crisis has been increasingly identified as the ‘crisis of the imagination’. Over the centuries, telling stories was used to confront the unknown, encourage thinking about solutions, illuminate opportunities and give hope. Stories and storytelling allow space for interpretation and agency to think critically and, most importantly, act imaginatively. They encourage inter- and transdisciplinarity and thus novel perspectives, stressing the fact that, ultimately, discussions on climate change are discussions about who we are. In this sense, storytelling has a great potential to motivate individuals, communities and policy-makers to act on climate change.

A new way of thinking about environmental problems has emerged since the 1980s. Environmental problems are increasingly seen as systematically entwined, with human action as their primary cause. We are in a new epoch in Earth’s history, the Anthropocene, and climate change is its most immediate and dramatic manifestation. The drivers of the Anthropocene can be seen through the lens of a simple equation: Environmental impact is the product of population, affluence, and technology. Nations and individuals vary greatly in their impacts, so questions of justice are unavoidable. Questions of justice extend across generations as well as among nations and individuals. Ultimately, we must ask what kind of world we want for ourselves and our children.

The question of how should I live has special resonance in the Anthropocene, which threatens virtually everything we care about. This chapter answers this question by saying that I should live in a way that expresses my values, and that these values should be directed towards making the world better. In practice this means living car-free if possible, avoiding airplane travel, eating a plant-based diet, and having few, if any, children. In addition to living this way, we should try to change law and policy, and support individuals in their efforts to live in this way. Yet, no matter how much we may succeed, we will inevitably live with change and perhaps even disaster. These present threats to living a meaningful life, but they are also the elements from which meaning and joy must be forged.

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh suggests that literary fiction has difficulty representing the Anthropocene, the epoch of irreversible human impacts on the planet, because the Anthropocene “consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel – forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space.” This chapter investigates how poets from Ireland have been making the Anthropocene imaginable over the past two decades by rendering “unbearably intimate connections” in lyric forms. Reading Moya Cannon alongside Doireann Ní Ghríofa and Sinéad Morrissey, the chapter spotlights poems in both English and Irish that look beyond Ireland – to Africa, the Americas, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Arctic – to arrive at a recognition not just of the human-centered globe, but of the Earth system or planet. These contemporary poets’ work makes visible how language and technology, including writing, mediate human efforts to represent the climate crisis. Their poems challenge us to develop a mode of reading that emerges from the interface of the global with the planetary.

This chapter outlines the different conceptual frameworks that can be used to better understand the evolving role nature has played in cities. It distinguishes between socioecological systems and urban political ecology, each of which influence how nature has been regarded and treated in different time periods and urban settings. It seeks to provide an overview of these concepts and explain their implications for how urban nature and nature-based solutions are constructed and viewed today as an urban policy issue. The chapter presents different approaches to understanding urban nature, nature-based solutions, and the relationship between nature and cities. It also discusses the emergence of urban nature and nature-based solutions as a response to urban sustainability challenges. The chapter engages with two case studies to illustrate its key messages: Urban Forest Strategy in Melbourne, Australia, and the Eco-Valley of Tianjin Eco-City in Tianjin, China.

This chapter suggests paths along which the futures of international relations as subject matter and International Relations as an academic discipline may develop. First, it stresses that the division between the ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ or ‘non-traditional’ agenda is intended as a device to facilitate learning for new students of international relations. Second, it outlines how novel intellectual developments in the field are shaping its future trajectory, with a specific focus on the continued development of a ‘Global IR’; IR’s increasing intellectual engagement with the sociology of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and STEM subjects as sources of conceptual innovation; and recent attempts to define the International as a condition of interactive multiplicity in an effort to clarify its distinctive contribution to the wider social sciences. Finally, the chapter notes that thinking about the future itself is becoming increasingly central to the discipline, with methods of counterfactual analysis, social imaginaries of future histories and utopian idealisations emerging as important theoretical and political projects.

This chapter introduces the concept of the proposed new geological epoch, and the main paradoxes and dilemmas that follow. The Anthropocene requires us simultaneously to see human beings as occupying a position of unprecedented responsibility for the ecosphere, and as a tragically blundering species, caught by the unforeseen consequences of previous actions. Further uncertainties derive from the current interim state in which urgent warnings coexist with stubborn normality. Ecological threats such as global warming and the extinction crisis defy representation because, in the words of Timothy Clark, they present us with ‘derangements of scale’, displacing the timescape of conventional narrative and challenging our habitual sense of what is trivial and what is important. Through close readings of essayists Kathleen Jamie, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, Richard Smyth, Rebecca Tamás, and Jean Sprackland, the chapter examines the implications of these ideas for the form, style, and content of the contemporary environmental essay.

This chapter explores fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in the twin contexts of American writing after postmodernism and climate change. It argues that Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meat and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity both ultimately undermine the connection between individual agency and effective political action – the former because of its vacillating metamodernist sensibility, and the latter as a consequence of the author’s retreat to realism and undermining of character – but that Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, by gesturing towards a posthumanist perspective, intimates a way through the impasse.

Chapter 35 examines Goethe’s awareness of the impact of human activity on the physical environment and his often prescient depictions of damage to natural systems. These are shaped by a range of perspectives and experiences, from Goethe’s work as a civil servant, to his scientific study, to his lifelong passion for nature. The chapter traces two themes in particular that run through his literary work: first, flooding, and second, fire and the destruction of forests. It also examines Goethe’s historical position, between the pre-industrial world and capitalist modernity.