This article seeks to evaluate the ethical underpinnings of neoliberalism and its associated power relations, and to illustrate the influence of such relationships on the health of people and the planet in the so-called era of the Anthropocene. We seek to reveal the current ethical standing of neoliberalism, and to identify other ethical positions and power relations that could be more conducive to promoting peaceful progress in an era during which all future life on our planet will be increasingly threatened by several organically inter-linked, human-caused crises, including that of the Earth’s biosphere. We conclude that on a planet close to many tipping points, beyond which irreversible entropy may ensue, a shift is needed away from neoliberal and anthropocentric belief systems towards a more ecologically aware perspective on life. Fostering the ethics of greater cooperation, mutual respect, deeper democracy, solidarity and enhanced social justice could facilitate the development of sustainability as a maxim of wisdom and praxis. Ultimately however, such progress requires the transformation of political power, as well as policies that are grounded in new ethical commitments.

The technosphere is a complex, self-perpetuating system and yet current trends of environmental degradation and resource consumption threaten its future. Toxic chemicals constitute a small but crit...

A mischievous figure from traditional cultures around the world can contribute an alternative narrative for humanity in the Anthropocene.

Agriculture has played a pivotal role in shaping landscapes, soils and vegetation. Developing a better understanding of early farming practices can contribute to wider questions regarding the long-term impact of farming and its nature in comparison with present-day traditional agrosystems. In this study we determine stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values of barley grains from a series of present-day traditionally managed farming plots in Morocco, capturing a range of annual rainfall and farming practices. This allows a framework to be developed to refine current isotopic approaches used to infer manuring intensity and crop water status in (semi-)arid regions. This method has been applied to charred crop remains from two early farming sites in the eastern Mediterranean: Abu Hureyra and ‘Ain Ghazal. In this way, our study enhances knowledge of agricultural practice in the past, adding to understanding of how people have shaped and adapted to their environment over thousands of years.

The sustainable use of environmental resources is an important tenet guiding future governance and management in the Anthropocene. However, the concept of sustainability is based on underlying assumptions of how sustainable development policies are formulated and applied. This commentary describes some of the flaws of ‘sustainability’ which are that (1) it requires full knowledge of the workings of Earth’s multiple physical systems and their sensitivities; and (2) the structures and management tools used by societal actors have low adaptive capacity to address ongoing changes to the physical environment. This commentary considers that societal actors and their future roles are likely to emerge from changing economic patterns, community structures and geopolitical contexts over coming decades. This providing an alternative Anthropocene future to that which is commonly posited, and emphasizes the use and limitations of sustainable development and the societal actors that are concerned with it.

Geoengineering evokes fears and hopes among the general public, media and scientists. Policy-makers thus face the dilemma of how to respond to this deeply controversial issue. In this paper we examine a wide variety of policy documents from different countries, international organizations and NGOs to gain insights into how geoengineering is perceived at the policy level. We use qualitative content analysis in order to determine specific aspects of framing of geoengineering: concerns and hopes to indicate risk perceptions and action proposals to account for directions in policy development. The policy documents contain a large variety of concerns, hopes and action proposals. Technical and risk-related issues dominate the concerns; the hopes express a wish for new solutions to climate change; and the action proposals emphasize the need for more research. Furthermore, there were clear differences between Anglo-American and German documents, indicating that international policy development on geoengineering will be a difficult task.

A defining feature of both the Anthropocene concept and the new discipline of pyrogeography is combustion of carbon-rich fuels by humans. A key objective of pyrogeography is understanding to what degree landscape fires set by hominins has overwritten natural fires through geological time, and whether these changes had substantial ecological knock-on effects. This research is essential to precisely define the onset of the Anthropocene. Nonetheless, the commonly used imprecise definition that the Anthropocene commenced at 1780 is a useful organising principle for pyrogeography because it provides a framework to understand the synergistic effects of anthropogenic global environment changes in shaping global fire activity following the Industrial Revolution.

Human rights are considered ethical demands that operate at an elevated juridical level. They have become popular legal constructs that contribute to the traditional instrumentalist and the more esoteric functions of law. While there is often considerable criticism leveled against human rights, as creatures of law and as legal mechanisms possessing unique characteristics, they are also uniquely situated and able to perform a singular mediating role in the human–environment interface. The recent mushrooming of rights to a healthy environment, environmental-related procedural rights and other substantive political and socio-economic rights bearing on environmental interests, is testimony to their increasing popularity. Yet, despite their prevalence in the environmental regulatory domain, the arrival of the Anthropocene is possibly set to require a complete rethink of the way in which we use human rights to mediate the human–environment interface. This is because the Anthropocene presents an urgent call for dramatic regulatory interventions of a kind hitherto unseen. Accepting the continuing prevalence of human rights as part of the environmental regulatory domain, this article argues that there is every reason to believe that their traditional role, nature, objectives and construction should change because of the Anthropocene. The article carries this argument by discussing the Anthropocene and its features that might influence conceptions of human rights and the environment as they are currently embedded in the social institutions of environmental law and governance. The argument then uses climate change as a useful explanatory context to identify and to understand the different types of rights issues that might arise in the Anthropocene. The next part of the discussion then takes stock of human rights in the environmental context by evaluating the way in which they currently mediate the human–environment interface. The article concludes with suggestions founding a re-imagination of the relationship between human rights and the environment in the Anthropocene.

As humans have colonised and modified the Earth’s surface, they have developed progressively more sophisticated tools and technologies. These underpin a new kind of stratigraphy, that we term technostratigraphy, marked by the geologically accelerated evolution and diversification of technofossils – the preservable material remains of the technosphere (Haff, 2013), driven by human purpose and transmitted cultural memory, and with the dynamics of an emergent system. The technosphere, present in some form for most of the Quaternary, shows several thresholds. Its expansion and transcontinental synchronisation in the mid 20th century has produced a global technostratigraphy that combines very high time-resolution, great geometrical complexity and wide (including transplanetary) extent. Technostratigraphy can help characterise the deposits of a potential Anthropocene Epoch and its emergence marks a step change in planetary mode.