Abstract

Never before has humanity placed its stamp on the planet in ways even remotely comparable to the situation today. Human domination of Earth is such that natural scientists have suggested naming the current geological era, starting with the fossil fuel revolution, the Anthropocene, a nomenclature which would, if widely adopted, make the Holocene (which began just after the last Ice Age, 11,500 years ago) a brief interlude in the history of the planet. We live in an era which, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, is marked by human activity and expansion in unprecedented ways (Steffen et al. 2007). It is an overheated world, a volatile world of accelerated change in which new opportunities present themselves for comparative anthropological research.