‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ Public Environmental History

Abstract

The geological concept ‘the Anthropocene’ circulates widely outside Earth System Science – in museum communities, public culture, social sciences, and amongst social science and humanities scholars, artists, activists and public historians too. It is an evident idea for public historians today working with environmental history to engage with a concept that successfully and popularly bridges academic and public interests. This article discusses the concept of the Anthropocene within public environmental history’s historiography and brings in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential discussions from the academic field of history and theory about the non-synchronous temporalities geological time and historical time. The article categorizes public environmental history’s methodological approaches since the field emerged in the 1990s, revealing the important concepts being landscapes, human-nature interactions, climate change, sustainability and the Anthropocene. It concludes that the Anthropocene is a concept that can further develop public environmental history but that it also a paradox to the field potentially affecting a core idea in public history – relationships to publics. This has to do with temporal implications of the concept: it squeezes the temporality of memory important to public history and humans out of view; it imposes an extremely slow and long chronological time that is unfamiliar if not foreign to ordinary people to perceive of; it carries with it the idea about a future without humans and other species of today.