Welcome to the Anthropocene. For the first time, fossil fuel-burning humans have become the prime drivers of the planetary climate. We have left behind the relatively stable pattern of natural variability that governed the environment in the Holocene epoch, beginning some 11,700 years ago. How do we adapt to our strange new planet? What kinds of ideas and values should we carry with us from the Holocene?
Dr. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is an Associate Professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study where he is completing a book (his fourth) about the birth of the fossil fuel economy and how it produced a new ideology of infinite economic growth.