LARB Digital eDitions #44: Environment and Anthropocene

February 201672 pages

LARB Digital eDitions #44: Environment and Anthropocene

At the end of 2015, global leaders agreed to keep the Earth as we know it from overheating. The deal, reached at a UN-sponsored summit in Paris, may mark a new era in which humans prevent the planet’s temperature from rising any more than two degrees Celsius.


If humans are affecting climate, it makes sense that thinkers in the humanities will have something to say about it. These essays, taken together, make up a snapshot of responses to life in the Anthropocene, our current age, defined by one writer as “the age of human influence over nature on a planetary scale.” They might not sway global environmental policy. But they just might change the way you think about the world, as intimidating and incomprehensible as it might seem at this moment.