ABSTRACT
The environment is a major player in human health. It’s not just the backdrop to what we are doing during our busy daily routines, but it is an important contributor to the way that our physical bodies function; the quality of the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water that we drink are all predicated on the quality of the environment in which we live. In this chapter, we switch our focus to thinking about the environment, how it has changed over the past few hundred years, and how those changes have real ramifications for the functioning of our human bodies. The term ‘Anthropocene’ was coined by an ecologist (Eugene Stoermer) and an atmospheric chemist (Paul Crutzen) as a way to describe the “influence of human behavior on the earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere, and hydrosphere in recent centuries” (Haraway 2015a: 258). The ways in which people have altered the earth, down to its very core, will be read as a time of ecological collapse and destruction that will be written into the earth’s geology, according to these scientists. Other scientists, in a number of disciplines including anthropology, have picked up the use of this term, each time nuancing its definition to fit the purview of their academic interests. Bruno Latour, in his Presidential Address to the American Anthropology Association, argued the term gives “another definition of time, it redescribes what it is to stand in space, and it reshuffles what it means to be entangled within animated agencies” (2014: 16). Donna Haraway has discussed the strengths of the concept of the Anthropocene as well as a more precise term that she puts forth, the ‘Capitalocene’ (Haraway 2015a; 2015b).
