Amid the many discussions of how environmentalism and democratic politics might intersect, perhaps the greatest challenge for historians has come from the simultaneously emergent and epochal shift into the Anthropocene. This is because the Anthropocene signals a world ‘after nature’, but that means at least two things. First, that human beings have become geological agents, and that we have become conscious of our being geological agents, through an increasingly historical awareness of how our species has transformed planetary conditions of habitability. Secondly, and related to the first point, the once seemingly accepted divisions between a humanly-curated, and thus artificial, world of politics and a natural world or environment somehow separate from it, and indicative of a certain type of Western ‘modernity’, no longer seems tenable, if it ever was.¹ However, as we shift, or rather stumble into the complex worlds of the Anthropocene, there is no clear point of origin around which to orient its political implications. In fact, its temporalities weave in and out of deep geological time, modern democratic time, the accelerated time of the post-1945 global order, and now into a sort of Anthropocene time of revision since 2000, the moment of its formal conceptual coining.²

中文翻译：

---

地球的战时？

在关于环保主义和民主政治如何交叉的许多讨论中，也许对历史学家来说最大的挑战来自于同时出现的和划时代的转变到人类世。这是因为人类世标志着一个“追随自然”的世界，但这至少意味着两件事。首先，人类已经成为地质代理人，并且我们已经意识到我们是地质代理人，这是通过对我们的物种如何改变行星宜居条件的日益历史的认识。其次，与第一点相关，曾经看似被接受的人为策划的、因此是人为的政治世界与自然世界或环境之间的划分，以某种方式与之分离，并表明某种类型的西方“现代性”，似乎不再站得住脚，¹然而，当我们转向，或者更确切地说是偶然进入人类世的复杂世界时，并没有明确的起源点来确定其政治含义。事实上，它的时间性在深层地质时期、现代民主时期、1945 年后全球秩序的加速时期以及现在进入自 2000 年以来的某种人类世时期的修正时期，即其正式概念创造的时刻。²