by Michel Lussault

Interview first published in French in the journal Rhizome, 2022.

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Rhizome: How do you define the Anthropocene?

Michel Lussault: This neologism is coined from the term “anthropos”, i.e. the generic human being, and “cene”, deriving from Kainos, which means “new”, in this case in the sense of a new geological period: the “period of the human”.

It was Paul Josef Crutzen[1] who proposed this concept at the turn of the 21^st century to show that, due to the impact of human activities on planetary biophysical systems, human beings have become a “force of nature” of comparable importance to geological forces. In other words, human activities and their effects are so massive and far-reaching that all of the planet’s biological and physical systems are “forced.” These powerful “anthropogenic forcings” cause an accelerated evolution of planetary bioclimatic conditions by triggering numerous feedback loops between all of the various components of the Earth system. These are comparable in importance to the non-anthropogenic bioclimatic evolutions that have existed in the geological history of the planet, but therefore differ in their origin, and above all in their rapidity. Indeed, the geological history of Earth has experienced, for example, very significant temperature changes over tens of thousands of years,[2] whose origins were linked to fluctuations in the motion of the planet and its axial inclination. In a few hundred years, we will experience changes of comparable magnitude whose origin is not a “normal” biophysical fluctuation, but anthropogenic. Continue reading →