Paper short abstract:

The catastrophe foreseen due to climate change causes an inevitable break in the sense of time. The main goal of my presentation is to show how the concept of the Anthropocene creates opportunities for new narratives and how a reconceptualization of historical time can enrich this procedure.

Paper long abstract:

The catastrophe foreseen due to climate change causes an inevitable break in time. As the future becomes more urgent, the space for predictions becomes narrower and expectations fade. The main goal of my presentation is to show how the concept of the Anthropocene challenges this “shortening” of the future time and how a reconceptualization of historical time can enrich this procedure.

The proclaiming of the Anthropocene as the successor of the Holocene causes an evident imbalance in the geologic time scale. Temporal disproportions of this type may raise questions for geologists and earth system scientists but are something common in the historical sciences. As can easily be observed, the closer a historical period is to the present, the shorter it is considered to be. This happens because of the density with which historical time is endowed as it makes the journey from the past to the present.

What is unique about the Anthropocene is that it has been proclaimed less as an epoch of the past and much more as an epoch of the future. The claim that the Anthropocene is here to stay is a daring prediction, which manages to create a promising counternarrative to the stories of upcoming Armageddons. Such a wholesale change of perception of the future needs a solid base which can only be offered by the past. It is thus a task for historians, philosophers and political theorists to reconfigure historical thinking in a way that can support the imagining of a utopic future.