Join NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and Public Books for the New York launch and panel discussion of Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us from Verso. Bonneuil will discuss the book in conversation with political historian Meg Jacobs, urban ecologist Stephanie Wakefield, and cultural theorist Nick Mirzoeff.
Refuting the view of a “human species” that upset the Earth system unaware of what it was doing, this book proposes the first critical history of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch defined not only by environmental crisis, but by its human origin. Bonneuil and Fressoz shake up many accepted ideas: about our supposedly recent “environmental awareness,” about previous challenges to industrialism, about the manufacture of ignorance and consumerism, about so-called energy transitions, as well as about the role of the military in environmental destruction. In a dialogue between science and history, The Shock of the Anthropocene (in translation from the French by David Fernbach) dissects the new theoretical buzzword and explores paths for living and acting politically in this rapidly developing geological epoch.