The Anthropocene. Christian Schwägerl

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      Obviously, Google hits do not say anything about how correct or profound an idea is. This can be illustrated perfectly by the number of hits returned by a search for “Glenn Beck.” For a term as esoteric as “Anthropocene,” this increase is considerable.

      The Anthropocene idea touches a nerve with roots deep in the history of our civilization. Critical debates on humankind’s role on earth were taking place as long ago as the sixteenth century. Christian Europe, after China, the second center of science and technology, had begun to conquer the known world. During this period, a French artist named Jean de Gourmont created a symbol that characterizes this process. De Gourmont drew the most up-to-date world map of his time in the form of a human face. Rather than give this face the appearance of a king, he depicted it as a fool with a double-peaked, bell-tipped cap and jester’s staff.⁹⁴

      Known as “The Fool’s Cap,” the drawing was produced circa 1575, in the heyday of early explorers and European colonizers. It was the time of a worldwide race for raw materials and land estates, finding silver mines in Peru and spice plants on the Maluku Islands (Moluccas). Meanwhile, British miners were already excavating two hundred thousand tons of coal a year. Emperor Charles V had broken the Christian Church’s prohibition on limiting interest, thus enabling Dutch merchants to lend him money, and unleashing a wave of speculative investment that has lasted to the present day.

      De Gourmont’s fool’s head was regarded as a warning against earthly fantasies of power, pride and folly. Tattooed on the fool’s forehead is a proclamation of how absurd it is for men to fight over the earth with sword and flame. De Gourmont calls the earth the “world point.” This was a revolutionary term at a time when there was no telephone, no Internet, when no one spoke of a “global village” and when it was risky to question the biblical creation story. The Frenchman was thus one of the first to realize that the world is truly small, rather than the infinite space it seemed to conquerors at the time.

      On the jester’s scepter is written the “infinite vanity of human beings.” Above the fool’s head hangs the command: “Know Thyself.” For a long time, the map was filed in the humor section of map collections. But it is one of the most sharp-witted, serious reflections on the relationship of humanity with the Earth.

      Many others shared this critical line of thinking, including Hans Carl von Carlowitz, an early eighteenth century tax accountant and mining administrator at the royal court of Freiberg in Saxony. He determined how mining had led to a decline in forests across the whole of Europe. He lambasted the wastage of wood by the rich and in 1713 introduced the concept of sustainability.⁹⁵