Preface: On Waking Up vii
Acknowledgments xii
1. The Anthropocene Rupture 1
A rupture in Earth history 3
Volition in nature 5
Earth System science 9
Scientific misinterpretations 13
The ecomodernist gloss 21
An epoch by any other name 27
2. A New Anthropocentrism 36
To doubt everything 36
Anthropocentrism redux 39
The antinomy of the Anthropocene 45
The new anthropocentrism 50
The world-making creature 58
The new anthropocentrism versus ecomodernism 66
In praise of technology 72
3. Friends and Adversaries 76
Grand narratives are dead, until now 76
After post-humanism 87
The freak of nature 98
The ontological wrong turn 102
Recovering the cosmological sense? 109
4. A Planetary History 112
The significance of humans 112
Does history have a meaning? 116
An Enlightenment fable 122
"Politics is fate" 127
5. The Rise and Fall of the Super-agent 136
Freedom is woven into nature 136
Responsibility is not enough 145
Living without Utopia 157
Notes 163
Index 176