Umano, tropo (poco) umano

The expression “Anthropocene” hit the headlines when the chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Jozef Crutzen on 22nd February 2000, during a meeting of the scientific committee of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP), interrupted the interlocutors using for the first time this word, the only one capable of defining the impact that the human species is having on the environment and on the biosphere. From that moment an important debate appares and it immediately went beyond the boundaries of the hard sciences to flow into different fields, from epistemology to anthropology, from philosophy to sociology of science, passing through economics and politics. The dossier of the n. 21/2019 of S&F_ intends to examine the expression “Anthropocene” as a concept that refers both to an insufficiency of human being as we know it faced with the crisis of the Modernity and its superabundance – an excess of intervention, in the sense of expropriation, exploitation and destruction of Nature, Earth and Other.