The years between 1770 and 1830 are the great decades when geology became the science we recognize today, the science that gave us the concept of deep time and that is focused on reconstructing Earth’s past and explaining the immense forces that gave Earth’s crust its present form; the science that decentred humanity’s place in time. In the early twenty-first century, the Anthropocene has complicated and confused this picture, and some have objected that it seems to put humans back at the centre (others have embraced this human-centred approach). There is no shortage of historical and conceptual confusion surrounding the Anthropocene. This paper will try to shed some light on the Anthropocecene and will do so from two unusual points of departure: Goethe, who witnessed and participated in the great changes of the revolutionary decades around 1800; and Max Frisch, the author of Man Appears in the Holocene(Der Mensch erscheint im Holozaen: Eine Erzählung, 1979). 

Ernst (Ernie) Hamm is an historian of science in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at York University in Toronto, Ontario. His work focuses on the history of the geosciences, the sciences in the Enlightenment, Romantic science, Goethe’s scientific work and the interactions of the natural and human sciences.