Homogenocene: Defining the Age of Bio-cultural Devastation (1493–Present)

Abstract The entrance into the Anthropocene Epoch has pushed historians and social scientists to reconsider human history through new lenses and along an entirely different timeline. For historians, the notion of the Anthropocene can be seen as an overarching category superimposed on the usual chronological divisions into ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary history. In social sciences in general, the notion of the Anthropocene has been embraced, often critically, by enlarging its semantic field through a series of neologisms, which this article aims to analyze and contribute to. Originating from within stratigraphy and geology, the new coining for a (not yet official) epoch acts as a tectonic shift by bringing geology into history, as well as into humanities and social sciences. Paradoxically, it could be said that humans are being “ejected from history” just as geology enriches itself with a human-centered eponym, Anthropocene, that is, when specific actions carried out by a single biological species, homo sapiens , have spawned consequences so deep and everlasting that an imprint upon the Earth’s stratigraphy has been impressed forever. These specific actions can be encapsulated in a single term: overconsumption, possibly accompanied by its twin dimension, overexploitation (of resources). This article sets out to identify the period and sequence of events leading to the shift from consumption to overconsumption and from exploitation to overexploitation. Identifying the moment these transitions occurred is essential, as the double excess of “over” patterns has characterized what is commonly understood as the Anthropocene Epoch.