Monograph

Sviluppo e ambiente

Per una storia dell’Antropocene
  • Simone Neri Serneri,

The climate crisis is the most striking symptom of our time: the Anthropocene, the historical epoch in which the impact of anthropogenic societies on the Earth system challenges the environmental conditions that made human civilisations possible. How did we arrive at the contradictions of the present time, in which socio-economic development and environmental systems are intimately connected but in a state of dramatic tension? The text outlines the events and processes that over the last four to five centuries have fuelled an exceptional development of human societies through an equally exceptional transformation of ecosystems, starting with the “Columbian Exchange” of the 16th century, and arriving, through the use of the “subterranean forest” and the “ghost acres” in the late 18th century, up to the 20th-century global “Great Acceleration” in the use of resources.

  • Keywords:
  • Anthropocene,
  • Environmental History,
  • Global Development,
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Simone Neri Serneri

University of Florence, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0001-6118-4841

Simone Neri Serneri is Full Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Florence. In the field of environmental history he published Incorporare la natura. Storie ambientali del Novecento (Carocci, 2005) and co-edited The Basic Environmental History (Springer, 2014), Industria, ambiente e territorio. Per una storia ambientale delle aree industriali in Italia (il Mulino, 2009) and Storia e ambiente. Città, risorse e territori nell’Italia contemporanea (Carocci, 2007).
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  2. Belich, J. 2009. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the An- glo-World: 1783-1939. Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press.
  3. Bonneuil, C., e J.-B. Fressoz. 2019 (2013). La terra, la storia e noi. L’evento Antropocene. Roma: Treccani.
  4. Chakrabarty, D. 2021 (2009, 2014). Clima, Storia e Capitale, a cura di M. De Giuli, e N. Porcelluzzi. Milano: Nottetempo.
  5. Chakrabarty, D. 2021 (2015, 2016, 2017). La sfida del cambiamento climatico. Globalizza- zione e Antropocene. Verona: Ombre Corte.
  6. Chatterjee, E. 2020. “The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism.” Journal of Asian Studies 79: 1-22.
  7. Crosby, A. W. 1992 (1972). Lo scambio colom- biano. Conseguenze biologiche e culturali del 1942. Torino: Einaudi.
  8. Crutzen, P. J. 2002. “Geology of mankind.” Nature 415: 23.
  9. Crutzen, P. J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change News- letter 41: 17-8.
  10. Fischer-Kowalski, M., F. Krausmann, and I. Pallua. 2014. “A Socio-Metabolic Reading of Anthropocene: Modes of Subsistence, Pop- ulation Size, and Human Impact on Earth.” Anthropocene Review 1: 1-20.
  11. Foster, B., B. Clark, and R. York. 2010. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York : Monthly Review Press.
  12. Ghosh, A. 2017 (2016). La grande cecità. Il cam- biamento climatico e l’impensabile. Vicenza: Neri Pozza.
  13. Gibbard, P. L., et al. 2022. “A Practical Solution: The Anthropocene Is a Geological Event, Not a Formal Epoch.” Episodes: Journal of Inter- national Geosciences 45, 4: 353-60.
  14. Gibbard, P. L., et al. 2022. “The Anthropocene as an Event, Not an Epoch.” Journal of Qua- ternary Science 37, 3: 1-7.
  15. Haraway, D., and A. Tsing. 2019. “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing.” by Gregg Mitmann. Edgeeffects, October 12, 2019. <https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/> (2025-03-05).
  16. Head, M. J., W. Steffen, et al. 2022. “The Great Acceleration Is Real and Provides a Quanti- tative Basis for the Proposed Anthropocene Series/Epoch.” Episodes: Journal of Interna- tional Geosciences 45, 4: 385-96.
  17. Hornborg, A., J. R. McNeill, and J. Marti- nez-Alier, edited by. 2007. Rethinking En- vironmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change. Lanham, MD: AltaMira.
  18. Krausmann, F., et al. 2009. “Growth in Global Materials Use, GDP, and Population During the 20th Century.” Ecological Economics 68, 10: 2801-9.
  19. Krausmann, F., et al. 2018. “From Resource Extraction to Outflows of Wastes and Emis- sions: The Socioeconomic Metabolism of the Global Economy, 1900–2015.” Global Envi- ronmental Change 52: 1-12.
  20. Lewis, S. L., e M. A. Maslin. 2019 (2018). Il pianeta umano. Come abbiamo creato l’An- tropocene. Torino: Einaudi.
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  23. McNeill, J. R., e P. Engelke. 2018 (2013). La Grande Accelerazione: Una storia ambien- tale dell’Antropocene dopo il 1945. Torino: Einaudi.
  24. Moore, J. 2017 (2014). Antropocene o Capita- locene? Scenari di ecologia-mondo nella crisi planetaria. Verona: Ombre Corte.
  25. Morgan, R. A., and C. Simonetti. 2024. “Plan- etary Boundaries, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene.” In The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History, edited by E. O’Gor- man et al., 187-203. Londra: Routledge.
  26. Neri Serneri, S. 2023. “Antropocene: Ambiente e sviluppo in età contemporanea.” In L’età contemporanea. Prospettive di storia europea e globale, a cura di M. Bresciani, e F. Conti, 150-70. Roma: Carocci.
  27. Parthasarathi, P. 2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Diver- gence, 1600-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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  32. Syvitski, J., et al. 2020. “Extraordinary Hu- man Energy Consumption and Resultant Geological Impacts Beginning Around 1950 CE Initiated the Proposed Anthropocene Epoch.” Communications Earth & Environ- ment 1: 1-10.
  33. Theodoridis, D., P. Warde, and A. Kander. 2018. “Trade and Overcoming Land Constraints in British Industrialization.” Journal of Global History 3: 145-68.
  34. Waters, C., et al. 2022. “Epochs, Events, and Episodes: Marking the Geological Impact of Humans.” Earth-Science Reviews 234: 1-18.
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  37. Yusoff, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press.
  38. Zalasiewicz, J. 2020. “Old and New Patterns of the Anthropocene.” In Strata and Three Stories, edited by J. Zalasiewicz, and J. A. Thomas, 45-57. RCC Perspectives 3.
  39. Zalasiewicz, J., C. N. Waters, et al. 2021. “The Anthropocene: Comparing Its Meaning in Geology (Chronostratigraphy) with Con- ceptual Approaches Arising in Other Disci- plines.” Earth’s Future 9, 3: 1-10.
  40. Zalasiewicz, J., et al., edited by. 2019. The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate. Cambridge University Press.
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Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Sviluppo e ambiente

Book Subtitle

Per una storia dell’Antropocene

Authors

Simone Neri Serneri

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

64

Publication Year

2025

Copyright Information

© 2025 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0649-5

ISBN Print

979-12-215-0648-8

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-0649-5

eISBN (epub)

979-12-215-0650-1

Series Title

Lectio Magistralis

Series ISSN

2612-7725

Series E-ISSN

2704-5935

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