A Prominent Role in a Landscape Lush with Mutual Mediation

Abstract

This chapter clarifies how the turn towards humanity as a decisive factor can be understood as a result of increasing human empowerment, which has meant that the human being can seem to have assumed a position at the core of its own universe. Such an anthropocentric conception is, however, inadequate if we are to understand the wider implications of the human turn.

The chapter goes on to describe in greater detail how, with the human turn in the Anthropocene, we humans have already moved beyond such a situation. The human factor has now grown to such colossal and unfathomable proportions that it dislodges not only the idea of the world and nature as a relatively undisturbed framework, but even the very idea of humankind as holding a central role in that previous scenario. Instead, what we now see is an Anthropocene landscape lush with mutual interconnectedness and mediation.