This is a lecture from Colloquium Series Department 1.

In a synthesis book published in 2004, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) issued 24 graphs to illustrate the human impact on the Earth System. Twelve of these graphs represent socio-economic trends serving as proxies for the “human enterprise.” These are juxtaposed to twelve other graphs representing indicators tracking the development of the Earth System’s structure and functioning. Taken together these graphs have been interpreted as suggesting an acceleration of the human imprint on the Earth System beginning in the 1950s, a phenomenon that has become referred to as the “Great Acceleration.” The Great Acceleration is a powerful image that has become very influential in the past two decades in the debates surrounding the Anthropocene. The project will reapproach the idea of the Great Acceleration from a historical-critical perspective. It will look beyond the Great Acceleration graphs at their broader context acknowledging, in particular, that these graphs themselves reflect particular historical conditions of their production. From this critical perspective, we will reassess the extent to which the notion of a Great Acceleration is supported, that is, whether it can indeed be established that there is change in the dynamics of the “human enterprise” that manifest itself in the Earth system’s answer from 1950 onwards, or else, and maybe worse, that we have been on the same trajectory into the Anthropocene dynamically already much longer than only the past 70 years.