The Anthropocene Term Analysis

But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. […] You could [call the planet a] "war machine." Each day we arm it more.

Global warming [shows us] that we didn't defeat the environment at all. There was no final conquest, no dominion established. In fact, the opposite: Whatever it means for the other animals on the planet, with global warming we have unwittingly claimed ownership of a system beyond our ability to control or tame in any day-to-day way. But more than that: with our continued activity, we have rendered that system only more out of control. Nature is both over, as in "past," and all around us, indeed overwhelming us and punishing us—this is the major lesson of climate change, which it teaches us almost daily.