June 4, 2014, by Helen Whitehead

Welcome to the Anthropocene video

Although it’s a couple of years old, this video, made by Owen Gaffney at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), about climate and environmental change is still very relevant – take a look. “Welcome to the Anthropocene” is a film about the state of the planet, which opened the UN’s Rio+20 summit on sustainable development in June 2012. The film is a three-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. It charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.

The Anthropocene is an informal term for a geologic epoch or period that marks the time in which human activities have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.

The film is part of an educational webportal on the Anthropocene, anthropocene.info, commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure conference. There are several other related videos there.  Useful background viewing if you are joining us on the ‘Sustainability, Society and You’ MOOC on FutureLearn from 16th June.

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