Beyond “Geological Nature,” Fatalistic Determinism and Pop‐Anthropocene: Social, Cultural, and Political Aspects of the Anthropocene

The commentary encourages supplementing the geological and natural concept of the Anthropocene with a cultural and political aspect. These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive but are complementary. This approach can facilitate its transition from the language of academic debate to practical and necessary actions at the societal level. According to the authors, the slightly abstract and impersonal Anthropocene should be shown in the context of cultural, economic and political dependencies and choices that created it and continue to reproduce its logic. This turn also opens up a new area for analyzing the Anthropocene from the perspective of a critique of political economy (an analysis of the costs of economic policies that reproduce and accelerate successive stages of the ecological catastrophe) as well as of civic culture (research “anthropocentric awareness” or “anthropocentric citizenship” in entire societies). Thus, the authors suggest rejecting the fatalistic determinism of the Anthropocene as a process that, although originally caused by abstract (devoid of historical, economic and political contexts) humans, is now often treated as a phenomenon beyond the reach of social action.

"equality" (Żuk & Żuk, 2022).However, it is worth trying to organize the concept of the Anthropocene and to facilitate its transfer from the language of academic debate into the sphere of practical social activities.Namely, this concept, which is becoming increasingly popular in the media, has huge research and political potential.The term was popularized by atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen, who declared at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program meeting in Cuernavaca, Mexico in February 2000, "We're not in the Holocene any more.We're in the … Anthropocene!" (Crutzen, 2002).
Crutzen used the term "Anthropocene" not based on stratigraphic studies, but owing to a direct perception and understanding of the Earth's changing system.From the beginning, his concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch indicated a crisis and transformation of the relationship between man and existing social systems with the Earth.Can treating the Anthropocene as an entirely human-made project make it easier to create a conscious path of departure from the socio-political model of development that leads nature and human civilization to an inevitable catastrophe?Today, the concept of the Anthropocene which functions at the intersection of the world of science and the media increasingly takes the form of Popular Anthropocene and resembles neo-Malthusian eco-catastrophism (Moore, 2023) (reducing humanity to a homogeneous population in which there is no room for a critical analysis of the interdependent influence of various political and political models on the fate of the Earth, nature, climate and individual social classes).The Anthropocene understood and perceived in this way may lead to the creation of another category of literature in bookstores or may be another element of popular culture that inspires the creation of disaster films and books but does not change anything in the real world.
It can be said that there are currently three types of social actors who raise the issue of the Anthropocene in public debate.On the one hand, there are academics and local social activists who deeply analyze various aspects of threats related to the Anthropocene (but they do not agree on whether it is possible to change current trends and how to turn theory into national and global actions).On the other hand, the simplified image of the Pop-Anthropocene that is present in the media does not bring any social effects and can only inspire the production of catastrophic and commercial messages in popular culture.The fact that the concept itself is present in social circulation does not mean that it is understood and that appropriate actions are taken.The analysis of the simplified and unclear image of the Anthropocene disseminated by the media leads to the following conclusion: In fact, it is rather evident that the lack of a consistent discussion of the Anthropocene does not solely stem from a poor scientific understanding of its ecological drives, but also by the lack of political awareness and a general unpreparedness to face the socio-environmental implications of the Age of Humankind (Zottola & de Majo, 2022).
Politicians are the third type of actors who touch upon the topic of tensions in the relationship between nature and the prevailing system.However, the vast majority of them, at recurring climate conferences, mainly try to disarm and neutralize the social anger of movements and civic initiatives that are a response to the effects of the Anthropocene.In other words, the political class usually tries to depoliticize climate challenges and reduce them to technical problems that can be solved using appropriate technology, without the need to introduce deep changes in socio-political systems.
Each of the three variants of dealing with the Anthropocene is deprived of a political context and is not translated into the language of public problems covering entire societies.This is a classic situation in which public problems are reduced to private concerns of individuals or small niche groups.Wondering whether politics could exist at all in a market and individualized society, Zygmunt Bauman wrote: The snag is, though, that these days the most common troubles of the individuals-by-fate are not additive.They simply do not sum up into a "common cause."They are shaped from the beginning in such a way as to lack the edges or "interfaces" allowing them to be dovetailed with other people's troubles.Troubles may be similar …, but unlike the common interest of yore they do not form a "totality which is greater than the sum of its parts" and acquire no new quality, easier to handle, by being faced up to and confronted together (Bauman, 2001, p. 48).
This view fits well with the challenges of the Anthropocene.
However without a global political perspective and clearly defined ecological risks posed by specific economic and political logic, quick decisions and changes going beyond narrow groups of experts will not be possible.In Earth's Future 10.1029/2023EF004045 ŻUK AND ŻUK this commentary, we want to: (a) show that the perspective of the social sciences does not have to be opposed to that of the natural and geological sciences, but all of them can complement each other well; (b) emphasize the need for taking a cultural and political perspective in the debate on the Anthropocene and the future fate of the Earth, its residents (both human and non-human animals) and the entire natural world; (c) reject the fatalistic determinism of the Anthropocene as a process that, although originally caused by some abstract and anonymous humans, is now often treated as a phenomenon beyond the reach of social action; (d) treat the Anthropocene not as a politically neutral project, but as a phenomenon causally related to specific political and economic forces that are not and have never been anonymous, and outline the resulting difficulties in developing a critical political perspective on the Anthropocene.In our opinion, this perspective may accelerate practical actions to save the climate and avoid an ecological catastrophe on Earth.In this sense, we treat the Anthropocene as it deserves: not only as an academic idea but also as a practical challenge that not only triggers geological and environmental consequences but also brings or may bring social, economic and political effects.We recognize that combining the geological and natural perspective with the cultural and political perspective can take the Anthropocene from the level of theory and put it into social practice.

The Dispute Between Naturalism and Anti-Naturalism
The different perspectives of the natural sciences and the social sciences in explaining and defining the phenomenon of the Anthropocene come down to the classic dispute between naturalism and anti-naturalism.The latter position, which was originally developed by humanistic sociology, rejects the idea that social reality is simply part of nature, and thus rejects the methodological assumption that the social world should be studied in the same way as the natural world.If we recognize the Anthropocene as a cultural reality (and not only as geological and natural processes), then we cannot be bound by the naturalistic formula of experience in our analyses.As Florian Znaniecki (1992, p. 136) claimed, cultural facts can be reduced "neither to objective natural reality nor to subjective psychological phenomena."The Anthropocene has hard natural indicators (temperature increase, the impact of accelerating global warming on increasingly extreme weather phenomena (Papalexiou & Montanari, 2019), catastrophic fires (Senande-Rivera et al., 2022) and rising sea levels (Tebaldi et al., 2021)), yet it causes objective psychological states ("eco-anxiety" and social anxiety (Verplanken et al., 2020), the anger of young climatic activists (Svensson & Wahlström, 2023)).However, it is primarily a socio-cultural construct, not only a product of human activity and its various systems of production and domination but also a construct defined and described by and sparking numerous polemics in the socio-cultural dimension.For modern social sciences, the Anthropocene is primarily a social product that affects the quality and living conditions of the human species, all other non-human animals and the entire natural world.Nevertheless, it cannot be treated as a manifestation of determinism of impersonal "forces of nature" or anonymous geological and biological processes.Breaking with the determinism of nature does not mean ignoring the complex and almost dialectic relationship between society and the natural world: the relationship between them is permanent.All social, cultural and political models are a response to "objective" natural conditions, but at the same time they transform these "natural conditions."In this sense, the human environment is both social and natural.As Berger and Luckmann wrote in their classic work entitled The Social Construction of Reality, "the developing human being not only interrelates with a particular natural environment, but with a specific cultural and social order" (Berger & Luckmann, 1991, p. 68).In other words, "From the moment of birth, man's organismic development, and indeed a large part of his biological being as such, are subjected to continuing socially determined interference" (Berger & Luckmann, 1991, p. 68).From this cultural perspective, the Anthropocene should be treated in two ways: as an objective "natural and geological" state and also as a defined model of "social, cultural and economic" relations, placed in a specific historical and political context.The relationship between these two dimensions created the phenomenon of the Anthropocene in the past and continues to affect the further phases and fate of the Anthropocene.Without a perspective in which these two dimensions intertwine and interact, it is impossible to formulate political postulates and practical strategies of action that, by changing the socio-political system, can simultaneously affect the natural and geological trajectory, pushing away the vision of a self-fulfilling catastrophe.Frank Biermann ( 2021) is right when he claims that the artificial dichotomy between "nature" and "humans" is not only indefensible, but it also deemphasizes questions of planetary justice and democracy and may risk political marginalization of central concerns of human and non-human survival.
Some contradictions within the discussion on the Anthropocene have already been questioned as they prevent the debate from developing a cultural and social perspective.As rightly claimed, "in climate change, social relations Earth's Future 10.1029/2023EF004045 determine natural conditions; in Anthropocene thinking, natural scientists extend their world-views to society" (Malm & Hornborg, 2014, p. 66).Moreover, negating the artificial division into "natural" and "socio-cultural" makes it possible to create the category of not only "common heritage," but also of "common worlds" or "common futures" (Harrison, 2015).Now, in the third decade of the 21st century, when climate change has accelerated even more, it is important to give social analyses and concepts of the Anthropocene a political perspective.The Anthropocene can be understood as a global political phenomenon not only in the sense of growing interdependence (Biermann, 2014) but also as the result of political choices and the historic domination of a specific political power.This perspective allows us to see that the Anthropocene is entangled in power relations and that capital adversely affects the environment and the people's classes.It also creates space for political demands and facilitates the creation of recovery programmes.This perspective also makes it possible to democratize the debate about the fate of the Earth, break the dominant narratives that blur responsibility for the current situation and extend the discussion to circles and environments that have not participated in it so far (e.g., those who are more concerned about the cost of living than ecological threats and for whom such considerations are the entertainment of academic "wise guys" and "green" eco-business, and the ecological lifestyle itself seems unattainable without changing the rules of capitalism).This would involve translating the Anthropocene into the language of everyday life practice and the perspective of the people's classes.In this way, indifference and ignorance about the future of the Earth are also reduced.Moving the issues of the Anthropocene permanently from academic halls and discussion boards to the main agenda of political challenges globally and in individual countries can make the political debate more realistic and, at the same time, reclaim the classic role of the university which is a link between critical diagnosis, new politics and class people.
Even among those who see a new political space for the Anthropocene, there are significant differences as to what the framework of the Anthropocentric political perspective should be (Lövbrand et al., 2020).Nevertheless, there is a consensus that the meaning of the social environment is undergoing changes in the new conditions of the Anthropocene, just like the definitions of geopolitical threats are changing (Dalby, 2017).All this makes it necessary to redefine the framework of political conflicts.

The Political Character of the Anthropocene: A Few Words About the Political Differentiation of Systems Affecting Natural Processes
Climatic migration is an example of a new political conflict that may symbolize the politicization of the Anthropocene.The phenomenon of climatic migration (Nukusheva et al., 2021), the full phase of which is still ahead of us, illustrates the spatial differentiation of areas that are either more or less conducive to the life of the human species.Is this spatial differentiation only the result of climatic, geographic and natural differentiation?To a large extent, this is the case, but it is also a manifestation of the diverse socio-political systems existing on the Earth in the past.It is a cliché to say that the quality of air, water and climate depends to a large extent on the economic, political and legal standards in force in a given country.If so, the different phases of the Anthropocene depend both on the entire Earth and in individual continents, on historical and contemporary political systems.To emphasize the meaning of this statement, it is worth asking some thought-provoking questions: Can the Anthropocene be imagined in a system of production characteristic of a slave system or early Middle Ages?Would the Anthropocene be possible in an anarchist society or one based on the dominant role of local worker cooperatives, which are not guided-like contemporary political systems and the elites of state authorities-by the logic of growth domestic product but, for example, by the complacency of their employees?These questions boil down to a fundamental question: is the Anthropocene, which was born during the Industrial Revolution, in fact, the history of capitalism and its impact on social and natural life?
A positive answer to this question, however, still does not exclude the diversity of capitalism itself and its various models, and thus the different degrees and manners of its impact on both people's lives and the world of nature.Namely, the dominance of global capitalism in the modern world does not mean that capitalism had the same face everywhere and exerted the same influence on the environment and the Earth (without extensive analysis, one can agree that the approach to the environment and ecological legislation were different in the neoliberal model of capitalism known primarily in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) and the model of "Rhenish capitalism" during the welfare-state period and the grassroots ecological movements in Germany of the 1970s.Hence, there is the concept of the capitalocene, which is understood as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life and also emphasizes the importance of a historical perspective that extends into the past, much earlier than the 20th century commonly associated with the Anthropocene.According to Jason W. Moore (2017), capitalist logic was based on the concept of Cheap Nature as a system of domination, appropriation and exploitation even at the dawn of modernity.
When did the accumulation and absolute domination of the rules of global capitalism associated with the great acceleration and global change generally considered to be the beginning of the Anthropocene occur?Post-1950 events have been usually indicated as the cut-off date for the beginning of the Anthropocene, when energy consumption, gross domestic product growth, population growth, production growth and global ocean temperatures began to increase rapidly (Syvitski et al., 2020).It is worth emphasizing that these processes occurred along with the dynamics of capital accumulation and growing social inequalities, which were observed particularly after the neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s initiated by Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States.
However, another question arises: if the Anthropocene is a product of capitalist relations of production and state political rule, would their change or rejection transform the dynamics of the Anthropocene or even offer a chance to undo the processes initiated by this epoch in the environment?This perspective has been outlined by John Bellamy Foster, who emphasizes that creating a new order is not only possible but even necessary to save life on Earth.How should this be done?Foster does not doubt: The new, essential ecological civilization, is nothing less than a worldwide ecological and social revolution against the capitalist mode of production-a revolution that is most likely to emerge first in the Global South, given the depth of the economic and ecological crises (Foster, 2022).
By rejecting capitalist logic and looking for a global political space to save the Earth, we must also abandon the nationalist tradition and economic nationalism, which are not only historically related to capitalism (Conversi, 2023) but are also incongruent with the current global environmental and climate challenges (Conversi, 2022a).Industrialization and the development of nation states and nationalist movements historically coincided.Today, in times of crisis and the fight for dwindling resources, nationalism is once again a response of and support for capitalist states.This tactical alliance is at odds with the desired policies of the Anthropocene era, which could be the answer to the planetary crisis (Conversi, 2022b).

Challenges for the Political Perspective of the Anthropocene and Obstacles to the Politicization of Actions to Protect the Earth
Although the challenges of the Anthropocene are global, traditional politics is implemented within the borders of nation states and is therefore unable to respond to transnational phenomena.Moreover, states also have the ambition to control and manage the environment under the principle of territorial exclusivity: "Mechanisms used by governments to tackle global problems are frequently very much about local control, about national sovereignty and border practices" (Dalby, 2020, p. 146).These mechanisms are applied despite the transnational challenges of climate policy and the Anthropocene.However, it is not only about developing transnational climate policy, but also about politicizing relations between humans and non-humans, extending justice and the sphere of human morality to non-humans, and initiating a withdrawal from a human-dominated world that is the legacy and consequence of capitalist logic (Epstein, 2023).This would require a radical change in social relations and human/non-human relations from constant competition and the desire to colonize to mutual cooperation and care work that is frequently invisible or devalued (Corwin & Gidwani, 2024).
The logic of efficiency and effectiveness that is typical of capitalist instrumental rationality is also an obstacle to the social and political activity that should be taken in response to the Anthropocene.Namely, instead of thinking about changing the social order and its relationship with the world of nature, the strategy of "security rationality" is applied.Thus, the current state power elites continue to maintain a monopoly over "corrective actions" and use the discourse of security or "emergency situation" to avoid real social changes.Such tactics once again make it difficult to politicize the Anthropocene: "In the place of social relations, knowledge production practices around the Anthropocene produce instead security relations" (Fagan, 2023, p. 17).
Among the main problems in politicizing the Anthropocene (understood as the creation of a common macrosocial strategy that goes beyond the efforts of dispersed, fragmented and isolated stakeholder groups) is that climate-related activity is reduced to individual responsibility.While morally this perspective may be based on real feelings, individualized approaches may limit the collective imagination about the types of changes that are necessary to address planetary damage (Soneryd & Uggla, 2015).This methodological and cognitive Earth's Future 10.1029/2023EF004045 reductionism means that individual responsibility for environmental problems is placed on an anonymous individual, leaving little room for reflections on the politics of institutions, nature and changes in social power relations (Maniates, 2001).
This also makes it easier to completely blur political responsibility and reduce the entire strategy of saving the Earth to the slogan "We are in the same ship" (Arsel, 2023).This approach perpetuates current trends and the belief that without social conflict and political changes, it is possible to develop sustainable policies that will save the environment.
On the other hand, some opinions point to the need to combine the individual level of various stakeholders with the level of systemic changes so that "individualized responsibility and accountability and transformative systemic change can be seen as two sides of a single coin" (Macdonald, 2023).Indeed, the growing individual concerns about the future of the Earth may be an additional argument for the need to politicize the Anthropocene.Eco-anxiety is a form of alienation that is "caught between the feeling of helplessness in the face of inaction on the climate crisis and a desire for a collective subject that can fundamentally shape the Anthropocene."This leads to "the recognition that the planetary crises of the present have been shaped by acts of human sociality and can, in turn, be reshaped by collective political agents" (Davidson, 2023, p. 12).
Another argument for exceeding the limits of traditional politics in the Anthropocene is the scale of natural hazards and disaster risk, which, on the one hand, have ceased to be local phenomena and have become global, and on the other, are part of the system of social inequalities.In this way, social, procedural and spatial inequalities influence the scale of disaster risk (Cutter, 2021).If activists and academics are convinced that changes in financial, legal, political and governance systems are necessary for sustainable and resilient futures (McPhearson et al., 2021), this raises the question about the directions of political changes.Regardless of the diverse and competing suggestions and guidance regarding the future political models that can protect life on Earth, there is nonetheless a sense of the need to abandon the logic and practice of neoliberal capitalism.Each time, critical reflections lead to the conclusion that the Anthropocene is less a geological age defined by human activity as much as the compounding consequences of a relatively small segment of humanity, so too is neoliberalism traceable to specific people, histories, and institutions (Kingsbury, 2023).

The Politicization of the Anthropocene, "Dangerous Conflict" and the Radicalization of the Political Paradigm: Beyond Nation-State Politics and Market Logic
Although capitalist logic is dominant, there were periods in the history of the 20th century when its influence on nature was varied and nuanced.An interesting illustration of this spatial and temporal differentiation may be the fall of communism in the late 1980s in Eastern European countries.Numerous branches of industry were privatized or liquidated (this was the effect of capital accumulation; the economies constituting the core of the global capitalist system got rid of competition from Eastern Europe and, above all, total production activity largely decreased at that time) (Vukina et al., 1999), unintentionally deindustrializing the economy.This, in an unplanned way and somewhat as a side effect, led in the 1990s to a temporary improvement in the quality of water, air and the general condition of the natural environment in Eastern European countries.A similar effect was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic on a global scale in 2020-2021 when air quality improved temporarily (Albayati et al., 2021).Would these "emergencies" in the global economy change the trajectory of the Anthropocene if they had lasted longer?If we assume they would, we must consequently recognize that we, as people creating specific socio-political and economic systems, can change the pace and phases of the Anthropocene, and perhaps even eliminate its significance from the natural and geological perspective.If political and economic systems created a path for human development that moved the human species and the entire natural world into the Anthropocene, can political and economic systems make another shift to establish greater harmony between the social and the natural worlds?In this way, another provocative question can be posed: can breaking the rule of state logic (based on the control of people and resources of the natural world in a given territory) and/or rejecting market logic (which can commodify every natural resource and turn it into a product for sale with a certain market value) change the history of the Earth, influence the trajectory of the Anthropocene and stop the Great Acceleration?(Steffen et al., 2015) If we accept this possibility, new possibilities open up in which man and society can become the creators of the post-Anthropocene ("the Communion" as described by John Bellamy Foster) (Foster & Clark, 2021).From this perspective, both the beginning and end of the Anthropocene cease to be anonymous and it becomes possible to identify specific social and political forces that can play the role of the environmental Earth's Future 10.1029/2023EF004045 ŻUK AND ŻUK proletariat as the main drive to stop the current catastrophic trends in the social and natural environment.It is not only about those who potentially form the environmental proletariat, which is "a class in itself," and a just transition combining environmental and social issues can be consistent with their interests (indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, peasants, rural communities and working-class families) (Faber et al., 2021), but about those who are "a class for itself" and are aware that the role of the environmental proletariat is in line with their interests.Who should play this role in individual countries and on a global scale is of course one of the basic questions for social research.Either way, there is a return to the language of class in discussions about the politics of the Anthropocene, which highlights the broader tensions inherent in the relationship between nature, society and capital (Arsel, 2023).This may be the answer to why the politicization of the Anthropocene, which shows the structural political-economic constraints on earth system stability (Albert, 2020), becomes a potentially "dangerous conflict" from the point of view of political and economic elites.Namely, the demand that capital and nation states abandon the monopoly on managing the Earth and its resources is an invitation to broad and radical social changes of a transnational nature (Quinn, 2023).

Research and Practical Conclusions for the Socially Defined Anthropocene
Should the geological concept of the Anthropocene be rejected in the context of a social perspective?Definitely not.But it is worth complementing and strengthening it with cultural and political aspects.The socially produced description of the effects of human activity has already become a legitimate and objectively existing social fact in culture.It is described, criticized and discussed as a social fact, not as an abstract idea or poetry.Therefore, the term "Anthropocene" should not be excluded from the language of the debate, but it should be specified, clearly defined in the social sciences and supplemented with the cultural, political and economic dimensions omitted from the "naturalistic concepts."Social scientists do not have to be experts in biology and geology (just as geologists do not have to be outstanding sociologists or political scientists), but it would be good for these two perspectives to be complementary rather than mutually exclusive.If we say A and accept the social context of the Anthropocene, then we must say B and deal with the social and political implications of this epoch.We indeed have no influence on the time and socio-historical context in which we came into the world as humans.However, if we accept the social character of the Anthropocene, it means that we recognize that the human species and the social system reproduced or changed by people are their product and a process in which they consciously or unknowingly participate.This means that not only can the Anthropocene be reproduced, but it can also be transformed by man who creates Social History and influences the History of Nature.Adopting this assumption opens up huge areas for research and several social policies.
As we have tried to show in this commentary, the socio-cultural dimension of the Anthropocene also allows us to put an end to its anonymous and slightly dehumanized character.There is a certain paradox in the original concepts of the Anthropocene: on the one hand, the human species is pointed out as a force (social, economic, industrial) influencing the condition of the Earth.On the other hand, the same human species is subjected to the process of desocialization and treated as passive beings who are not only influenced by the blind forces of nature and geology but also, and perhaps above all, by the blind and anonymous economic and political forces responsible for the current state of the Earth.In this way, the prevailing political order is almost equated with geological determinism and recognized as something "natural" and, at the same time, inevitable.This is what requires a change in the discussion about the ways and means of reaching the post-Anthropocene, understood as both a geological epoch and a social order restoring more harmonious relations between the environment and the social world.
What elements of the current debates about the Anthropocene are worth developing in this context, and which ones should be introduced into these discussions?
The global and supranational nature of the Anthropocene certainly weakens nationalist positions and attempts to enclose environmental challenges within individual nation states.In this sense, it is a useful tool for criticizing all nationalisms and national particularisms represented particularly by political forces associated with the populist right and disregarding or undermining environmental policy, climate change and global, cosmopolitan responsibility for the fate of the Earth (Kulin et al., 2021;Żuk, 2023a;Żuk & Szulecki, 2020).For this reason, this supranational and transnational perspective should be continued, and resource nationalism, which is inconsistent with climate protection and global environmental challenges, should be abandoned (Conversi, 2020).
Earth's Future 10.1029/2023EF004045However, it is worth talking openly about the economic costs of the Anthropocene in economic activity and political decisions that reproduce the present state and those that can stop the current trajectory.The critique of the political economy of the Anthropocene makes it possible to indicate the specific economic value of individual trajectories of socio-economic development resulting from additional costs related to climate change (the costs of fires and additional expenses related to health care and climate migration, the costs of saving endangered plant species and animals, etc.).This could also start a discussion about what practical actions and instruments need to be taken in the political economy to stop the dynamics of the Anthropocene.In addition to the revolutionary perspective, which aims to undermine the foundations of the logic of the Capitalinian Age (defined as the period of acceleration of global monopoly capitalism in the 1950s, which led to the era of planetary ecological crisis) (Foster & Clark, 2021), evolutionary actions are also possible.For example, the "anthropocentric tax" can be charged on the activities of large corporations or the mining industry that have a particular impact on perpetuating the framework and socio-ecological effects of the Anthropocene.It can be paid to the "global climate rescue fund."This can be called an introduction to the discussion about the anthropocentric critique of political economy.However, such actions cannot ignore other main dimensions of public life: social policy that will support lower classes in bearing the costs of the green transition, new tasks for universities, which should combine climate science with social and cultural perspectives (Naylor & Veron, 2021) , critical education that will not exclude and discourage young people from lower classes from supporting ecological policy (Żuk, 2023b), as well as a new model of regional development for those who will not benefit from energy transition (residents of coal basins and employees of the mining industry and the traditional energy sector) (Żuk, 2023c).
On the other hand, on the socio-cultural level, it is possible to research "anthropocentric awareness" or "anthropocentric citizenship" (understood as an active attitude on the individual, national and global levels to the challenges and threats related to the environmental disaster on the Earth, going beyond the current political and cultural limitations).Emphasizing the importance of the socio-cultural dimension makes it possible to break the static and anonymous foundations of anthropocentric processes.This consequently unveils the mask of neutrality and the lack of political responsibility for the ecological consequences of decisions made by political and economic decision-makers, as well as for the thoughtless attitudes of all other participants in social life.Both these shifts-adopting a socio-cultural perspective and consequently imposing economic costs and emphasizing political responsibility-are insufficient for a radical change in the trajectory of processes taking place on Earth.However, they are necessary to break the atmosphere of indifference of the political and business establishment, as well as other social actors and individuals to the fate of the Earth.The slightly abstract and impersonal Anthropocene should be shown in the context of cultural, economic and political dependencies and choices that created it and continue to reproduce its logic.