End Of An Age Of Plenty

A consumer society is a post-industrial term used to describe the fact that society is characterised more by what people consume and less by the jobs they do or goods they produce. As our relationship with consumerism has changed so too have the choices available of why, when, where and how we consume (Fig 1). Human consumerism is a major characteristic of the Anthropocene. The latter age is the latest in the history of life on planet Earth.. The Anthropocene comes either after or within the Holocene, the current geological epoch, which began approximately 10,000 years ago with the end of the last glacial period. The Anthropocene defines Earth’s most recent geological time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geological, hydrological, biospheric and other Earth system processes are now altered by humans adversely for the wellbeing of humans. The word combines the root “anthropo”, meaning “human” with the root “-cene”, the standard suffix for “epoch” in geologic time. These environmental problems of the Anthropocene are bound up with the detrimental impact of the growth of capitalism and the associated progress of technology.

http://blog.culturalecology.info/2017/08/04/end-of-an-age-of-plenty/