Land Use in the Southern Cone from 1950 to the Present. The Southern Cone and the Anthropocene

ZARRILLI ADRIAN GUSTAVO; PADUA JOSE; DA SILVA CLAITON

Land Use - Handbook of the Anthropocene in Latin America

‎ Bielefeld University Press

Lugar: Bielefield; Año: 2023;

In order to analyze a specific region’s presence in the history of the Anthropocene, it is necessary to give historical and geographical concreteness to the debate on the subject, which usually only occurs on a generic and global level. It is clear that the starting point has to be global, because the central idea is that there has been a change of scale in humanity’s presence on the planet, in such a way that the aggregate action of human beings has begun to modify the macro-structures of the “Earth System.” In other words, human action, understood globally, has come to acquire the weight of a geophysical agent. In quantitative terms, moreover, this change in scale occurred mainly in the period since 1945 – which has been called the Great Acceleration – when there was a huge increase in the size of the population, the global economy, the extraction of natural resources across the planet, and the spread of the human-produced industrial technosphere