Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades, driven home by dire warnings in the media from scien- tists regarding the current and future effects of global climate change. Concern about massive land cover change, habitat loss, species extinc- tions, and the “end of nature” as an alternative or equilibrium to industri- al modernization has become widespread. In the year 2000, the unprece- dented scope of anthropogenic environmental transformations that have occurred since the advent of the industrial revolution led scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to publish their resounding, if initially surreptitious proposal for the designation of a new geological time peri- od called the “Anthropocene,” a term intended to capture the “central role of mankind” in planetary geological and ecological processes since at least the eighteenth century (17).