Antonio Stoppani's ‘Anthropozoic’ in the context of the Anthropocene

Abstract

The figure of Antonio Stoppani (1824–91), an Italian priest, geologist and patriot, has re-emerged in the last decade thanks to discussions gravitating around the ‘Anthropocene’ – a term used to designate a proposed geological time unit defined and characterized by the mark left by anthropogenic activities on geological records. Among these discussions, Stoppani is often considered a precursor for popularizing the term ‘Anthropozoic’, which he used to describe and characterize the latest ‘era’ of Earth's geological time. His writings, largely unknown to an international audience before the ‘Anthropocene saga’, have been particularly in the spotlight after Valeria Federighi translated excerpts of his main geological work, Corso di Geologia, originally published in three volumes between 1871 and 1873. In the first edition of Corso di Geologia, namely Note ad un Corso Annual di Geologia, or simply Note, published between 1865 and 1870, Stoppani characterized the Anthropozoic in stratigraphic terms. In particular, Chapter 15 of the second volume of Note (1867) represents the first stratigraphic characterization that the author provides of the Anthropozoic. Our contribution here brings, for the first time, a translation of Chapter 15 to a broader international audience, accompanied by a critical commentary elucidating the broader social, political, religious and scientific context wherein the notion of Anthropozoic emerged in Stoppani's writings. The text of the original document and its translation can be found in the supplementary material tab at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000590.

Optimising the Anthropocene definition: an epistemological view with briefings on four 2022-23 conferences

“…Another notable early contributor was the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani (1824-91) who popularized the term 'Anthropozoic', widely considered a precursor to Anthropocene thinking, in his three 1871-73 volumes of Corso di Geologia. Translations by Peppoloni and Di Capua (2021) and Luciano and Zanoni (2023) found, respectively, that he "grasped the profound cultural and educational potential of geological science for human societies" and defined humans as "a new telluric force, which, due to its power and universality, does not pale in the face of the major forces of the globe".…”