Introduction

Imagine this: you are sitting in your study, glance flitting like a dragonfly from the laptop screen to the view of fields and trees beyond the window. It's hot, early summer and already the first heatwave has hit, leaving your skin sticky and head fuzzy. The word Anthropocene is an ever-present echo in your mind-the syllables rising and falling over and over like a siren ... A word for an epoch in which humanity's indelible mark has been left in the geological strata of our planet, and whose exact start is still contested, but whose end feels ever more immanent with reports of ecological tipping points, and targets unmet. You've recently survived a pandemic (we do not use these words lightly, you lost people, we all did), and last year saw record temperatures in the UK and parts of Europe and the Americas consumed by wildfires. Already this week, the average global temperature record has been broken twice, with predictions that it will be broken again and again over the coming months. As children, you sat in front of small TVs and watched BBC's Newsround tell you about holes in the ozone layer, animal extinction, polar ice caps melting, oil-slicked birds. You caught your parents watching footage of the Chornobyl disaster and whispering fears to one another, have witnessed the Great Acceleration rush forward in your lifetime, and know of vast floating islands of discarded plastics in the oceans, floods covering one-third of Pakistan, and now long-terms risk to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as well as global impact through crop loss after the attacks, a few weeks ago, on the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine.