Ahead of his 2016 Reith Lectures, Professor Stephen Hawking gave a damning assessment of the survival chances of the human race. He warned ‘we face a number of threats to our survival from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming, and genetically engineered viruses’, before adding the grim prediction that: ‘although the chance of a disaster on planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, becoming a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years’. Hawking's comments mirror recent thinking within the environmental humanities concerning the advent of the ‘Anthropocene’ – the geological period in which humans have come ‘to play a decisive, if largely incalculable, role in the planet's ecology and geology’. There is a growing consensus that we have arrived at a point where humans will almost certainly be the architects of our own destruction. Or perhaps we arrived at that moment in a previous epoch. In June 1961, the natural scientist Rachel Carson wrote that she had finally settled upon an opening sentence for Silent Spring (1962). The book would begin, she wrote to her friend and confidante Dorothy Freeman, with the declaration: ‘This is a book about man's war against nature, and because man is part of nature it is also and inevitably a book about man's war against himself’. Carson, who was to become, like Hawking, one of the most widely recognised scientific figures of her generation, was writing about the massive environmental threat posed to humans and ecosystems alike by the increasingly widespread use of organophosphate and organochloride chemicals in the post-war period. Despite the differences in the mode of delivery of the perceived threat to the human, by the human, Carson's and Hawking's statements both evoke the location of the Anthropocene, which, as Timothy Clark notes, ‘brings to an unavoidable point of stress the question of the nature of Nature and of the human’.

Hawking's comments highlight the Cold War and Climate Change as two significant phases in the creation of the Anthropocene, further drawing together the contemporary moment and the mid-century period in which Carson was writing. The ecocritic Timothy Morton lists the following as the key moments in the Anthropocene's development: ‘1784, soot, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, plutonium’.