Children in the Anthropocene : how are they implicated?

There has been much debate about where the boundaries lie that would mark the arrival of the new epoch of the Anthropocene. There have been a number of possibilities proposed: the start of the Industrial revolution in the eighteenth century or the beginning in the mid-twentieth century known as the great acceleration of population, carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, plastic production, and the beginning of nuclear age with the first atomic bombs spreading detectable radiation to every stratum of the planet. But for many scholars in the humanities, these arguments are not as relevant as what taking up the premise or challenge of the Anthropocene provides. As an unsettling ontology that disrupts a persistent “humanist” paradigm, the concept of the Anthropocene allows new conversations to happen around human-dominated global change, human exceptionalism, and the nature/culture divide. In this chapter through stories from fieldwork with children in La Paz, I will propose the means for considering the ontological openings of the naming of the Anthropocene for the field of childhoodnature.