Since the start of the current epoch – the Holocene – humans have been physically transforming the natural world and, in the process, technologizing nature’s inhabitants and environments to benefit human needs and desires. The human activity engendered by this anthropocentric mindset, while benefiting human health and well-being in a myriad of ways, has also negatively affected a wide range of ecosystems, resulting in ecological destruction, extinction, genetic malformations and abnormalities, and other problematic environmental phenomena. As a result, some scientists have proposed that we are entering a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, an epoch characterized by the global changes wrought by human actions made possible by technology’s evolution.
