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The climate crisis is the most striking symptom of our time: the Anthropocene, the historical epoch in which the impact of anthropogenic societies on the Earth system challenges the environmental conditions that made human civilisations possible. How did we arrive at the contradictions of the present time, in which socio-economic development and environmental systems are intimately connected but in a state of dramatic tension? The text outlines the events and processes that over the last four to five centuries have fuelled an exceptional development of human societies through an equally exceptional transformation of ecosystems, starting with the "Columbian Exchange" of the 16th century, and arriving, through the use of the "subterranean forest" and the "ghost acres" in the late 18th century, up to the 20th-century global "Great Acceleration" in the use of resources.

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