Jürgen Renn, Georg N. Schäfer, Jochen Büttner, Manfred D LaubichlerThe rejected recognition of an Anthropocene epoch has not ended the Anthropocene debate, rather it underscores that the decisive question is less stratigraphic than political: how humanity understands and governs a coupled human–Earth system reshaped by a planetary Technosphere. Building on an extended evolutionary perspective, we argue that the Anthropocene is best understood as a major co-evolutionary transition in Earth history—marked by reconfigured energy and material flows, new information and control structures, and path-dependent feedbacks between society and the Earth system. Against appeals to lost origins or expectations of transformative catastrophe, we reconstruct the Technosphere's emergence across four phases (anthropogenesis, technogenesis, capitalogenesis, photogenesis) culminating in the present reflexive turn: the Technosphere now senses and models its own risks while a photospheric path opens as a technical possibility, though its socio-political realization remains far from guaranteed. We propose geoanthropology as a transdisciplinary practice to make this reflexivity consequential: producing Anthropocene-adequate knowledge and making it actionable under uncertainty, urgency and plurality. Concretely, this involves regional Anthropocene inquiries, novel transdisciplinary formats like the Anthropocene Campus, decision infrastructures, and open epistemic webs that link models, data, and publics.
Cite as: Jürgen Renn, Georg N. Schäfer, Jochen Büttner, Manfred D Laubichler. (2026). The Decision for the Anthropocene – Between Activism, Doubt and Responsibility for the Earth system.
Working Papers, 2026 (003). DOI: 10.17617/2.3696343
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