A legacy of Enlightenment thought was to see the human as separate from nature. Human history was neatly distinguished from natural history. The age of Anthropocene has now put all that into question. This human exceptionalism is seen by some as responsible for the devastating impact humans have had on the planet. But if we give up on the nature / culture distinction and see human activity as just another type of natural process, we risk losing our ability to attribute moral agency and responsibility to humanity for the environmental crisis, argues Giuseppina D’Oro.

Traditionally the history of nature has been conducted in relative isolation from the history of civilizations. Humans have been studied in different ways by, for example, palaeontologists and “historians”. Palaeontologists have mapped the evolution of homo sapiens through the study of its fossilized remains, just as they mapped the evolutionary history of other animal species. Historians, by contrast, have explained the events of the past in the light of the norms of conduct by which past agents led their lives and, in so doing, given us access to radically different ways in which “humans” have understood themselves and their standing in the world.