Anthropozän - Das Zeitalter des Menschen

- Season 1

(2020)

When people settled down in the Neolithic Age to practiced farming and cattle breeding, they started a process that changed the face of the world once and for all. Today, satellite images allow us to have a literally global view of the consequences of human activity: Agricultural areas cover large parts of the earth's surface with geometric patterns, megacities grow over seemingly endless surfaces, roads wind their way through high mountains and deserts. The so-called "technosphere", the man-made things, now weighs more than all animals and plants. Statistically, ...

Earth has something that distinguishes it from most celestial bodies, an atmosphere that makes life on our planet possible in the first place. But over 30,000 years ago, we humans started changing the composition of this atmosphere. The discovery of controlled use of fire is a milestone in history, but led to an extreme increase in air pollution from internal combustion engines to power vehicles and from power plants that generate electricity and heat for civilization. The Man-made climate change threatens life in general.

Water is one of the most versatile elements on earth. Its ability to assume three states of aggregation guarantee the water cycle that makes life possible, as it happens on our planet. The constant cycle of evaporation and rain ensures that fresh water is theoretically always available. But the resulting inexhaustibility is endangered, because people increasingly intervene in this cycle through pollution and remodeling of entire landscapes and change the habitats that are shaped by water, which ultimately threatens the existence of mankind.