Is the Anthropocene a Useful Way to Understand Conflict in the Middle East?

Over the past two decades, a new word has entered universities, research labs, and think-tanks: Anthropocene. It aims to understand the upheaval of geological and climatic balances on the planet. Now it's being used to understand conflicts in the Middle East. In 2000, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen made an intervention at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Mexico. The Earth, Crutzen argued, had entered a new age. Following from the Holocene, the Anthropocene is c