Global industries, multinational corporations, outrageous rise of global population, deforestation, the global oil and nuclear industries pose the ongoing challenge for sustainability of earth resources. Exploitation remains the main problem, which may be analyzed from Marxist, materialist and capitalist perspectives. Aerologists, deep ecologists, environmentalists, lawyers in the legal space, life sciences and social sciences ask about the future of humanity. Writers and activists foresee the end of the human era. In 2002, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer resurrected the concept of the anthropocene to denote the current interval of time on earth in which many key processes are dominated by human influence[1]. The birth of the anthropocene is the departure from the conditions of the Holocene epoch that nurtured the growth of human civilization.[2]Since 1800, global population has risen from roughly 1 billion to 6.5 billion in 2000 and a projected 9 billion by 2050. The duration of the anthropocene is now arguably the most important question of our age—scientifically, socially and politically. We cannot think of a greater or more urgent challenge. Socio-cultural products (anthropocene-literatures and anthropocene-films) may be viewed as futuristic telescopes to arrive at the concept of the postearth[3]the product of the robbery of the earth by humans as theybegin to recreate and reshape the earth. The questions that emanate from this thematic issue are: how different languages define the anthropocene? What language has been used by artists to communicate the Anthropocene? The linguistic and discursive representation of the anthropocene (be it in literature, theatre or in films) are part of the welcomed subthemes together with other themes that touch on the sociological questions of power, imbalance and exploitation and how these are expressed and contested in and through language. Moreover, we hope to answer the question: is the language used for promotion of sustainable development agenda – a language of fear or is it a language of opportunity? How does it interplay with the discourses about the post-earth scenarios.

[1]Crutzen, P. J. 2002 Geology of mankind. Nature 415, 23. doi:10.1038/415023

[2] John Foster. Marx and the Rift in the Universal Metabolism of Nature. Monthly Review

[3]Postearth is the posthuman era