WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

Anthropocene history is as different from Holocene history as the Anthropocene Earth System is from the Holocene Earth System. The framework of World History straddles them both, positioning itself to answer the two big questions posed by Anthropocene history: (1) how did globally networked human systems come to overwhelm the Earth System in the middle of the 20th century? and (2) can our understanding of the past help us tackle current challenges? This panel tackles these questions through the lenses of population, energy, waste, and multispecies relations in Korea. South Korea's emergence as a prosperous modern nation from the international war (1950-53) at the beginning of the Cold War and its aftermath underscores the ironies of the Anthropocene. The postwar "great escape" from poverty and ill health described by economist Angus Deaton has been paralleled by the increased socioeconomic inequality and planetary boundary overshoot that came with the “Great Acceleration”. How to reconcile the imperatives of decency, democracy and resilience with the limits to growth is a challenge keenly felt in Korea as it is in the world writ large.