This chapter examines the concept of bounding as a particular articulation of economic thought that has become a key aspect of the cultural history of the Anthropocene. Through the work of economic and environmental thinkers like Barbara Ward, Kenneth Boulding, Kate Raworth, Will Steffen and others, we trace the evolution of bounding – characterized by constraints on the collective human enterprise – as a specific feature of Anthropocene thought that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, with conceptualizations such as Spaceship Earth and The Limits to Growth, and returned to prominence in the 2000s with frameworks like Planetary Boundaries and Doughnut Economics. The chapter concludes by proposing a wider social and cultural reading of the Anthropocene and its history in order to facilitate the perception of patterns of thought that are currently shaping the cultures and behaviours of the future in the human-Earth relationship.Among the key characteristics of the Anthropocene period – both as an intellectual construct of the twenty-first century and as a would-be epoch on the geologic time scale – is the rise of collective human agency into a planetary force. This has brought with it a set of planetary concerns and governance challenges that will remain, regardless of whether the Anthropocene is acknowledged as a stratigraphic epoch or not. This chapter, however, is not so much about the ‘stratigraphic Anthropocene’, although its formal definitions, criteria and the huge stratigraphic research effort that has gone into it since the 2009 inception of the Anthropocene Working Group will always be there in the background of any discussion of the concept.

Here, we are far more interested in the broader use of the Anthropocene as a concept that increasingly captures central features of the practical and existential human-Earth relationship. This understanding of the Anthropocene has been on the rise in recent years. After several decades of research and debates, marked by demarcation feuds and controversies over naming and starting dates, the concept has matured and become established enough to serve as a very useful tool to think with in facing omnipresent challenges to human existence on this planet. In fact, this is already the case, and as such we believe it can play a very important integrative and enlightening role, especially as an emerging part of twentieth-century cultural sensitivities of how the human is linked to the planetary. Regardless of its future stratigraphic status, ‘it remains a broad cultural concept already used by many to describe the era of accelerating human impacts, such as climate change and biodiversity loss’, to cite a report in Nature on the news of a vote against accepting it as a new geological epoch in March 2024 (Witze 2024; Turner et al. 2024).