One of the leitmotifs of W.G. Sebald’s work is his idiosyncratic appropriation of the term Naturgeschichte (natural history). This essay explores the different intellectual traditions from which he borrows to mould this vital subtext. These range from the cultural practice of embedding scientific observations in narratives, evolutionary history, and the entropic cosmology of modern physics to the use of Naturgeschichte in critical theory, the German-Jewish tradition of reflecting on creaturely life, and the perception of warfare as a ‘natural history of destruction’. This overview of Sebald’s diverging concepts of natural history highlights some of the limitations and contradictions inherent in their eclectic narrative employment in works such as After Nature, The Rings of Saturn, A Place in the Country, The Natural History of Destruction, and the abandoned Corsica Project. In so doing, however, evidence is marshalled for the argument that it is precisely this syncretism that allows Sebald to explore the human condition in the Anthropocene, which is marked by the gradual replacement of the biosphere through the technosphere.

The Anthropocene concept was developed by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen beginning in 2000 to reflect the realisation that human impacts had pushed Earth outside of the stable conditions of the Holocene Epoch. It quickly became a framing concept for the Earth System science community, with subsequent, ongoing analysis as a potential addition to the Geological Time Scale unit by geostratigraphers. The term's use then spreading widely to other disciplines. The Anthropocene may be described via striking, partly irreversible changes to the Earth’s physical surface (‘lithostratigraphic’), to its surface chemistry (‘chemostratigraphic’) and to its biology (‘biostratigraphic’). Its beginning is best placed around the mid-twentieth century at the same time as the sharp change in Earth System trajectory, driven by an expanding technosphere. Time will tell whether it becomes formalized, but its geological reality as the beginning of a major new chapter in Earth history is now beyond doubt.