The text of this article is mostly identical with a (German) abstract submitted for the symposium "Learning and Teaching Cultural Sustainability" at the Pädagogische Hochschule Niederösterreich(11). The illustrations from our own projects were added for this Scilogs version (esp. from Hamann et al. 2014, 2016, Leinfelder 2016, 2018, Leinfelder et al. 2016, Syvitski et al. 2020). This essay also complements the Scilogs Anthropocene blog post "Addicted to energy"(12), published on 17.10.2020 on the occasion of the release of the new Anthropocene Working Group study (Syvitski et al. 2020). --- 11 See: https://www.ph-noe.ac.at/de/forschung/forschung-und-entwicklung/anthropozaen/symposium.html https://www.ph-noe.ac.at/de/forschung/forschung-und-entwicklung/anthropozaen.html https://anthropozaen.hypotheses.org https://anthropozaen.hypotheses.org/390 12 https://scilogs.spektrum.de/der-anthropozaeniker/die-menschheit-verbrauchte-seit-1950-mehr-energie-als- in-fast-12-000-jahren-zuvor/