Enlightenment, Environment and Evocation offers the first systematic study of how two eighteenth-century friends -- the painter Joseph Wright of Derby and the physician, natural philosopher and evolutionist Erasmus Darwin -- responded to the landscapes of the English Peak and Midlands as industry and agricultural improvement transformed the region around them. Drawing on the Joseph Wright Gallery and Archival Collection at Derby Museums and Art Gallery, the Darwin Family Collections, and county record office archives across Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, the book traces how Wright's canvases and Darwin's verse each wrestled with a world being remade by mines, mills and manufactories, forging new visual and literary languages for understanding humanity's growing geological footprint. From this close study of two lives and their circle, the book builds a wider argument: that the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions of the Enlightenment period, not the mid-twentieth-century "Great Acceleration," mark the true onset of the Anthropocene. It contends that eighteenth-century responses to landscape and environmental change can inform and inspire today's efforts to build resilience against the climate emergency, and that just as Enlightenment earth sciences shaped eighteenth-century culture and thought, so the Anthropocene concept has become an influential force across the arts, humanities and sciences. Rich in original research, this is a significant intervention in debates over the Anthropocene's origins -- grounded in the particular, but reaching for the urgent and the global.