“Geologists and stratigraphers don’t own the concept,” she added. “People can just walk outside, and they recognize we’re in the Anthropocene.”
— Paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill, as quoted by reporter Dino Grandoni in the Washington Post, June 2024.
I guess most of us want to think we’re special… along with the particular time period we’re living in.
But what shall we call this particular time period? When humans are leaving behind an ungodly mess everywhere we go?
Well, we’re not going to call it the ‘Anthropocene’, according to certain geologists. A panel at the International Commission on Stratigraphy recently took it upon themselves to reject the idea of updating Earth’s ‘official’ geological timeline, by establishing a new ‘epoch’.
This makes a certain sense, that the geologists would be spoil-sports. If you’re a geologist, you’re all about million-year-old rocks… not the latest political or philosophical trends. Geologists have a different perspective on ‘time’ than the normal, everyday, man-on-the-street. They understand that long after you and I are gone, the rocks will still be here, telling the story only rocks can tell.
Luckily, there’s the ‘official’ timeline, and then there’s the ‘people’s timeline’.
As Daily Post readers are no doubt aware, the geological epoch in which we’re living has long been referred to — by geologists and their immediate families — as the ‘Holocene’, from the Greek words hólos meaning “entirely”, and kainós meaning “new”. The general idea is that the current epoch is “entirely new”.
Geologists like to think of the past 10,000 years as being entirely new, marked by the end of the last Ice Age. To a geologist, the most recent 10,000 years is, like, “just last week”.
Here’s what the world looked like at the start of the Holocene, 10,000 years ago. Even elephants had to wear furry coats.
But things have been getting progressively warmer.
In 2000, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen suggested that the effects of human activities were so profound that Earth was no longer just “entirely new” but now “really, really, entirely new” and that we had obviously entered a different epoch, which he called the ‘Anthropocene’, from the Greek words for “human” and “new”.
“I was at a conference where someone said something about the Holocene, the long period of relatively stable climate since the end of the last ice age,” Dr. Crutzen recalled years later. “I suddenly thought that this was wrong. The world has changed too much. So I said: ‘No, we are in the Anthropocene.’ I just made up the word on the spur of the moment…”
Dr. Crutzen, who died in 2021, knew a thing or two about humans changing things, having won his Nobel Prize for explaining how pollution was stripping Earth’s protective ozone layer.
You might think the Earth, freshly stripped of its ozone layer, could qualify for an updated name that wasn’t 10,000 years old, but the geologists at the International Commission on Stratigraphy said, ‘No, thank you. We’re sticking with Holocene.’
As if they were in charge of these things. Ha!
One problem with creating a new epoch is, you typically need to identify some type of earth-shaking geological event — like, say, the end of an Ice Age — to mark the beginning of the epoch. A stripped ozone layer didn’t cut the mustard. Neither did a layer of residual plutonium, from the nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s, found at the bottom of a lake by Francine McCarthy, a professor of earth science at Brock University in Ontario.
Stripped ozone is one thing; nuclear bombs are quite another. But geologists apparently have no respect for either one.
Nevertheless, the term ‘Anthropocene’ has appeared in book titles, album covers, and YouTube videos. The geologists might think human activity is immaterial to how the Earth has been unfolding lately, but the rest of us seem to think human activity is pretty darned important.
We’re not satisfied with ‘entirely new’. Ours is a thoroughly modern era. It’s time for something ‘newer than new’.
The new epoch is still being debated, however. For example, Norman Wirzba, a professor of theology at Duke Divinity School, said the name ‘Anthropocene’ implies that all of humanity is responsible for the mess we’ve made, even though only a handful of countries are mainly responsible. (We can guess which countries he’s talking about.)
“Why are we calling this the Anthropocene, when it’s very clear that what really made this happen was capitalism?” said Wirzba, who has suggested an alternative name for the current epoch:
The “Capitalocene.”
But I’m not sure that works as well in a cookbook title.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.