A prestigious committee of modern geologists has issued the scientific verdict on the academic debate over Holocene vs. Anthropocene. They declare that Gaia, our beloved Earth, remains in the 11,700-year-old Holocene Epoch.
In 1882, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche claimed, “God is dead!” Now, in 2024, we can cry out, “The Anthropocene is dead!” — whatever that means.
On a purely particular level, the individual human couldn’t care less about highfalutin scientific “definitions” involving such names as Eocene, Holocene and Anthropocene. However, should we celebrate the end of the ill-fated Anthropocene Epoch, at least as a suggested geological term? I’ve written an entire book titled “Autobiography in the Anthropocene” as well as three or four articles for Noozhawk focused on The Anthropocene (4.1.1. Books).
I could say that the news of the once-looming Anthropocene’s demise rocks my earth and shakes my intellectual bones — not!
Yet, the now-defunct term Anthropocene Age becomes a plain adjective — anthropocene — and no one seems sure whether it even require italics anymore. Earth scientists are willing to confer a bit of scientific status to the term, now deeming it “an event” — likely commencing in 1950, almost 75 years ago. Without the hypothetical stature of “The Anthropocene Epoch,” my 5-year-old book “Autobiography in the Anthropocene” becomes a contradiction: Can we read an autobiography from a time period that no longer exists?
These debates are rather esoteric, and at least the very useful term anthropocene has now entered common usage and printed discourse, capitalized or not. As a highly pungent term, and often as a metaphor, anthropocene remains a useful and potent symbol. Our single species now impacts the frail mother planet Gaia with heavy pollution and warming and many other “costs,” and these are at the least anthropogenic.
Another way to look at this depressing situation — especially dismal for young humans — is to accept that the suggested new time period (the Anthropocene) does represent a catastrophic mismatch between the pace of human population growth (and the technological means to support 8 billion of us) compared with the evolution and numbers of all other life-forms on the planet. The elephants are disappearing; we all accept this calmly.
Put more simply and in a way I’ve explained to adolescent students: Natural “evolution” without human interference would never have produced the nearly 1 billion cattle farting, grazing and defecating on Gaia as they do today. Cattle did not “evolve” to serve as hamburger meat or wonderful tri-tip steaks served to humans at the glorious Fourth of July barbecue.
Elizabeth Kolbert has written about a coming sixth extinction, yet we cannot be sure when or whether this would occur, or whether it’s already underway and we are blind to its growth. It is questionable, for example, that California hasn’t yet banned all fossil fuel exploration and extraction. The last catastrophic extinction was 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous time period, and it wiped out all of the non-avian dinosaurs (also termed the “Cretaceous-tertiary Extinction”).
Wise scientists will tell us that such catastrophic die-offs are always succeeded by a recovery of biological diversity. Yet, this hardly comforts us since any catastrophic extinction event would destroy human civilization and likely all, or most, humans and many other entire species. I can’t believe in the Singularity and Ray Kurzweil’s hope to become a half-AI Immortal; these fantastic dreams consign 99% of humans to the trash heap.
I admit that I was an early proponent and popularizer of the push to have The Anthropocene proclaimed officially as the new geologic age, succeeding the Holocene. In a series of three Noozhawk columns and my 2019 book, I made the case for “Anthropocene,” and these went well. Eight years ago, when the first Anthropocene column appeared online, I felt like the term struck many readers as “new” and perhaps even “timely.”
I had hoped someone might shift their consciousness a bit and into a new direction, perhaps assuming a more “macro” or “gestalt” outlook on the state of our fragile Gaia. They might realize that it is time to be Facing Gaia and Her needs as Bruno Latour has written. Or, they might buy into the radical proposition behind the “Anthropocene” consciousness — that the human species alone affects and has drastically impacted — the total ecological system of this Earth.
Think back to 2016. The idea was that a measurable plutonium isotope amount had been found all over the planet in 1950, thus inaugurating this Anthropocene. Other historians and scientists suggest that 1750 works much better since the Industrial Revolution and dominance of Western Civilization spread our damaging technologies planet-wide, and Gaia had no defenses against the mines, the railroads, the coal smoke belching into the atmosphere, and so on.
Anthropocene has entered our vocabulary to such an extent that we cannot and should not try to eliminate it. For example, in William Faulkner’s novels, a disreputable character named “Ike McCaslin” runs rampant, and in researching this (fictional) namesake, I ran across a great article titled “The Faulknerian Anthropocene … in Go Down, Moses.”
Perhaps treat the term as a simple noun, without the capitalization required of the proper noun, Anthropocene. Many of us immediately understood that “The Anthropocene” would always be a metaphor, an image to encapsulate a series of scientific advances and required ethical decisions. These backcountry hiking adventures in eastern Santa Barbara County mirror the early Anthropocene wanderings all of us perforce must follow in the 21st century.
4.1.1.
It was the International Union of Geological Sciences that rejected the “Anthropocene Epoch” description in March.
Books: Dan McCaslin, “Autobiography in the Anthropocene” (2019, Sisquoc River Press); Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction” (2014); Bruno Latour, “Facing Gaia” (2017); “The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner,” ed. John T. Matthews (CUP 2015): article titled “The Faulknerian Anthropocene…in Go Down, Moses,” Chapter 12.