During the last decade the term Anthropocene has gained a lot of media attention. Although the term was first coined during the 1980s, it didn’t make it into popular culture until the year 2000, when atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen popularised the term, transforming it into the environmental buzzword that it is today.
Composed from the greek words anthropo, ‘man’, and cene, ‘new’, the term attempts to define this new era we find ourselves in, where man-made actions are shaping drastically the environment of our planet and influencing the systems it operates in: the extinction of different animal and plant species, ocean acidification, widescale natural resource extraction, carbon dioxide emissions.
However, the demand by multiple environmentalists to make Anthropocene the defining term for the time period we live in, has sparked discussion among geologists, who disagree whether or not humans will have a lasting effect on the Earth’s fossil record to be able to denominate a new geological epoch.
Environmental author, and self-proclaimed ‘carbon cycle correspondent,’ Peter Brannen, seems to support geologists’ concerns in his article for The Atlantic – humouredly titled ‘The Anthropocene is a Joke’ – and goes so far as to criticise the idea of the Anthropocene as an ‘interesting thought experiment’ whose only purpose is that of inflating humanity’s legacy. His argument states that ‘virtually no geological record will remain of us’ and that the idea of a new geological epoch is incredibly selfish and human-centred, as it implies that we, humans, and our technological creations, will persist into the future on a timescale of millions of years – something which seems improbable considering the catastrophic effects (for our species) of global warming.
The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations. It is of a thread with our species’ peculiar, self-styled exceptionalism – from the animal kingdom, from nature, from the systems that govern it, from time itself. This illusion may, in the long run, get us all killed.
However self-centred and geologically inaccurate, a term like ‘Anthropocene’ is useful in defining the current time period in a way that combines all these environmental ideas. As Andrew Revkin points out: ‘we’re the first species that’s become a planet-scale influence and is aware of that reality,’ and having a term for it reflects our awareness, and enables our ability to engage, not only scientifically, but culturally with the environmental impacts of our species.
Articles:
What is the Anthropocene And Are We In It? (The Smithsonian Magazine)
The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of Human-Influenced Age (The Guardian)
What Is the Anthropocene And Why Does It Matter? (Natural History Museum)