immanence

Geology watchers were more than a little surprised last month to learn that we are living in a new age called the Meghalayan, which apparently began about 4200 years ago.

After all the excitement over the Anthropocene, it seems that a rival group of geological stratigraphers — one tasked with naming the sub-parts of the Holocene — has won the naming race, for the time being. Some, like Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis, are not happy with the outcome, which triviliazes the whole point of the Anthropocene debate — to gauge the degree to which humans are and should recognize our collective centrality in geological-scale global change. Geologist Ben van der Pluijm calls this trivialization Monty Pythonesque — a slicing up of the Holocene by “the Ministry of Silly Cuts.” 

Maslin and co-author Erle Ellis had previously argued that the process of naming and defining the Anthropocene shouldn’t be rushed. They called for transparency and much wider input, with an international commission “drawn from anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, geography, paleoecology, economics and philosophy,” and with a “formal, documented, procedure for membership, decision-making and reporting, and feedback on its workings.”

It seems they got one piece of that — the Holocene team seemed to rushed their findings through while the slower and more deliberate Anthropocene Working Group took their time — but not the rest. Maslin and Lewis are upfront about the reasons why the Anthropocene designation is important: it’s about counteracting the trend of the last 500 years to demote humanity from its perceived centrality to being “an insignificant naked ape in an almost infinite universe.”

There’s an anthropocentrism to that definition that slices in two directions: on the one hand, it “raises” humans up to being the central, defining, and essential agent on the planet; and on the other hand, it forces us to ask whether and how we might live up to the definition, responsibly (and how we are failing). That raising is one reason why ecocritics and environmental humanists have been notably ambivalent about the concept — which is why others, like Andy Revkin, have called for a little more “anthropophilia” (Revkin’s case for that comes from” an article that is one of the better summaries of the debates).

All of this raises questions about the role of geology in public discourse and its interactions with other fields, and about the public understanding of how geology (and especially stratigraphy) works. Is the redefinition of the Holocene a sign that some geologists are not at all interested in being the vehicles of a new moral dispensation for humanity? Are the Holocene renamers unnecessarily muddying the terrain for the Anthropocenophiles? Is this a dispute about careers being made, in the same way that they always have been but to the detriment of the broader discussion the topic calls for? (That would account for the charges that critics of the 4200-year Meghalayan dating have been ignored in the recent decision.)

Or is the new naming, as many claim, completely irrelevant to the debate over the naming and marking of the Anthropocene? After all, just because we now have a Meghalayan, in place of a Late Holocene, does not mean that we might not also have an Anthropocene in our midst. (Or a Misanthropocene, or a Manthropocene, or a Capitalocene, or whatever it will come to be known as).

To my mind, what’s most fascinating about the new naming episode, aside from what it tells us about how scientific facts are made (which I find always interesting), concerns how geologists signpost the world by connecting evidentiary sites — in this case, a cave in northeast India where the “smoking gun” climate-recording stalagmite was found (alongside ice core samples in Greenland, for the Greenlandian and Northgrippian ages) — to a timeline that maps the earth’s depths against the present’s deep past. The more such signposts there are, the more the semiotic Earth becomes a time machine, a clock, a book, and something like a register of our souls.

Added note (August 13, 2018): Climate skeptics are falsely reporting that the International Commission on Stratigraphy has “rejected” the Anthropocene proposal. It has not. The two proposals — to rename and clarify the sub-units of the Holocene, and the name the current time “the Anthropocene” — are separate and independent. I guess this means that the “muddying” (which I referred to above) seems to be working.