It’s nice to see archdruid John Michael Greer’s proposal for a “Pleistocene-Neocene transition” get a little traction in the science press — specifically, in a Science Alert article by psychologist Matthew Adams.
Greer, whose writings on religion and ecology are respectably out-of-the-box, advocates against the Anthropocene label on the basis that a geological epoch — which is what the “cenes” refer to (from the Paleocene and Eocene to the Pleistocene and Holocene) — typically takes millions of years to establish itself. By that standard, the “Anthropocene” can only be based on the fantasy “that what our civilization is doing just now is going to keep on long enough to fill a geological epoch.” (The Holocene is only about 12,000 years old, so it’s debatable whether it even qualifies as an epoch.)
As Greer puts it, designating an epoch named after us is based on the delusional hope that we can “have” our planet “and eat it too” — that we can burn through “stores of fossil carbon that took half a billion years for natural processes to stash in the rocks” and “rip” through “equally finite stores of other nonrenewable resources” even as we “wreck” the “infrastructure” we need to keep doing that (“by destabilizing the climate and sending cascading disturbances in motion” through a welter of other ecological cycles). To the best of our knowledge, doing that is not very likely to succeed.
While an Anthropocene epoch may one day come to pass (just as the flying spaghetti monster could come to save us), geologists neither study nor predict the future, and basing a geological label on a dubious projection makes little sense. If the term is based instead on the causality ascribed to humans for the current era — we caused it, so it should be named after us — that’s also inconsistent with past naming practices. If it weren’t, we would be calling the Cenozoic something like the “Cometocene,” for the comet that ostensibly ended the previous era, killing the dinosaurs and making space for the emergence of life forms (mammals and others) that constitute the Cenozoic.
All of this is why I prefer to see the Anthropocene not as a geological epoch, but as a “predicament.” But it’s also a reason to wonder whether “Ecozoic” — the term Thomas Berry proposed for a future of coexistence we could work toward (and which my own EcoCultureLab has taken on in its tag line of “Culture for the Ecozoic”) — is appropriate either. It’s safer to think of a future ecological era as part of the Phanerozoic eon (a term I like for its resonance with C. S. Peirce’s phaneron and phaneroscopy, suggesting as it does an era of life-phenomena), the Cenozoic era, the Quaternary period, and either the Holocene epoch or simply (as Greer suggests) the late Pleistocene. (Keep in mind the time scale that, from largest to smallest unit, goes “eon – era – period – epoch – age.”)
In place of the Anthropocene designation, Greer proposes “Pleistocene-Neocene transition,” with “Neocene” (or “new recent”) used as a “placeholder” for whatever “new normal” emerges after the messy transitional period that is almost inevitably going to follow “industrial civilization’s giddy rise and impending fall.”
There’s a certain judgmentalism that colors his writing, as it does that of many ecocentrists in this debate, found in such phrases as “our idiotic maltreatment of the planet.” This of course overgeneralizes the “us,” as if all humans are equally to blame, but it also obscures the fact we are still collectively waking up to the reality unfolding around us. When you’re on a sinking ship, pointing your finger saying “I told you so” isn’t as helpful as preparing the life boats and making them accessible to your fellow passengers. And, fortunately, it may not be the entire ship that’s sinking — it could be that we just need to replace the drunken captain with a more informed steering committee, some infrastructural rearrangements, and an altogether new destination.
Metaphoric playfulness aside, it’s good to recognize our uncertainty as well as the time scale against which that uncertainty will ultimately be measured. As Greer writes,
By the time the transition winds down a few centuries from now, the species that have been able to adapt to new conditions and spread into new environments will be ready for evolutionary radiation; another half a million years or so, and the Neocene will be stocked with the first preliminary draft of its typical flora and fauna.
Will there be a place for humans in that draft? It’s a little too far down the line to hope for (!), but at least we could consider how to make a better case for it.
Hello Adrian,
I don’t know where Greer gets his idea that the Anthropocene is supposed to designate a *future* geological epoch, but he seems to miss the point of it entirely. To say that we are NOW in the Anthropocene means that the human impact on the Earth already dwarfs that of any single species that has ever existed on the planet, and thus to admit that humans are responsible for the devastation of that impact. Hence denial that we are NOW in the Anthropocene amounts to a denial of human responsibility, akin to the denial of anthropogenic climate change. I don’t see how such denial can help us make the transition to a Neocene/Ecozoic era.
Hi Gary – I agree with you that denying human responsibility for the current human impact on the Earth is akin to denying anthropogenic climate change. And that both are misguided. But I don’t agree that calling that impact (or our responsibility for it) “the Anthropocene” logically follows. We *should* call it something and draw attention to it. But every geological epoch (and period, era, eon) to date has been named once it has been identified in the geological record, and each of those records has typically covered a long duration. The implication of calling our current epoch “the Anthropocene” is that we are expecting (predicting, projecting) the Human Era to last a long time. That’s what Greer is taking issue with.
If, on the other hand, the industrial-human dominated period is just a blip leading to something whose characteristics we can’t predict, then it’s better to highlight the transitional nature of what’s going on. If we are poised at the beginning of something that will last a long time, the implication might be (at least for some) that we are great, and that there’s nothing to worry about. But if we are poised at a transitional period whose outcome is uncertain, then what we do matters. That, I think, is what Greer is arguing.