The New York Times’ Raymond Zhong summarizes the latest deliberations on the Anthropocene in an article called “For Planet Earth, This Might Be the Start of a New Age.”
The article features some good implicit sociology-of-science:
Like the zoologists who regulate the names of animal species or the astronomers who decide what counts as a planet, geology’s timekeepers work conservatively, by design. They set classifications that will be reflected in academic studies, museums and textbooks for generations to come.
And a few pieces of everyday wisdom a scientifically literate public should be able to recite, but most likely wouldn’t make it half-way through:
Right now, according to the current timeline, we are in — deep breath — the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon, and have been for 4,200 years.
And a good wrap-up of the Anthropocene Working Group’s recent work:
It took a decade of debate — in emails, academic articles and meetings in London, Berlin, Oslo and beyond — for the Anthropocene Working Group to nail down a key aspect of its proposal.
In a 29-to-4 vote in 2019, the group agreed to recommend that the Anthropocene began in the mid-20th century. That’s when human populations, economic activity and greenhouse gas emissions began skyrocketing worldwide, leaving indelible traces: plutonium isotopes from nuclear explosions, nitrogen from fertilizers, ash from power plants.
The working group has been voting on the status of the Anthropocene (is it an epoch, an age, or what?) and on the location of the “golden spike” that would exemplify — or best indicate, in a Peircian sense — the epoch/era/whatever in all things geological (from a list recently reduced to twelve and including “a peat bog in Poland, the ice of the Antarctic Peninsula, a bay in Japan,” and “a coral reef off the Louisiana coast”). But it isn’t letting the (Schrödingerian) cat out of the bag until their work is ready for the darts and comets likely to strike it in the open atmosphere (/pandemonium) of public debate.
It is then that a far more contentious debate about the Anthropocene could begin.
Many scholars still aren’t sure the mid-20th century cutoff makes sense. It is awkwardly recent, especially for archaeologists and anthropologists who would have to start referring to World War II artifacts as “pre-Anthropocene.”
And then there are those (including me) who think the Anthropocene should be defined more loosely as an “event“:
Events don’t appear on the timeline; no bureaucracy of scientists regulates them. But they have been transformative for the planet.
The filling of Earth’s skies with oxygen, roughly 2.1 to 2.4 billion years ago — geologists call that the Great Oxidation Event. Mass extinctions are events, as is the burst of diversity in marine life 460 to 485 million years ago.
In other words, stay tuned. “Might be the start of” something or other. Could be big.
And let’s not ignore James Lovelock’s latest contribution, the Novacene, as AI beings slowly, but surely, and, for Lovelock, happily, take over from us. One positive: they won’t be troubled by climate change.