Everyone sitting on the edge of their seats waiting for geologists to finally decide whether or not we have entered the Anthropocene epoch can now breath a sigh of relief. They’ve sent up their white smoke signal to indicate that yes, they’ve decided. (Oh, maybe I’m mixing it up with the Vatican.)
They’ve decided no. But it doesn’t mean what you think it does.
If it sounds like they’re passing the buck, well, they are geologists, the turtles of the scientific world. They shouldn’t be making radical, epoch-ending pronouncements.
Actually, it may mean what I and others have been saying it ought to mean: that the Anthropocene is an event, not an epoch. It’s the kind of thing that, in the geological record, happens pretty suddenly, shockingly — “a complex, transformative, and ongoing event analogous to the Great Oxidation Event” — and everything afterward is different.
How different? We won’t know until we’re an epoch or two removed from it. Let’s enjoy the ride.
(But in the meantime, you can read Erle Ellis‘s account of the decision. Ellis resigned from the Anthropocene Working Group last year, partly because he disagreed with the narrowing of criteria the group was using to define the Anthropocene.)
