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Christine J. CuomoT
he scientific movement to
declare a new geological epoch
called the Anthropocene has
received a lot of attention in
the popular press. There seems to be an
impression that designating an Anthro-
pocene Epoch is a cool or compelling way
to recognize that human societies have
caused recent and ongoing global cli-
mate change, as well as other systemwide
impacts on Earth, including acidification
of the oceans, widespread species endan-
germent and landscape changes. I have
even heard it said that the idea of the
Anthropocene is a way to acknowledge
and begin facing our personal and col-
lective responsibilities with respect to
those impacts.
Although some may consider the idea
a good way to name a set of real and
very serious problems, embracing the
Anthropocene as an inevitable new geo-
logic epoch betrays a misunderstanding
of its quite serious material and ethical
implications, especially regarding our
conceptions of, and relationships with,
the natural world and other species.
Scientific interpretations of unprec-
edented evidence of anthropogenic
activity in rock layers — as would be
required to geologically define a new
epoch — have serious implications and
social ramifications, for they provide the
evidence for our common ideas about
Earth, and our ecological relationships.
There are important differences between
noticing a geological signal, and inter-
preting and defining that signal as the
sign of a “new normal” that has fully
supplanted the current Holocene Epoch.
We need much more discussion about
the ethical dimensions of the proposal
that the Holocene Epoch has ended and
has been permanently replaced by the
Anthropocene, and as such, we ought
to table the question of the existence of
the Anthropocene.;LEXƶWMRE3EQI$
The idea of the Anthropocene was
first introduced into the scientific lit-
erature in 2000 by Paul J. Crutzen and
Eugene F. Stoermer in the International
Geosphere-Biosphere Program’s Global
Change Newsletter. Since then, interest
has grown in a hypothesis that Earth is in
a new stage, distinguished by particularly
intense, long-lasting and harmful anthro-
pogenic impacts, and that this new stage
amounts to a new geological epoch. An
epoch, by its geological definition, denotes
a stretch of time “during which the rocks of
the corresponding series were formed.” It
implies an observable record in rocks that
is distinct from the previous epoch. Thus,
those who propose the Anthropocene as a
new geologic epoch implicitly suggest that
direct anthropogenic impacts are visible in
the rock record in unprecedented, strati-
graphically marked ways.
The Working Group on the Anthropo-
cene (WGA), a committee appointed by the
International Union of Geological Sciences
(IUGS), describes the Anthropocene as an
age uniquely marked by “many geologi-
cally significant conditions and processes
profoundly altered by human activities.”
WGA’s definition highlights changes to
the biosphere as well as “erosion and sed-
iment transport associated with a variety
of anthropogenic processes, including col-
onization, agriculture, urbanization and
global warming; the chemical composition
of the atmosphere, oceans and soils, with
significant anthropogenic perturbations of
the cycles of elements ... and environmental
conditions generated by these perturba-
tions [including] global warming, ocean
acidification and spreading oceanic dead
zones.” The WGA notes that before the
Anthropocene is officially accepted, the
proposal has to be scientifically justified by
observations of the stratigraphic record.
The definition provided by the WGA
makes clear that, in every sense, the marksof the Anthropocene Epoch have been pro-
duced by phenomena — from widespread
human colonization to species extinctions
— that have caused and continue to cause
catastrophic harm to humans and non-
humans alike. Debates about the events
that ushered in the Anthropocene are also
telling. Some suggest it dates to about 1800,
around the start of the industrial revolution,
which created countless benefits but also,
ultimately, put us on a path to catastrophic
climate change. Alternatively, members of
the WGA propose that the beginning of
the Anthropocene, and hence the end of
the Holocene, occurred specifically with the
explosion of the world’s first nuclear bomb
on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, N.M.
Geographically, that event was chosen
because it produced a clear and indelible
mark on Earth in the form of “worldwide
fallout easily identifiable in the chemo-
stratigraphic record.” As we all know,
it also produced clear, catastrophic and
long-lasting harms.
In identifying the product of nuclear
warfare as the characteristic mark of a
new age for Earth, we risk encourag-
ing a grand narrative that conceives of
the human relationship with our sur-
roundings and fellow species as inevitably
and ultimately destructive, careless and
selfish. Instead, we should regard the
proposed demise of the mammal-friendly
Holocene Epoch as a crisis in the extreme
that we should work to avoid.
The Anthropocene hypothesis neces-
sarily implies that the proposed new epoch
has supplanted the Holocene, Earth’s cur-
rent epoch, which began about 10,000 B.C.,
after the Pleistocene epoch and the end of
the last major ice age. Geological epochs
have previously ranged in duration from
about 2 million to 23 million years, so if
the Holocene has abruptly been terminated
after only a dozen millennia by human
action, it would certainly be a deviation
from geologic history.TEKIȦȉ•4GXSFIVȶȉȦȮ• EARTH • [[[IEVXLQEKE^MRISVK(SQQIRX