I think it is darkly hilarious and ultimately wonderful symbolism that geologists rejected the Anthropocene label only for everybody else to laugh at them and keep using it anyways.
At this stage in the game acting like there isn’t enough proof that we are in the Anthropocene is something you only believe if you hope to one day get a cushy job at an energy or oil company :)
We’re not in the Anthropocene because the next epoch hasn’t taken shape yet. What humanity has done is create a transition from the holocene to whatever epoch will come next, the nature of which is unknown though we can predict some aspects. The idea that this right now is the new geological epoch is absurd hubristic misunderstanding of what a geological epoch is.
It’s not an epoch any more than the crash that totaled your car is your new car.
This article touches on the idea of an event, which aligns with your language around a transition. That seems appropriate to me, e.g. the industrial revolution would be the event that kicked off the next epoch. Considering the profound impact we’ve had on the planet since the industrial revolution, it seems like a reasonable place in time to assert that a new epoch has begun, however. It has clearly started to take shape. We have already done 1.5C of warming, with all signs pointing to much more to come. Biodiversity is already plummeting and will continue to drop. It’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that we’ve created a deviation from the Holocene normals and are simply calling this new thing something else, something undefined but clearly underway and likely to be as disruptive as any epoch change in the past. It’s an observation that we’ve fucked things up, but it’s not surprising that geologists aren’t ready to make the leap to a formal name, especially one randomly invented by a dude in an off the cuff comment and not through the scientific process.
I mean, I guess? But regardless of what comes next, we know that humanity is having a global impact on geology, so calling it the anthropocene seems reasonable. Even if we reverse anthropogenic climate change and use science and technology to live in a climate utopia, that’s still man-changed. Or if we cause our own extinction, then we were the cause of the next geological epoch. Regardless, “anthro” works.
That’s a great way of describing the nuance of what an epoch is intended to represent.
Naming things, whether it be periods in time or species, has always had a lot of disagreement. What this era we are now in is called isn’t as important as the fact that we have changed the world so much it is/will leave a clear mark for millions of years to come. I prefer to call the leading transition period as the “fucked around” era, and the one we’re now traveling in the “finding/found out” era.
now just Latinize it and you’re good to go – “Fornicaricene” (?) and “Inveniecene” (?)
Idiocene?
I prefer Capitalocene because Antgropocene implies a human subject writing history while in fact we have not reached that self-determination/subjectivation. We’re still object of the organizational structure that emerged from our history. It is the determination of capital to accumulate that steers our decisions over planet manegement
This seems like an attempt to shift the blame to another group you don’t identify with. We collectively did this. Humans have been clearing forests and altering ecosystems for millennia, and the only thing that really changed is industrialization and the ability to easily extract massive amounts of fossil fuels from the earth. Technology made that possible, and once the cat was out of the bag it became very difficult to put it back in. Sure capitalism sucks and all that, but humans, organized by country and loosely in competition with each other, were bound to fuck this all up regardless of whether the Soviet Union or the US or the British Empire or China was “in charge”. It’s a prisoners dilemma stacked on expectations of comfort. And sure a global authoritarian government exclusively focused on sustainability could pull this off, but people sure as shit wouldn’t like it, so here we are. Capitalism and it’s effects to undermine solutions in the name of profit are absolutely making it worse, but to place exclusive blame on capitalism seems naive and ignores human nature itself.
