Orbis spike 161010/27/2023 And the Anthropocene is, at base, a political strategy, notwithstanding its scientific verifiability its intent is not simply to carve humanity’s name upon the stratigraphic map (humans, after all, invented the map in the first place), but to raise awareness of the negative planetary impact of certain human activities, with the intent of altering or mitigating them. The earliest would place the start date between six and eleven thousand years ago, based on the adoption and spread of agriculture, since the land-clearing it required necessarily altered the earth’s atmosphere.īut this would be tantamount to saying that the Anthropocene is equivalent to human life as we know it by linking climate change to something we cannot imagine undoing-very few people are advocating a return to hunter-gatherer status-it would effectively remove any political energy the term might have. There are numerous contestants for the Anthropocene’s “Golden Spike,” or Global Boundary Stratosphere Section and Point (GSSP), the site that marks a recognized division in the geological timescale by pinpointing the planetary material that justifies the divide. But what we can see from that doubled place depends on where we locate that other moment. The move to recognize the Anthropocene is, in effect, a move to double the present, to see it from the perspective of another moment as well as our own. Holocene means “wholly recent,” so the decision to bring this epoch to an end would mark the present as a peculiar time, after the recent, a time out of time in more than one sense. “Holocene,” the name for the epoch in which we officially still live, was adopted in 1885, a half-century after Charles Lyell’s demarcation of the “Recent” epoch by the end of the last Ice Age, some 11,500 years ago. The International Committee on Stratigraphy, the group that oversees the divisions recognized in the International Geologic Time Scale, has formed a committee to consider the question, and hopes to decide the issue by next year. Stratigraphy organizes the vast geological timescale according to significant and demonstrable changes to the planetary system, so the Anthropocene proposal-formally tendered in 2008-is no casual matter: if it happens, it will be a new recognition that humans have changed not only the earth’s climate, but the earth itself. But in case you’ve missed it, “Anthropocene” is the proposed stratigraphic name for a new slice of geological time, an epoch made distinct by significant, measurable human impact on the earth and its climate. Most people reading this will, I think, have heard of the Anthropocene by now indeed, given the extensive reporting on the concept, the Anthropocene may have greater name recognition than the Holocene, the geological epoch in which we officially still live. Lewis and Mark A Maslin, the climate scientists who authored the proposal, comprehend it, it holds the potential to reorient the way we think about the Anthropocene, to help reconcile the quest for dramatic change in environmental policy with ongoing movements for social justice. It doesn’t have any obvious connection to the events we usually think of as tied to climate change, nor to the “great acceleration” that began in the mid-20th century. It may seem, at first, a strange year to choose. Recently, a study appeared in the journal Nature proposing a previously unsuggested start date for the Anthropocene: 1610 CE.
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