THE NEW HUMAN EPOCH

I love John Green’s now-finished podcast Anthropocene Reviewed. Love it. It really is everything I want in a podcast. I’ve even been re-listening to it. The only issue I have with the podcast is, well, the whole premise.

You see, I don’t think the notion of the anthropocene makes any damn sense. The term is variously defined but generally means “the period of time during which human activities have impacted the environment enough to constitute a distinct geological change.” People using this term commonly seek to highlight the problems of modernity, technology, capitalism, and/or Western civilization. For example, they’ll note how in recent centuries our tools and techniques for getting food and fuel and dealing with waste (or failing to do so entirely) have truly diverged from more “natural” or “traditional” beliefs and means. Or maybe they just focus on our volumes of extraction and production, or even the philosophical orientation said to be enabling all of the above. They speak of an ethos of innate connectedness being overtaken by one of human exceptionalism. They explain how this has enabled humans to violate evermore violently so many in-built limitations, pushing natural systems toward their tipping points, perturbing the sacred balance of the meta-system, that system of systems within systems within systems, upon which all of us depends and is a part. To me, and many others, that seems a wild premise from which to then impose the most fleeting human timescale upon the the deepest of the geological.

But let’s say you are game to do just that. Fine. The farthest back most of us are likely willing to go and find any behaviour significantly different from that of our primate or avian or insect cousins — if we even want to do so, which I have some trouble with — will be around 45,000 years or so, with the dawn of the Upper Paleolithic. There we find the first evidence of organized settlements, an explosion in the diversity of tools, artistic works, and artifacts, and all coinciding with the extinction of Neanderthals. Even at the scale of tens of thousands of years, our species is little more than a blip when viewed from the perspective of epochal Earth-time. But, of course, those speaking of the anthropocene are not keen to highlight this longer history but what is effectively the unfolding present. Usually they focus on the mere decades since the start of the nuclear or chemical revolutions, smack in the middle of the last century. Or they might push back the date of the start of this era to the birth of industrialization, some time in the 1800s. Or they might even point to nearly two centuries before then. Does any of this do anything for the absurdity of their project? If you think it does, now notice that, as applied, this term tends to emphasize not so much the past but an unknown future. You’ll notice that to date we’ve seen nothing of the human transformation of the planet if you only imagine the species having a few centuries left or our impacts having any weight or reverberation beyond tomorrow.

From there, if you think about it, we’ve been seeking out issues and reforming our cultural and technological errors, reducing our negative impacts on ourselves and the rest of Being, all along. Even just plastic straws: we went from one viral video of a single turtle with a straw stuck in its nostril to banning plastic straws in cities, regions, and countries all over the world within just a few years. There was effectively no public discussion of the problem with straws prior to this, and then suddenly discussion of single-use plastics was everywhere and straws and plastic bags were gone as fast as one could expect from our elaborate bureaucracies. As such, the lifespan of this period of accelerated human impact and human-induced change has been and promises to be as short as can be imagined. If it were ten times longer that would still be astonishingly fleeting relative only to our own pre-historic or pre-modern rates of innovation (my favourite example is that it appears to have taken our ancestors a million years to innovate from knapping one side of a stone, producing the most primitive cutting tool, to chipping and flaking two sides, making a far more effective axe-like blade; and it took another million years to get far sharper knife-like blades) never mind those biological and geological forces and scales perfectly common throughout the life of the Earth.

For earthly context, you have only to look at the Quaternary glaciation. This period of cyclical glacial expansion and contraction began some 2.58 million years ago. Since then, the poles of the planet have been covered by sheets of ice three to four kilometres thick that push their way to the equator over spans of 100,000 years or so. These frosty smotherings are then broken up by 50,000-year-long reprieves where ice contracts to the poles.

(Interestingly, these deep freezes tend to drop global sea levels more than 100 metres and, since the start of the last warming trend, at the height of the Last Glacial Maxim, about 20,000 years ago, global seas have risen roughly 130m. Meaning, our relatively recent ancestors were able to walk from England to France, for example. By contrast, the University of Hawaii Sea Level Centre tells us that “By the end of the century, global mean sea level is likely to rise at least one foot (0.3m) above 2000 levels, even if greenhouse gas emissions follow a relatively low pathway in coming decades.” One of these is a natural process, one we are in the middle of, and is rarely spoken of and never considered to be negative. The other is spoken of ad nauseam and framed as the incomprehensibly catastrophic outcome of human arrogance.)

Of course, we’re still in that period of global glaciation, in one of the many and transient thawing periods. We call the last 12,000 years or so, the time since the receding of the last ice age, the Holocene. Even just in light of the brief Quaternary glaciation, 2.5 million of the Earth’s 4.5 billion years, all of human civilization found within this 12,000 year Holocene can be seen as little more than an instance. So then, what is a mere fraction of that, 200 or even 500 years, say? Compared only to the Quaternary glaciation, to say nothing of the timeline of the Earth or life on this planet, it is extraordinarily fleeting.

Wilder still is that the same people offering blistering attacks against anthropocentrism happily affix the name Novel Human Epoch (anthro = human, cene = new) to this period. How, in this way, is the anthropocene not maximally anthropocentric? Could anything be more so? How does this “de-center” our species? How does it “re-embed” humans into the web of life and the broader symphony of Nature? Is this anything other than the demand that humans are not only unlike animals and all other life but also separate? How does it get us out of the narrow subjective frame that they demand is operative here? How is this something other than more of the human exceptionalism that is said to have gotten us here?

If all this still fails to come across as compelling, from there you can get political about this name. You might notice that the human species is radically diverse in its impact on the planet. Some individuals, tribes, and empires have far more or less impact than others. A set of issues induced by a minority and in the most recent past should probably not be labelled in universal terms like “human.” Could you spell out something more obvious?

Everyone has noticed all of the above and been pointing it out for a long time. From where I sit, all of this is enough to make me never wish to use the term. And yet there is only persistence on this labelling project and more and more people have taken up the framing and the label. Why do you use it?