According to First Dog on the Moon (I do rigorous research for these essays), some geologists have decided that the Earth moved from the Holocene into the Anthropocene in 1950.
Although First Dog also points out that there is a bit of scientific kerfuffle over that date, I’ve decided to go with it. By the time anyone dealing with what constitutes an epoch makes it official, I will probably have shuffled off this mortal coil, so I have to make to do with the facts I have.
The thing I like best about choosing 1950 as a date is that it means my entire life (give or take a year) has been lived in the Anthropocene. And that feels about right to me.
Given the current disaster news – the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast is about the temperature of a nice hot tub right now and that’s not even the worst thing going on – the years of my lifetime feel like the end result of the work of that segment of humanity who believe the purpose of life is their personal dominion over the planet, all of its other life forms, and most people.
While there is a dangerous sect of religious dominionists, the secular kind have done most of the damage. The human race over my lifetime appears to have been well-populated with people who can look at a beautiful landscape and think of all the ways to destroy it so that they can make something imaginary, which is to say money.
A lifetime that includes “plastics” (why, yes, I did see The Graduate back in the day), vast expansion of nuclear bombs and nuclear power without equal understanding of what we were doing, and human-engineered existential threat (I’m not talking about chatbots) seems like a perfect place to start the anthropocene.
I mean, I grew up a mile from an oil refinery.
Just thinking about the concept of an anthropocene, of an epoch dictated by the actions of the dominant species on the planet, is deeply disconcerting. We have all this complex and diverse life on Earth and a species that has only been here for 300,000 years has already become so powerful that we are changing the whole thing. And not, I might add, for the better.
I am not a believer in the idea that human nature is inherently evil, so I don’t think we were destined to do this. There are a large number of examples of people throughout history figuring out how to live in harmony with the rest of life on Earth.
I’m pretty sure the Indigenous people of Australia, who lived there for some 40,000 years before other people decided to take their land, would not have brought us to this point. Reading Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything made it clear to me that there are myriad ways for humans to live on this planet.
Some of them are better than others. It is our luck to live in a time dominated by those who lack all concept of balance with the rest of the life on this planet. These particular authoritarian dominionists preach the idea of scarcity on a planet teeming with riches and continue working to make it true.
I do hold out a little hope that we humans will also figure out how to shift things again, so that the anthropocene eventually becomes an amazing epoch in the history of the world instead of the one where everything crashed.
If we work at it, if we stop pretending an economy means some people have to suffer so that others can get insanely rich, if we realize that the other life on the planet has its own requirements — some places really do need to burn regularly and if you suppress that, they will burn destructively — we might actually become a civilized species.
Of course, what might happen is that humans will just crash everything, including ourselves, and something else entirely will grow out of the detritus. If that happens, the anthropocene might not be all that long, as epochs go.
I’m hoping for an eventually positive anthropocene, maybe one that will lead to the equilibriocene. A world in balance.
All we can do now is try to lay some groundwork for that. We won’t be here. What we can do is try to shift a few things and hope it all turns out.
That’s the biggest problem with being a short-lived species that’s too smart for its own good: you don’t get to see how the story ends.
All we’ve got left is hope. Not wishful thinking hope, but hope rooted in doing what we can.
Weirder things have happened.
Hear, hear! I second that emotion!
I hope you are right about your hope. I have been feeling very discouraged so I am glad to read this.
I’m trying to channel Rebecca Solnit when I mention hope. She writes about it so well.
Primates (us) are hardwired to be competitive in some areas (resources) and cooperative in others (child care). Rising above our programming is tough. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” One of the scourges of human history is this zero sum thinking, from feudalism to capitalism. We won’t change until we SEE that the benefits of cooperation and sharing outweigh the rewards of greed.