In 2014, editors of the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED) announced inclusion of the increasingly used word Anthropocene. It refers, they said, to the “era of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth.” In 2016, attention to the term in both science and the media has been deepening and widening.
The OED‘s editors explained the word’s etymology:
The –cene suffix, derived from the Greek for ‘new’ or ‘recent’, has been used since the 1830s to form names denoting the epochs and strata of the present Cenozoic era of geological time, ranging from the Palaeocene to the Holocene. The Holocene epoch covers roughly the past 10,000 years, starting after the retreat of the ice in the last glaciation of the Pleistocene. That period corresponds with the major developments of human society and technology from the Neolithic to the modern era, but the term Anthropocene (from anthropo– ‘human’, as in anthropology) is typically used to refer to a much shorter period in which human activity has become a major ecological force, beginning with the Industrial Revolution.
Beginning with the Industrial Revolution? Actually, part of the reason for intensified attention is that scientists this year have begun looking seriously at the mid-20th century as the starting time, and at the need to identify a corresponding “golden spike,” the best physical evidence for that start. In science’s official taxonomy of deep geological time, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) is considering elevating the informal term Anthropocene to formal, permanent status.
Journalists are paying attention. Whatever the ICS may decide, media coverage is gradually transforming the term from an exotic science-lingo curiosity into a common word in the civic vocabulary.
Much of the media coverage stems from a January 2016 paper in the weekly Science by the Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ (and yes, those quotation marks appear in the group’s website heading). It’s one of four working groups of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, a part of the ICS, the largest scientific organization within the International Union of Geological Sciences.
In an August news report in Science that inspired extensive media attention, Paul Voosen described the working group as “a mix of 35 geologists, climate scientists, archaeologists, and others.” One of those others is Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard historian of science known for strong advocacy of climate-change action. Here’s the group’s January abstract:
Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth. Vigorous debate continues about whether this warrants recognition as a new geologic time unit known as the Anthropocene. We review anthropogenic markers of functional changes in the Earth system through the stratigraphic record. The appearance of manufactured materials in sediments, including aluminum, plastics, and concrete, coincides with global spikes in fallout radionuclides and particulates from fossil fuel combustion. Carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles have been substantially modified over the past century. Rates of sea-level rise and the extent of human perturbation of the climate system exceed Late Holocene changes. Biotic changes include species invasions worldwide and accelerating rates of extinction. These combined signals render the Anthropocene stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene and earlier epochs.
The paper concludes that “distinctive attributes of the recent geological record support the formalization of the Anthropocene as a stratigraphic entity equivalent to other formally defined geological epochs.” But the paper’s ending notes a not entirely scientific question that has not yet received the media and political attention that is probably inevitable: Is it “helpful to formalize the Anthropocene or better to leave it as an informal, albeit solidly founded, geological time term, as the Precambrian and Tertiary currently are”? After all, the working group observes, “unlike other subdivisions of geological time, the implications of formalizing the Anthropocene reach well beyond the geological community. Not only would this represent the first instance of a new epoch having been witnessed firsthand by advanced human societies, it would be one stemming from the consequences of their own doing.”
The term would reframe both discussion and understanding. Five years ago, an editorial at the weekly Nature declared that the Anthropocene merits “proper recognition” not only for reflecting “a grim reality,” but for providing “a powerful framework for considering global change and how to manage it.” Framework indeed. The editors’ subhead predicted that “official recognition for the Anthropocene would focus minds on the challenges to come.”
The working group’s question—Would formalization be helpful?—calls to mind something Nature‘s editors asked: “Is it wise for stratigraphers to endorse a term that comes gift-wrapped as a weapon for those on both sides of the political battle over the fate of the planet?” Voosen once called the term “an argument wrapped in a word.” If the ICS decides formally to assert this encompassing name based on known physical realities planetwide, won’t it also have to be ready for inevitable accusations, from climate scoffers and others, of spreading ecopropaganda?
In recent years, journalists have been gradually introducing the name to the public, but the coverage has mostly overlooked the concern in the working group’s and Nature‘s questions. A recent search of online archives at the Anthropocene-promoting New York Times turned up well over a hundred hits on the term, six in October alone. But a search at the Wall Street Journal, known for editorial-page climate scoffing, turned up only a mocking quip from online columnist James Taranto and an incidental mention in a Bjorn Lomborg op-ed.
At the Guardian, an October piece used the Anthropocene as framing for indicting a “whole media ecosystem” of climate-science denial, exemplified by the Drudge Report, Infowars, Breitbart, and Daily Caller. That piece could also have mentioned The Federalist, where a recent search on “Anthropocene” yielded one hit, an indirect criticism of the Anthropocene concept, and National Review, with a mocking mention of the term found from 2015.
Meanwhile the Anthropocene, both word and concept, is becoming less exotic and more routine in the media. National Public Radio engaged it in a four-minute Morning Edition segment in April 2015, though at the NPR website, physicist Adam Frank had already done much the same in online essays in 2011 and 2014. In September 2016, four Anthropocene pieces aired on NPR’s TED Radio Hour. Later NPR published Frank’s essay “Climate change and the astrobiology of the Anthropocene,” explaining the framing of scientific understanding of Earth in terms of planets generally. NPR’s Science Friday recently posted “How to survive the Anthropocene,” an online article about an essay collection.
The recently issued Living Planet Report 2016—a book-length warning about humanity’s effects on wildlife and biodiversity—opens by declaring the Anthropocene its “defining concept.” The report comes from organizations led by WWF International, formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund. Media coverage—from the India Times to the Australian, from the UK’s Telegraph to Canada’s CBC—adopted the Anthropocene framing.
All of that goes well beyond merely introducing the word. So does other recent media treatment of the Anthropocene.
Some of the coverage engages scientific, technopolitical, or technological implications. The Smithsonian piece “Will medicine survive the Anthropocene?” contemplated the prospect of global warming disrupting production of plant-derived drugs. At the Huffington Post, a professor of public health, advocating the United Nations’s Sustainable Development Goals, contributed “How can the SDGs help us survive the Anthropocene epoch?” New York Times online science columnist Andrew Revkin—a veteran commentator on the Anthropocene—published “Building a ‘good’ Anthropocene from the bottom up.” His posting examined projects that could reverse human-caused harm.
The Guardian‘s article “How the domestic chicken rose to define the Anthropocene” carried a subhead explaining, “Over the past 70 years, the bird has become a global staple, and could be the key fossil evidence for human-influenced epoch.” The article quoted University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, who chairs the Anthropocene working group: “It has become the world’s most common bird. It has been fossilised in thousands of landfill sites and on street corners around the world.”
In the Aeon essay “Now it’s time to prepare for the Machinocene,” Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, argued that if “we are to develop machines that think, ensuring that they are safe and beneficial is one of the great intellectual and practical challenges of this century…. Our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are likely to be living in a different era, perhaps more Machinocene than Anthropocene.”
At the Guardian, travel writer Robert Macfarlane published the long article “Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever.” The thumbnail summary noted that though politicians and scientists have been heard about the Anthropocene, responses by writers and artists merit considering too. Under the headline “Art of the nuclear Anthropocene,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ran a brief series of photographs on themes like radiation, uranium mining, and nuclear weapons. A History News Network essay examined two headlined questions: “How should historians write about the Anthropocene—and why is it important?” The Conversation published “Why a volcano, Frankenstein, and the summer of 1816 are relevant to the Anthropocene,” a commentary about two centuries of nature writing engaging the complexities of human entanglements with the natural world.
Some of the coverage conveys passion. In a short commentary at The Conversation (reprinted elsewhere), marine geologist James Scourse expressed frustration with what he sees as faddish semantic dithering. It’s telegraphed in the headline: “Enough ‘Anthropocene’ nonsense—we already know the world is in crisis.”
And in the Nature opinion piece “Define the Anthropocene in terms of the whole Earth,” Australian scholar and writer Clive Hamilton argued that the Anthropocene is often discussed “in a way that undermines the seriousness of the issue.” The subhead summarized his criticism: “Researchers must consider human impacts on entire Earth systems and not get trapped in discipline-specific definitions.”
Hamilton’s ending emphasized what he sees as the stakes:
That so many scientists, often publishing in prestigious journals, can misconstrue the definition of the Anthropocene as nothing more than a measure of the human footprint on the landscape is a sign of how far Earth-system science has to go to change the way many people think about the planet. The new geological epoch does not concern soils, the landscape or the environment, except inasmuch as they are changed as part of a massive shock to the functioning of Earth as a whole.
Some scientists even write: “Welcome to the Anthropocene.” At first I thought they were being ironic, but now I see they are not. And that’s scary. The idea of the Anthropocene is not welcoming. It should frighten us. And scientists should present it as such.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
