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On a cosmological time scale, the existence of humanity is only a simple bulp. However, during our short life, we have made damage to the earth, so much so that some believe that we must invent a new geological era, the anthropocene, to recognize the world change that our species has caused. Technically speaking, we are not yet in the anthropocene – but it is largely because experts cannot agree on the start.
Ask most geologists and they will say that we are still in the Holocene, a geological era that started around 11,700 years ago and is characterized by a period of planetary stability when human civilization prospered. But this is where friction resides: our influence on terrestrial systems means that these characteristics no longer apply, and an increasing number of scientists think that a new era must be recognized. Enter the anthropocene.
There is a debate on who invented the term, but it was popularized in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist and the Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen And the biologist Eugene Stoermer. They argued that the anthropocene had started in the “last part of the 18th century”, roughly when global greenhouse gas emissions began to increase as the industrial revolution gathered steam. However, the anthropocene working group (AWG) begged to postpone. Created in 2009 and responsible for finding a formal definition of the time, its members declared that the effects of human activity at the time were too dispersed to provide an image of global change. Instead, the date they found was in 1952.
“The middle of the 20th century worked much better than all the other candidates,” explains …
