The
Age of Man: humanity as a global culture; our cities a new environment, a new
ecology, an invented eco-system.
It is inspiring. But it is
wrongly named.
Recent
articles from popular scientific literature delineate the problem. “Is Civilization Natural?” by Adam
Frank aired on NPR, September 26, 2014.
That is how I first learned the word in my car the following day.
Reading the blog transcript, I followed the links
and searched on my own. I found a National Geographic story from 2011,
“Enter the Anthropocene-Age of Man” by Elizabeth Kolbert. In its January 2013 issue, Smithsonian Magazine asked rhetorically,
“What is the Anthropocene; and are we in it?” by Joseph Stromberg.
First, is the presence of human civilization
remarkable in geologic time?
Second, if so, what is the proper name? The second problem is only hinted at. No one seems to have offered a better
label. As for the first, it
depends on whom you ask.
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Earth from Space. Apollo 8.
No indication that it is inhabited. |
According to National
Geographic, the word “anthropocene” was invented spontaneously by Paul
Crutzen, a Nobel laureate chemist.
“The conference chairman kept referring to the Holocene,
the epoch that began at the end of the last ice age, 11,500 years ago, and
that—officially, at least—continues to this day. "'Let's stop it,'"
Crutzen recalls blurting out. "'We are no longer in the Holocene. We are
in the Anthropocene.' Well, it was quiet in the room for a while." When
the group took a coffee break, the Anthropocene was the main topic of
conversation.”
In truth, Crutzen has been thinking about this for about 40
years. His first listing in JSTOR
is “SST’s – A Threat to the Earth’s Ozone Shield” in Ambio, vol. 1 no. 2, April 1972. SST refers to the Concorde
supersonic transport, a commercial experiment that ran for 27 years, from 1976
until 2003. Only 100 were ordered,
20 built, and seven put into service.
When Crutzen wrote in 1972, they were four years in the future.
Crutzen continued to research atmospheric
chemistry, and was honored with a Nobel prize, in 1995, along with Mario
Molina, and F. Sherwood Rowland, for his work on ozone depletion. But he is not a geologist.
The –cene words all mean “recent.” From the Tertiary Period through the
Quaternary Period, the Epochs are called (oldest first): Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene,
Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene.
They mean: oldest recent, dawn of the recent, slightly recent, more
recent, most recent, and wholly recent. (Idaho Museum of Natural History here.)
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Earth at Night
Evidence is where you find it. |
Stratigraphers define geologic layers by the
rocks, of course, but also, more accurately, and precisely by the fossils. (See The Map that Changed the World reviewed here on NecessaryFacts.) Some stratigraphers were not happy with
the neologism “anthropocene” that popped up in the scientific literature. Others may have settled themselves to
it. It depends on whom you ask.
“Many stratigraphers (scientists
who study rock layers) criticize the idea, saying clear-cut evidence for a new
epoch simply isn’t there. “When you start naming geologic-time terms, you need
to define what exactly the boundary is, where it appears in the rock strata,”
says Whitney Autin, a stratigrapher at the SUNY College of Brockport, who
suggests Anthropocene is more about pop culture than hard science. The crucial
question, he says, is specifying exactly when human beings began to leave their
mark on the planet: The atomic era, for instance, has left traces of radiation
in soils around the globe, while deeper down in the rock strata, agriculture’s
signature in Europe can be detected as far back as A.D. 900. The Anthopocene,
Autin says, “provides eye-catching jargon, but from the geologic side, I need
the bare bones facts that fit the code.”
(Smithsonian Magazine.)
“At first most of the scientists using the new geologic term
were not geologists. [Dr. Jan] Zalasiewicz, [University of Leicester] who is
one, found the discussions intriguing. "I noticed that Crutzen's term was
appearing in the serious literature, without quotation marks and without a
sense of irony," he says. In 2007 Zalasiewicz was serving as chairman of
the Geological Society of London's Stratigraphy Commission. At a meeting he
decided to ask his fellow stratigraphers what they thought of the Anthropocene.
Twenty-one of 22 thought the concept had merit.” (National Geographic)
(See, also, “The Anthropocene: a new epoch of
geological time?” by Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Haywood, and Michael
Ellis. Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical
and Engineering Sciences, Vol. 369, No. 1938, (13 March
2011), pp. 1056-1084, by The Royal Society.)
Geologic stages are shorter than epochs and they
tend to be named after the places where the layers were first explored, even if
similar layers are found elsewhere: Piacenzian, Gelasian, Calabrian … But the margins of error are still
given as ± 0.005 million years, which
means ± 5000 years, the time span of the so-called Anthropocene.
Geologic time is not the only long wave. The 1954 reference Earth as a Planet, edited by Gerard P. Kuiper, has no index entries
for humans, animals, or plants.
About halfway through the 744-page work, in a chapter by G. E.
Hutchinson of Yale, "The Biochemistry of the Terrestrial Atmosphere", is this
passage: “The carbon cycle, as it is commonly understood
in biology, consists of the photosynthetic reduction of CO2 by green plants and
a certain number of purple and green bacteria and the
subsequent respiratory release by plants, bacteria, and a to a less extent of
animals, of Co2 to the atmosphere.” (p. 379).
Man is the measure of all
things. But measurements must be
appropriate. The Moon is 384,403 km away, center to center, even though we do not travel
from the center to the center.
Knowing that in millimeters does not give you much more
information.
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Stars that have been touched by our
television signals
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/1996/ph123/l16c.html |
Anthropocene means “Man recent”. It violates the rules of nomenclature
and is gendered. Why not call this
the Gynocene? The word “people”
ultimately comes from a doubling for intensity of the first syllable of “poloi”
which means “many.” (Pepper is
another example: achoo!)
Linguists who theorize a common source for all Afro-Asiatic languages
use the word “Nostratic” ultimately from the Latin nos for “we” and, so, “nostras”
for we-folks, countrymen, natives, etc.
Homo-words carry too many other meanings. We have enough problems with homo erectus. Civilization may be sine qua non of who we are. It is not clear when, measured by paleontology,
we became rational and self-aware, versus just being
smarter apes. And those may be two
different events. The recent
discovery of cave paintings in
Indonesia that are 40,000 years old and similar to equally old works in Europe
suggests much, but answers little.
We have been radiating electromagnetic signals into space since
1840. Voyager 2 has been on an
“interstellar mission” since 1990.
Even though the sun will expand and burn the planet, some of our
descendants may witness that. And,
just as we know Paleozoic millimeter-sized plants from their fossils, they too,
may have evidence of our having been here now.
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