The Working Group has spoken, and it seems that anyone who bought champagne to toast the Age of Anthropos may have to keep it on ice. According to today’s New York Times
A committee of roughly two dozen scholars has, by a large majority, voted down a proposal to declare the start of the Anthropocene, a newly created epoch of geologic time, according to an internal announcement of the voting results seen by The New York Times.
The article clarifies that this decision was, in the words of Erle Ellis, “a narrow, technical matter for geologists,” and the vote should not be taken as a claim that humans have not disrupted the planetary ecosystem.
Ellis, who resigned in protest from the Anthropocene Working Group last year, advances the claim that the Anthropocene should better be understood as a geological “event” rather than a new (and presumably lasting) “epoch.” Ellis circulated an article by science report Paul Voosen in Science that proclaims, “The Anthropocene is Dead. Long Live the Anthropocene.”
An “event,” according to Ellis and others, can represent a less formal geological term. Its analogy would not be to long-last epochs such as the Pleistocene or even the current Holocene (now almos 12,000 years old, and still running) but rather the Great Oxygenation Event. That event, which happened around 2.5 billion years ago, saw cynanobacteria produce the first oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, thus making possible all forms of life that consume or process oxygen. For aerobic life forms, the GOE created a new world. For older, anaerobic life, oxygen seems mostly to have been poisonous.
Of course, the idea of the Anthropocene has long since slipped the hold of geologists, including their deliberate Working Group. I’m hardly the only lit professor who’s written books, in my case Break Up the Anthropocene (2019) with this word in the title – some of my favorites include Jeremy Davies’s The Birth of the Anthropocene (2016), Christophe Bonneuill and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene (2016), and Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor’s collection, Anthropocene Reading (2017).
I like Ellis’s notion of a relatively sudden Event, rather than a sedimented and more stable Epoch. I also like James Scott’s notion, advanced in Against the Grain (2017), of a “thin” Anthropocene that began when early humans started modifying their environment with fire, and later with agriculture, leading to progressively “thick” Anthropocene moments, including early modern globalization in the 16th-17c, the Industrial Revolution in the 19c, and the Great Acceleration that followed WWII in the mid-twentieth century.
Perhaps – is it too much to ask? – the twenty-first century may see some thinning of the Anthropocene event, as we transition from fossil fuels to other forms of energy? In which case the Event may still haunt us, but we won’t have entered the Epoch?