Beyond stratigraphic definitions, the name has broader significance for understanding the pace of “humans” on Earth.
ABOVE: Plastic waste is clogging the Niger River in Bamako, Mali. After it sediments, plastic will become part of the geological record of human impacts on the planet.
17 March 2024 — After 15 years of discussion, geologists last week decided that the Anthropocene – generally understood to be the age of irreversible human impacts on the planet – will not become an official epoch in Earth’s geological timeline.
Note to readers: and the backstory is a bit juicy. Twelve members of the international Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) voted against the proposal to create an Anthropocene epoch, and only four voted for it. That would normally constitute an unqualified defeat, but a dramatic challenge has arisen from the chair of the SQS, and several members. In a 6 March press statement, they said that they are asking for the vote to be annulled. They added that “the alleged voting has been performed in contravention of the statutes of the International Commission on Stratigraphy” (ICS), including statutes governing the eligibility to vote. Neither the Chair nor members had “instigated the vote or agreed to it, so we are not responsible for procedural irregularities”. Get out your 🍿
The rejected proposal would have codified the end of the current Holocene epoch, which has been in place since the end of the last ice age 11,700 years ago. It suggested that the Anthropocene started in 1952, when plutonium from hydrogen-bomb tests showed up in the sediment of Crawford Lake near Toronto, Canada.
The debate about its legitimacy continues but whether or not it’s formally approved as a stratigraphic term, the idea of the Anthropocene is now firmly rooted in research. So, how are scientists using the term, and what does it mean to them and their fields?
“It’s a term that belongs to everyone”
Over the weekend there was much comment in the Nature magazine comments section, plus other science journals. Herein a few:
As head of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York, UK, Chris Thomas has perhaps more riding on the term than most:
When the news of this – what sounds like a very dodgy vote – happened, I sort of wondered, is it the end of us? But I think not.
For Thomas, the word Anthropocene neatly summarizes the sense that humans are part of Earth’s system and integral to its processes – what he calls indivisible connectedness.
That helps move us away from the notion that somehow humanity is apart from the rest of nature and natural systems. It’s undoable — the change is everywhere.
The concept of an era of human-driven change also provides convenient common ground for him to collaborate with researchers from other disciplines:
This is something that people in the arts and humanities and the social sciences have picked up as well. It is a means of enabling communication about the extent to which we are living in a truly unprecedented and human-altered world.
Seen through that lens, the fact that the Anthropocene has been “formally” rejected because scientists can’t agree on when it began seems immaterial. Thomas went on to say:
Many people in the humanities who are using the phrase find the concept of the articulation of a particular year, based on a deposit in a particular lake, a ridiculous way of framing the concept of a human-altered planet.
Jacquelyn Gill, a palaeoecologist at the University of Maine in Orono, agrees:
It’s a term that belongs to everyone. To people working in philosophy and literary criticism, in the arts, in the humanities, the sciences. I think it’s far more meaningful in the way that it is currently being used, than in any attempts that stratigraphers could have made to restrict or define it in some narrow sense.
She added:
It serves humanity best as a loose concept that we can use to define something that we all widely understand, which is that we live in an era where humans are the dominant force on ecological and geological processes.
Capturing human influences
The idea of the Anthropocene is especially helpful to make clear that humans have been shaping the planet for thousands of years, and that not all of those changes have been bad, Gill said:
We could do a better job of thinking about human–environment relationships in ways that are not inherently negative all the time. People are not a monolith, and neither are our attitudes or relationships to nature.
Some 80% of biodiversity is currently stewarded on Indigenous lands. Which should tell you something, right? That it’s not the presence of people that’s the problem. The solution to those problems is changing the way that many dominant cultures relate to the natural world.
The concept of the Anthropocene is owned by many fields. This reiterates the importance of understanding that the role of people on our planet requires many different ways of knowing and many different disciplines.
Humans versus Earth: the quest to define the Anthropocene
In a world in which the threat of climate change dominates environmental debates, the term Anthropocene can help to broaden the discussion, says Yadvinder Malhi, a biodiversity researcher at the University of Oxford, UK:
I use it all the time. For me, it captures the time where human influence has a global planetary effect, and it’s multidimensional. It’s much more than just climate change. It’s what we’re doing. The oceans, the resources we are extracting, habitats changing.
I need that term when I’m trying to capture this idea of humans affecting the planet in multiple ways because of the size of our activity.
The looseness of the term is popular, but would a formal definition help in any way? Malhi thinks it would:
There’s no other term available that captures the global multidimensional impacts on the planet. But there is a problem in not having a formal definition if people are using it in different terms, in different ways.
Although the word “Anthropocene” makes some researchers think of processes that began 10,000 years ago, others consider it to mean those of the past century. Maybe a formal adoption, like a definition, would actually help to clarify that.
But I think it goes far, far beyond that. Some concluding thoughts …
“DOWN THE HOLE”
For those of you that subscribe to my separate “Down the hole” column wherein I go very deep into something, often ending up somewhere strange, the following will not be new. This is not the whole piece I wrote – merely a few of the bits that I think are important and relevant to the above discussion.
In his studio on the east coast of Vancouver Island, the master clockmaker Phil Abernethy is crafting a timepiece that will be calibrated in a manner that no horologist has ever attempted. It won’t show the minutes and hours of an ordinary human day. Instead, his clock will display time as experienced by some of the oldest trees on the planet.
Using techniques he’s honed over a lifetime, Abernethy will machine the gears by hand in traditional materials such as steel and brass. But the pendulum will respond to the forest: when trees grow quickly, the hours will advance more rapidly; more lethargic growth will result in a slower tempo. Over centuries, the long-term fate of the canopy will be registered on a calendar that may deviate from the Gregorian date by decades or more.
Abernethy has been commissioned to fabricate the arboreal clock by the Nevada Museum of Art. Standing 12 feet tall, the clock will be the first physical manifestation of an environmental timekeeping project many have been trying to develop over the past decade. Some of the clocks in the project respond to rivers; Abernethy’s enlists a stand of bristlecone pine trees in Nevada’s Great Basin as living timekeepers.
Note to readers: I have had the good fortune to be invited to interview him with my film crew. More on that in a later post.
As Abernethy notes:
Fluctuations in the bristlecones’ growth rate, affected by environmental conditions ranging from local rainfall to planetary climate change, will be measured by analyzing the thickness of tree rings in microcores retrieved from the mountain each year. These data will be used to determine the center of gravity for the pendulum, which will swing slower or faster depending on the tree ring thickness. Though the clock face will display time in the usual way, it won’t serve as a mechanism for human planning — a technology to impose order on the environment for our convenience — but rather to pace our lives to match the lived reality of other organisms.
Abernethy’s arboreal clock, in other words, upsets more than just the standards of horology. The environmental calamity known as the Anthropocene is a consequence of a worldview in which all that is not human is construed as a resource — even time itself. Other life forms are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, laid waste at a pace set by the world economy. Factory farming and logging, fossil fuel and plastics production, mining, human construction and infrastructure — all disregard the timing with which nonhuman systems emerge, ebb and flow. The globalized logic of industry, with its planetary supply chain, must keep up with human demand, turning civilization itself into a manifestation of logistics.
Our mastery of the world is a mastery of time. And as every industrialist knows, mastery of time requires the precision of a master clock to provide a temporal standard against which everything can be measured and controlled. Whether regulated by the swing of a pendulum or the oscillations of a strontium atom — as the most advanced atomic clocks are today — the master clock operates without an external feedback mechanism. The clock has become the ultimate authority. To question it would be tantamount to questioning modernity.
The design of Abernethy’s arboreal clock may be novel, but the underlying ideas are ancient. They predate pendulums and gearwork, originating in an era when people observed time in relation to other beings in order for all to flourish together. Ancient but mostly forgotten, these ideas are urgently needed today. Whatever practical use it might have, the arboreal clock is intended primarily to serve as a philosophical instrument.
Over the last two summers while sunning myself in Crete, I have been re-reading my Rachel Carson and other biologists. Research has shown that we don’t consider plants to be important mostly because they grow close together and don’t appear to move. Static proximity is a visual cue humans use to group objects, so individual plants and different plant species tend to be de-emphasized. A vine takes hours to turn toward sunlight, a bristlecone hundreds of years to mature.
Each organism’s clock – its sense of time – is so different from ours that we can’t even sense it.
In other words, what we call plant blindness is really time blindness: an obliviousness to temporal frames of reference that deviate from our own. And the situation is probably worse today, exacerbated by our ever-diminishing attention spans, e-commerce, social media and more. The pace of civilization continues to quicken.
Considered in these broader terms, the temporal mismatch has profound implications not only for plants but also for nonhuman animals and ecosystems. In our blundering time blindness, we recklessly disrupt the rhythms of most life on Earth.
There is an enormous history to read. Horology has had a profound and persistent impact on science since at least the 2nd millennium B.C.E., when Egyptian astronomers accurately mapped the night sky by observing the apparent motion of stars in relation to the steady flow of water from a punctured vessel. Some 3,000 years later, allegedly inspired by Galileo’s observations of a swinging cathedral chandelier, the Dutch scientist and inventor Christiaan Huygens built the first pendulum clock, an instrument of unprecedented precision that quickened progress in astronomy to an unprecedented degree. It also provided scientists with a deeper understanding of physiology by facilitating the measurement of the beating heart and providing insight into circadian rhythms.
Every advance in timekeeping has enhanced human perception of the surrounding world. Most of these innovations also enlarged the dominion of those who controlled the technology. With a chronometer in hand, the captain of a ship could determine longitude at sea, aiding exploration and discovery of new realms to conquer.
In Europe, timekeeping abetted the Industrial Revolution. British factories put laborers to work on the clock, enforcing long hours even in the darkest of seasons. In North America, time zones were ordained to synchronize railroad schedules, which previously were difficult to coordinate from station to station. With standardized time, freight traffic could be managed over vast distances, avoiding collisions on the tracks. With locomotives and ships, raw materials could be sourced and products distributed practically anywhere on Earth.
But there is another story to be told about timekeeping technology, and the prologue can be heard shortly after the first sundial was installed in Rome. A character in a play written by Titus Maccius Plautus in the 3rd century B.C.E. :
The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours. You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest.
Skepticism of modernized timekeeping increased with technological progress, especially in the era of colonial expansion. Clock towers became a visible manifestation of colonial occupation, trampling on traditional timekeeping practices and forcing locals to conform to European norms. During a late 19th-century riot against British colonial rulers, for instance, Indian rebels responded by opening fire on the clock in Bombay’s Crawford Market.
By 1934, as the historian Lewis Mumford declared, the clock had become “the key machine of the modern industrial age. By its essential nature it dissociated time from human events”.
Mumford was correct, but he didn’t account for the nonhuman realm. Those factories and railroads ripped through ecosystems, which became as abstract as the dividend coupons on stock certificates. As time was stripped of context, nature was uprooted, conveniently making space for more factories and railroads.
What was once a natural cycle became a vicious circle.
It’s why when you read the findings of biologists and their careful examination of tree rings in multiple locations that you find out all around the world warmer temperatures expanded from the tropics for about 60 years starting around 1570, probably a consequence of natural climate variation. Scientists at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research now believe that this phenomenon caused the droughts in Eurasia that destabilized the Ming and the Ottomans, and also hastened the collapse of the Jamestown colony in Virginia in the 1690s.
Such analysis of historical environmental conditions is possible only because trees are natural calendars – growing a ring each year – and because the calendars are rich in contextual information. Dendrochronology has helped us discern long-term climate change, especially variations so gradual that they occur over several human generations.
Time is similarly embedded in other organisms. For instance, giant clams record daily variations in marine conditions in the growth bands of their shells over hundreds of years. And at a molecular scale, nucleotide sequences reveal the mutation rate of life forms ranging from plankton to whales.
Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves. We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way. Mumford got that part right when he astutely described clocks as “power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes”.
So, yes, all life depends on timekeeping. But nonhuman life treats time as a mixed medium: entangled with the environment, dependent on other organisms.
Many cultures relied on phenological indicators and ecological calendars once upon a time. In “The Natural History”, the foremost encyclopedia of the Roman Empire, Pliny the Elder articulated this point of view by evoking the voice of nature:
I have given you plants that mark the hours. Why then do you still look higher and scan the heavens themselves? Lo! you have Pleiads at your very feet.
Nature, in other words, kept track of time in ways more germane than the constellations circling across the sky above.
Traditional clocks and calendars orient people. They provide practical and ethical direction. Salmonberries should be picked only after they have ripened. To take berries earlier would deprive the birds and inhibit seeding of future generations. And to ungratefully leave behind berries in their ripened state would offend the plant’s spirit, causing the brambles to stop bearing fruit. If these customs are ignored, the consequences will be felt in future years.
In other words, naturally calibrated clocks and calendars integrate people into their environment. They guide traditional care and management practices including planting and harvesting.
And they provide feedback. The feedback steadies the environment by bringing all who act on it into equilibrium. Time and the environment become indistinguishable. As one biologist friend of mine noted:
Near the peak of Mt. Washington in Nevada’s Great Basin, which rises more than 11,600 feet above sea level, the bristlecone pines are as scraggly as the tree in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. Until very recently, bristlecones didn’t grow at this elevation. To walk down the slope is to stroll through time, eventually reaching trees that are several thousand years old and as solid as sculpted stone.
Over the past decade, I have gotten to know these trees, visiting with members of the Long Now Foundation, the organization that stewards part of the mountaintop and has partnered with me on the clock at the Nevada Museum of Art. By observing the trees and their embodied experience of time, I have been able to see the inadequacy of my wristwatch.
The trees sensitized me to the time reckoning of other life forms, both plants and animals. They attuned me to the time kept collectively in living systems such as rivers, where the flow rate is affected by the melting of glaciers and the eagerness of beavers, not to mention the unquenchable thirst of industrial agriculture. By gearing the flow of time to match the flow of the Susitna or Matanuska — as I have done in partnership with the Anchorage Museum — fluvial clocks can integrate people into local watersheds.
Ah, nature. Natural time standards – instrumental to recognizing the right of life to live at its own pace. The Anthropocene be damned.