I've been thinking about the hubris of the "anthropocene". People who like the term point to…

[mbarrick]

I've been thinking about the hubris of the "anthropocene". People who like the term point to it like a smoking gun of human failure, yet the idea that the global layer of human shіt like strontium-90 and carbon polymers that have been laid down in a meager 70 years is the start of a geologic epoch is wildly optimistic. The idea that it represents an epoch presupposes that it will go on for a geologically significant length of time when it isn't even a significant fraction of how long modern humans have been around. Even the Holocene, the time since the last glacial maximum, is a blip on that scale, just 3% of the time modern humans have existed, only one quarter of one one thousandth of the time we broke off as a separate species from our common ancestor with chimpanzees. Arguably the Holocene is similar anthropocentric hubris and an unspecial chunk of the larger Paleocene that started 66 million years ago with the Cretaceous–Paleogene iridium layer boundary from the big, bad meteor. To call what we've been doing for a single lifetime, or even since the "time immemorial" birth of extant cultures is pure ego. The optimism that we will hold a candle to horseshoe crabs, sharks, or turtles and still be throwing around plastic and other human concocted chemistry for millions of years strikes me as insane. Even if we hold on for a few more tens of thousands of years we won't be an epoch. We'll be a boundary layer marking mass extinction and global climate change that maybe, in the unlikely event that in another few tens of millions of years something else evolves a brain that tries to figure stuff like this out, will look at and think, WTF? Image: USGS
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