A terrible time, a new epoch

The word “epoch" conjures up positive images of a new era. It suggests something memorable and life changing but in August 2024 it may come to be used to describe the start of a time that marks the effect of human beings on planet Earth – a beautiful word for an unfortunate experience, perhaps. In geology, an epoch is the smallest unit of time and lasts several million years, which means man’s impact upon Earth has a long trajectory and we are still only relatively near the start along that path. It is a very sobering thought.

The Anthropocene epoch (Greek for “human” and “new”) is the proposed name given by an international scientific working group to mark the end of the stable Holocene Epoch, which started about 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age and the beginning of this challenging new time in which we find ourselves. Climate change, increased pollution and the heightened rate of species loss have been so constant and unrelenting since the mid-20th century that scientists in the working group date somewhere between 1950 and 1954 as the beginning of a new geologic epoch.

In deciding on the start of a new geological time, scientists have to pinpoint a date and document global environmental changes that have been captured in natural materials – rocks, ancient ice or sediment from the ocean floor over the several million years, and they have been able to best do that by studying Lake Crawford, a limestone sinkhole lake southwest of Toronto, Canada. Apparently the annual changes in human activity are all registered there because the water at the top of the 24-metre deep, six-acre big lake does not mix with the water at the very bottom, which has remained completely isolated from the rest of the planet, except for what falls to the very bottom and accumulates in sediment, according to one member of the scientific team in a published interview.

It would appear that the very fast post-WWII recovery period has had most effect upon the planet. That period, in which we still live, has seen an exponential rate of human intellectual advancement and technological innovation that has even taken us beyond our own planet. Scientists cannot rule out the impact of the Industrial Revolution over the previous 200 years but I imagine it is the enormous scale of modern development that is changing the game as much as the explosion in world population in the last two centuries, from one billion to eight billion.

It is quite ridiculous that some politicians deny that human activity impacts upon our environment when the evidence has been growing steadily and is now undeniable. The challenge for them is that they just do not know what to do about it since it queers their political pitch, and even the politicians who recognise that we must act to reduce the pace of global warming have limited success. It is clear that we have to change the way we approach the issue, and one scientist writing in the New York Times, came to the conclusion that we don't really understand the true meaning of climate, that should broaden our thinking about it and change how we frame the debate. Adam Frank is a US astrophysics professor and one of the scientists advocating that we go beyond Anthropocene creating a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities and initiate a new scientific (and philosophical) project: The Astrobiology of the Anthropocene, which would focus on the interplay of forces that shape the fate of planetary-scale civilisations like ours, put human activity in the context of planetary evolution and help us understand exactly what we are up against and so find more adequate solutions.

Astrobiology, he says, is “fundamentally a study of planets and their ‘habitability’ for life. But sustainability concerns the habitability of one planet (Earth) for a certain kind of species (homo sapiens) with a certain kind of organisation (modern civilisation). That means our urgent questions about sustainability are a subset of questions about habitability.” So we are contextualising the issue incorrectly. We are not joining up the dots and are missing the opportunity to plot a path forward by overlooking what we learn each day about the evolution of other planets in our solar system and also Earth’s own evolution over 4.6 billion years. It is unlikely, he argues, that our civilisation is the first to face a sustainability crisis such as the one that presents itself today. For example, we know that planets in our solar system such as Mars was once a warm, wet and potentially habitable world. Mars provides a perfect case study for how planetary climate conditions can change and shows us that habitability is therefore not forever. That is a whole new ball game, as one might say.

For decades scientists have been saying that life on earth is not guaranteed. Maybe it is time we start facing that terrible reality and prepare for that long term eventuality. Human ingenuity will probably take us elsewhere in the galaxy but perhaps we do need to change how we see things unfolding and do the right thing.