anthropocene

nationality

American

occupation / innovator as

biologist

is, by being seen as an age, coded into some long history of ages. Such coding carries a load of assumptions, some religious, some teleological.

the Anthropocene is a general problem with geological ages. The Anthropocene is coded into this long history of ages, which is biblical, too. . . But when I first saw the term, I did not like it at all as a biologist because it seemed to reintroduce the great chain of being (Lovejoy 1964): we had the age of fish, we had the age of reptiles, we had the age of mammals, and guess what is next on the great chain of being' The Anthropocene! The age of the human!

is not an epoch, insofar as epochs represent drastic changes to geological periods, but rather counts as a short geological event, the transition time of 'the great dying'.

The other thing that I did not like about the term, is that it is a term of a geological epoch. Okay, I think what we are calling the Anthropocene is a short geological event rather than an epoch. It is more like the K-T event, (or, more properly, the K-Pg event) , the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary 66 million years ago that saw the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, or perhaps more aptly like the even bigger Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 million years ago in which more than 90% of all species went extinct. The Anthropocene is like the Great Permian extinction (Kolbert 2014). The Anthropocene is, you know, 'The Great Dying', which is not an epoch, it is a transition time. And so, I do not think we are in a new epoch, I think we might be in a transition to who knows what. But it is not a geological epoch. I think that we are elevating ourselves by thinking that humans are making a geological epoch. I think we are rather making a transition to something.i

Scott Gilbert

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Scott Gilbert