The term “Anthropocene” has taken on, in recent years, an ideological, descriptive or prescriptive value. It is a concept that, in its most restricted and rigorously scientific form does not exist, as we will see shortly, but which continues to circulate in the press and in the speeches of experts, and can provide us with more than one key to understanding what is happening to us and the great themes of ecology and sustainability.
Despite having distant antecedents, which can be traced back to the geologist Antonio Stoppani who anticipated the concept of the “anthropozoic era” in 1873 and even earlier, in 1864, to GP Marsh, who advanced the thesis according to which human activity was so invasive that it could be considered a real “new telluric force that in power and universality can be compared to the greatest forces of the earth”, the concept of the Anthropocene rises to the headlines and becomes a wide-ranging explanatory perspective with recent developments linked to the climate crisis and among supporters of the protection of the ecosystem and nature. It was probably the engineer – and meteorologist – Paul Jozef Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995, and the naturalist Eugene Filmore Stoermer who contributed most to its diffusion, in particular with the publication of the essay «The Anthropocene», the subsequent «Geology of minkind» in the journal Nature, and the volume, which explicitly refers to it from the title, «Welcome to the Anthropocene: Man has changed the climate, the Earth enters a new era», which makes this perspective a cornerstone of environmental activism.
Anthropocene has become, in the last twenty years, a synthetic concept that condenses many other potentially related notions, but also different ideological perspectives that have made it a political banner and that, consequently, often condition an equidistant and realistic evaluation. This broad speculative basket must be explored also because it remains little known to the general public, who often do not even know the existence of the term “Anthropocene”, but paradoxically it appears all too well known to insiders, who take its meaning for granted and, consequently, its effectiveness and the related implications, using it for further theoretical extensions, such as that linked to the so-called Super-Anthropocene (but this is already another story, which we will tell elsewhere).
In the early 2000s, the concept took on such importance that it became the heart of a real scientific debate. In 2009, a special commission was formed, the «Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)», specifically established to verify whether the conditions exist to define the Anthropocene as a geological reality, a necessary condition to be able to define it as an «epoch». The working group is indicated by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), a component body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), that is, the most internationally recognized body, together with the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), in geological and geophysical assessments, and in particular in reconstructing the evidence of geological eras in the history of the Earth, using evidence present in rocks. The working group includes among its members the most qualified geologists and stratigraphers to express an expert opinion on the matter, but also includes scholars of human and social sciences; this fact, in addition to providing the necessary interdisciplinary scope to the outcome of the evaluations, is interesting in the context of a broader evaluation in the reflections on the Anthropocene.
In 2022, the AWG launched a rigorous evaluation process to precisely establish whether or not the Anthropocene had the status of a “geological era”; in particular, the selection of a GSSP was initiated, i.e. the study for the identification of “global stratigraphic sections and points” that would indicate the evidence of the results of the human hand in the current composition of the Earth. In other words, it was a question of verifying whether it was possible to establish with rigorous certainty that the geological stratigraphy unequivocally indicated the presence of sedimentary layers due to the work of man. If the process had been successful, the Anthropocene would have been officially defined as a “geological era” and would have obtained a place in the International Chronostratigraphic Map. After a long evaluation process, however, the commission, in March 2024, concluded that “the addition of an Anthropocene epoch – and the end of the Holocene epoch – is not supported by the standards used to define epochs”. Scientists have therefore established that the Anthropocene, as a geological era, does not exist. The Holocene is safe: it remains the epoch of the present and more time will have to pass before we can define with certainty that we have arrived at another geological era.
- What changes for us, who had become accustomed to attributing “a certain meaning” to the concept of the Anthropocene?
- Are we sure we are not “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”?
G. Bernardoni and G. Brigola, Geology course by Professor Antonio Stoppani: Stratigraphic Geology, Vol. 2, 1873
PJ Crutzen, EF Stoermer, The “Anthropocene”, in Global Change newsletter, n°41, may 2000
PJ Crutzen, EF Stoermer, The “Anthropocene”, op. cit.
PJ Crutzen, Geology of mankind, Nature, Vol. 415, 3 January, 2002
PJ Crutzen, Welcome to the Anthropocene: Man Has Changed the Climate, the Earth Enters a New Era. Mondadori, 2005
The Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) is responsible for assigning “time units” to our most recent geologic time period.
EC Ellis, The Anthropocene is not an epoch, but the human era is undoubtedly underway, Le Scienze, 08.03.2024. The original in The conversation, 05.03.2024
