ANTHROPOCENE: A PARADIGM, NOT STRATGRAPHY

Paraphrasing 19^th century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, “Life advances, but can only be understood backwards.^” So too, to understand the continuing impact humans are having on the Earth, we have to frame the issue historically in deep time. The social-cultural concept “Anthropocene” accomplishes that. But how to decide when that impact began? The end of the last glacial age, about 11.7 thousand years ago­­­, marks the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, and the “Anthropocene” may well be understood as an equivalent term. Because by that time, humans had been established throughout the earth as hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years, but their impact on the global environment was minimal. However, not all experts agree, asserting that there has been an acceleration of human impact since 1950, and a new, more suitable stratigraphic marker (“Golden Spike) should be radioactive fallout from atomic bomb-testing around that time. While “Anthropocene” may be viewed as a strictly geologic term, it is better construed as a social-cultural concept, categorized as a “meme,” a broader, more universal definition that explicitly acknowledges the widely accelerating impact that our species has had, and will continue to have on our planet. Further, the meme Anthropocene must evolve into a universal global paradigm. We geologists in particular know paradigms can be powerful, even revolutionary. The paradigm shift, “Plate Tectonics,” from Stable Continents to Mobile Continents, has thoroughly superseded the previous one. The changeover culminating in the mid-1960s was dramatic, influencing virtually every Earth Science discipline. Such a paradigm shift has been described, “as a picking up the other end of the stick, handling the same data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations...giving them a different framework.” A common adage is, “If you want to change one’s beliefs, you have to transform the believer”—that is, not as humans versus the environment, but instead as humans in harmony with their environment. And the first step leading to harmony is sustainability: living within one’s means. Easy to say, but how to do that? This is the premier challenge, and certa­­­­­­­­­­­­­inly at the moment not yet happening at the global level.