The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history? By Nicola Davison
From the pragmatic
stratigraphic perspective, no marker is as distinct, or more globally
synchronous, than the radioactive fallout from the use of nuclear weapons that
began with the US army’s Trinity test in 1945. Since the early 1950s, this
memento of humankind’s darkest self-destructive impulses has settled on the
Earth’s surface like icing sugar on a sponge cake. Plotted on a graph, the
radioactive fallout leaps up like an explosion. Zalasiewicz has taken to
calling it the “bomb spike”.
he slowly realized that the sciences were not a
way to limit violence but to fuel it. He decided to hear and to feel this
terrible earth shaking tremor travelling from Hiroshima, the only date in
history that he takes as a real turning-point; the earth has been shaking ever
since…. Thanatocraty - Serres’ word for the black triad made by scientists, politicians
and industrialists. (Bruno Latour
on Michel Serres - Royal
Institute of Philosophy Lectures (1987)
It was February 2000
and the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen was sitting in a meeting room in
Cuernavaca, Mexico, stewing quietly. Five years earlier, Crutzen and two
colleagues had been awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for proving that the
ozone layer, which shields the planet from ultraviolet light, was thinning at
the poles because of rising concentrations of industrial gas. Now he was
attending a meeting of scientists who studied the planet’s oceans, land
surfaces and atmosphere. As the scientists presented their findings, most of
which described dramatic planetary changes, Crutzen shifted in his seat. “You
could see he was getting agitated. He wasn’t happy,” Will Steffen, a chemist
who organised the meeting, told me recently.
More articles on the Anthropocene
What finally tipped Crutzen over the edge was a presentation by a group of scientists that focused on the Holocene, the geological epoch that began around 11,700 years ago and continues to the present day. After Crutzen heard the word Holocene for the umpteenth time, he lost it. “He stopped everybody and said: ‘Stop saying the Holocene! We’re not in the Holocene any more,’”..
read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/30/anthropocene-epoch-have-we-entered-a-new-phase-of-planetary-history
