Today is Earth Day, which I remember celebrating in my high school science class way back in 1970, though, as I recall, it mostly involved picking up trash around our school grounds (including cigarette butts from the “student smoking” area, which back then was an officially sanctioned part of school life.)
In any event, I’m finishing up a semester of teaching our critical information studies doctoral course and one of the terms that we’ve come across repeatedly in various scholarly and popular articles we’re reading is “Anthropocene“, whether it’s in reference to Walter Benjamin (see Jason Grove’s “Dark Geology”, for instance) or to Bruno Latour (see Flower & Hamington’s “Care Ethics, Bruno Latour, and the Anthropocene“) or even to Judith Butler (see J.T. Barnett’s “Thinking Ecologically with Judith Butler“.)
This is a excellent example of “keywording” at work: that is, how a particular word may be introduced in a particular context as being a useful addition to the scientific vocabulary, creates some controversy within the field as to what phenomena it may actually refer, and is taken up outside the field on a much broader basis. Both originators of the term “Anthropocene”, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen and freshwater biologist Eugene Stoermer, have passed away, but both as scientists were deeply concerned about the future of the planet as it is being affected by man, given that they were seeing increasing evidence of the long-term negative impact of certain human technologies.
Their seminal, jointly-authored piece in the May 2000 Global Change Newsletter can be found here: http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf. During the past quarter century, this single opinion piece (and its title) has become far better known than their many scientific publications on such topics as diatoms (for Stoermer) and ozone depletion (for Crutzen).
I found that the following articles do a nice job of explaining how the “Anthropocene” is diffusing into popular usage even while so many geologists remain disdainful of it, finding the evidence for a so-called “golden spike” to mark the period of transition from one epoch to another is less than compelling.
Eugene Luciano published (with his collaborator Elena Zanoni) a discussion of the work of Father Antonio Stoppani, who was vital to the establishment of the first Italian geological survey and to the study of earth science in Europe during the 19th century. Stoppani is also credited with coining the term “Anthropozoic”, which some have pointed to as a predecessor to the modern concept of “Anthropocene”, though Luciano & Zanoni note that, unsurprisingly, as he was a Catholic priest, his version was far more religiously-oriented than today’s conceptualization. (This is reminiscent of Martin Rudwick’s magisterial explorations of early geohistory and its heroes, several of whom had similarly strong convictions.)
Luciano also provides an extensive explanation of of today’s so-called “Anthropocene Hypothesis” in his “Is ‘Anthropocene’ a Suitable Chronostratigraphic Term?” in which he focuses on professional critiques in the context of (chrono)stratigraphic classification and nomenclature, reviewing these critiques in light of the guidelines of the International Stratigraphic Guide, which serves as the international framework of reference for stratigraphic classification and nomenclature, finally concluding that the term seems to be suitable in that context, though allowing for the validity of some criticism. (Since his article was published, however, a committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences, which governs the naming of stratigraphic epochs, has rejected the “Anthropocene” proposal, so we currently remain in the Holocene epoch, as we have been for the past 11,700 years.)
Luciano is further acknowledged for providing advice and support for Angela Zottola and Claudio de Majo’s “The Anthropocene: Genesis of a Term and Popularization in the Press“, which investigates the use of the term “Anthropocene” in the English language press in four different countries – Australia, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. The researchers found that the use of the term was both superficial and inconsistent, focusing mostly on ecological effects associated with it and different theories endeavoring to explain it. They note, “However, the four countries analyzed unexpectedly provide four different representations of the Anthropocene. These are not connected to one another, but equally not primarily concerned with discussing the main environmental shortcomings of the Anthropocene. The scientific inconsistency of popular discourses associated with the Anthropocene should not solely be regarded as the attempt to promote eye-catching discussions aimed at increasing readership. Rather, a similar shortfall in content needs to be associated with the ideological context encompassing this discussion. While an in-depth analysis of the politically related concepts associated with this term would deserve a separate research effort, some considerations can also be raised at this stage. In fact, it is rather evident that the lack of a consistent discussion of the Anthropocene does not solely stem from a poor scientific understanding of its ecological drives, but also by the lack of political awareness and a general unpreparedness to face the socio-environmental implications” (pp. 470-471).
Sadly, all this reminds me of a cartoon showing a group of dinosaurs boasting about their respective running speeds immediately prior to the Chicxulub impact. (We now call the aftermath of that the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which also marked the start of our current Cenozoic era, which began about 66 million years ago.) But at least there were no arguing about an appropriate name for the catastrophe back then. Happy Earth Day!
Keywords In and Out of Context 