Anthropocene
Description
1.
"Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.
The Holocene — or “wholly recent” epoch — is what geologists call the 11,000 years or so since the end of the last ice age. As epochs go, the Holocene is barely out of diapers; its immediate predecessor, the Pleistocene, lasted more than two million years, while many earlier epochs, like the Eocene, went on for more than 20 million years. Still, the Holocene may be done for. People have become such a driving force on the planet that many geologists argue a new epoch — informally dubbed the Anthropocene — has begun.
In a recent paper titled “The New World of the Anthropocene,” which appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a group of geologists listed more than a half dozen human-driven processes that are likely to leave a lasting mark on the planet — lasting here understood to mean likely to leave traces that will last tens of millions of years. These include: habitat destruction and the introduction of invasive species, which are causing widespread extinctions; ocean acidification, which is changing the chemical makeup of the seas; and urbanization, which is vastly increasing rates of sedimentation and erosion.
Human activity, the group wrote, is altering the planet “on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale.” (http://www.nextnature.net/2010/06/the-anthropocene-debate-marking-humanity%e2%80%99s-impact/)
2. Pierre Charbonnier:
"The Anthropocene is, firstly, the name given to a new geological epoch in which the effects of human activity, notably CO2 emissions, define the conditions in which geophysical layers and atmospheric equilibria are formed: it is the human age, in the sense that human beings have become the dominant geological force. Numerous debates have ensued over the proper periodization of this epoch. Beyond these discussions, it is crucial to see how the Anthropocene quickly became a flashpoint for those seeking to diagnose contemporary society from an environmental standpoint, including those who reject the term for epistemological or political reasons. The common denominator of all positions in the debate, whether they hail from the natural or the social sciences, is that climate change is the decisive entry point for understanding the present. To speak of the Anthropocene is to suggest that climate change and its consequences are catalysts of an empirical and normative synthesis of our global present. Whether the topic is species conservation, resource management, international law, defense, or the future of democracy, Anthropocenic rationality presents itself as an extremely broad framework to which all inquiries are likely to lead. Of course, the wide array of social sciences do not all participate in this debate to the same extent, if only for reasons of thematic preference and the division of intellectual labor; many other analytical paradigms exist for understanding the historical present and engaging in its critique. We will argue that the theoretical propositions relating to the Anthropocene may affect social and political knowledge in its entirety, since the social milieu in its broadest sense has been redefined and reshaped by the implications of global climate change."
(https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-annales-2017-2-page-301.htm)
Typology
Jose Ramos:
"The Anthropocene is playing out in three “movements” (Bauwens and Ramos, 2020).
The first movement is simply our planetary scale impacts. This is the classic definition of the Anthropocene. Yet if this were the only dimension of the Anthropocene, we would be no different than the species that generated the first planetary crisis approximately 2.5 billion years ago, anaerobic cyanobacteria, which led to the Great Oxygenation Event (where the planet was literally poisoned by excess oxygen, a waste product of cyanobacteria).
So, the second movement of the Anthropocene signifies an awareness of ourselves as a planetary species with planetary impacts. Although there is still denial and ignorance, with fits and starts we are coming to grips with the crises we have created.
Finally, a third movement of the Anthropocene closes the loop on the first two, reflexive planetary responses, which signifies the capacity for humanity to leverage planetary awareness, toward coordinated, intelligent responses to the challenges we collectively face. This third movement of the Anthropocene is by far the most embryonic, and yet ultimately the most crucial, without which we have little hope of any real long term viability. These three aspects play out a classic action learning cycle, act—reflect—change, but at a grand scale that we have only begun to experience today."
Discussion
The Anthropocene Versus the Noosphere
Boris Shoshitaishvili:
The Anthropocene paradigm interprets the Great Acceleration as a world-historical shift in which humanity becomes a technologically empowered and primarily material planetary force, signaling the start of a new geological epoch. Anthropocene accounts are often cautionary and sometimes predict catastrophe for humanity and the living world. They are centrally concerned with the human impact on the Earth system and its physical subsystems such as global climate.
The Noosphere paradigm also treats the current period as a world-historical transformation but places less emphasis on the process's materiality and environmental disruption. Noosphere accounts present the Great Acceleration as a stage toward an integrated humanity achieving planetary significance in globally interconnected culture, technology, and awareness. In contrast to the Anthropocene, the Noosphere paradigm’s mood is primarily hopeful and occasionally becomes utopian.
In addition to divergences in content and mood, the two paradigms are geographically divergent: the Anthropocene serves as a key concept for understanding anthropogenic global change among scholars and thinkers in Western Europe and the Americas (Hudson, 2014); meanwhile, the Noosphere is central to Eastern European scholars and scientists working on comparable topics (Bernstein, 2019; Ronfeldt & Arquilla, 2020).
* The Anthropocene as Rupture and Physical Impact
The term Anthropocene belongs to the nomenclature of geochronology and chronostratigraphy, the subdisciplines responsible for establishing the official geologic time scale. Descriptively, it is a strictly temporal category. In 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) voted in favor of proposing the Anthropocene as the latest geological epoch to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), with plans to submit the proposal to ICS for official review by 2021 (Anthropocene Working Group, 2019). The rationale behind distinguishing the Great Acceleration in geological terms as the start time of the Anthropocene was the realization that since the 1950s humanity has left multiple geologic traces of its mass effect on fundamental cycles of the Earth system (Zalasiewicz et al., 2019). While the concept of a new human-caused geological division had predecessors in the 19th century such as Antonio Stoppani's suggestion of an “Anthropozoic Era” or the “Psychozoic Era” named in the work of Joseph LeConte and T. C. Chamberlin, the Anthropocene Epoch is the first such concept to move toward official proposal to the ICS (Hamilton & Grinevald, 2015).
Yet the Anthropocene has also quickly become more than a technical geochronological term. In contrast to earlier geologic epochs such as the Holocene and Pleistocene, the implications of the Anthropocene are being widely and intensely debated in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in nonacademic areas, especially environmental activism (Kress & Stine, 2017; Horn & Bergthaller, 2019).
A comparison of the etymology of the Anthropocene to the names of prior geologic epochs reveals key features that have made the term relevant far beyond geochronology. The word “Anthropocene” is a product of the same naming system used for the seven preceding epochs of the overarching Cenozoic era. All seven epochs end with -cene, echoing the Cenozoic era's Ceno- and deriving from the Greek word for “new” (kainos/καινός). But the -cene of Anthropocene signifies a different kind of “new” from the “-cene” of preceding epochs.
This difference is best recognized by comparing the naming logic shared by the two preceding epochs. The earlier of these, the Pleistocene, means the epoch that is, “mostly (pleistos/πλεĩστος) new (-cene).” Charles Lyell coined this name based on mollusk fossils in strata he was studying in Sicily: a high proportion of these mollusk species (∼70% or “most,” i.e., pleistos) were still extant (“new,” -cene) in his time (Wilmarth, 1925).
The subsequent Holocene is based on the same naming logic as the Pleistocene. Its name means “completely (holos/ὅλος) new (-cene)” because the fossils preserved in the geological formations of this epoch are of species that do not predate Homo sapiens (Gervais, 1847). Therefore, the difference in naming between the Holocene and Pleistocene is quantitative rather than qualitative: “all” of the fossils found in Holocene strata are as “new” as anatomically modern human beings, while “most” of the fossils in Pleistocene strata are as “new” as humans. For both, the -cene part refers to the novelty of nonhuman fossils. In other words, the novelty belongs to other species, while humans are simply the reference point.
Although the Anthropocene reproduces the -cene component of the prior epochs, it represents a radical change in naming logic and a kind of novelty unique in the Cenozoic Era. In the Pleistocene and Holocene, humanity served as the passive metric of novelty; in the Anthropocene, humanity becomes the collective agent of novelty. Rather than fossils of other species being new in relation to human beings, it is humanity as a whole that actively determines a new epoch for the planet. The Earth is made “new” in the Anthropocene through human activity.
This etymological transformation to an unprecedented type of novelty highlights the key quality of the Anthropocene: rupture with the past. As historian Julia Adeney Thomas has expressed, Bigger and more shocking [than “climate change”], the Anthropocene encapsulates the evidence that human pressures became so profound around the middle of the 20th century that we blew a planetary gasket (Adeney Thomas, 2019).
Taken together the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene treat the emergence of globalized humanity as an alarming disruption in geological and world history (Hamilton, 2017; Haraway, 2016). Anthropocene accounts tend to emphasize this sense of rupture and the widespread instability associated with the course of the Great Acceleration, especially human destabilization of deep time global features such as climate, atmospheric composition, and species distribution and diversity.
But the anthropos/ἄνθρωπος portion of the term points toward another equally important quality. Unlike the pleisto- or holo- of the prior epochs, which conveyed quantity/proportion (“most” or “completely”), anthropo- serves to highlight the new protagonist: the “human being” (anthropos).
It is worthwhile to consider what this word indicates about the nature of the protagonist. Anthropos was a generic term in ancient Greek. Like the English word “human,” anthropos does not register differences in gender, race, or ethnicity. This generic quality means that anthropos can symbolically consolidate the billions of diverse human beings into one abstract but active figure. The term Anthropocene accordingly implies that all human beings have participated in causing geological rupture, an immense generalization which has sparked important debates over responsibility, equity, and climate justice (Hecht, 2018; Malm & Hornborg, 2014). The Anthropocene therefore reconfigures human commonality into a destructive planetary-scale personification (a “who” rather than a “what”): the figure of “humanity” casts the Earth into this new geologic age, like the Titan Atlas throwing the world from his shoulders.
At the same time, the word anthropos tones down the ontological significance of a globalized humankind. From its earliest recorded appearances in Homer the word was frequently used in opposition to the Greek theos/θεός, the word for the divine (Liddell et al., 1996). Unlike the gods, anthropos is metaphysically limited. Thus, the term Anthropocene exhibits a particular tension: it presents humanity as a radically new figure of planetary force, as a world-changing figure without precedent, but it denies this titanic humanity a corresponding metaphysical significance. The collective protagonist of the Anthropocene is equipped with untold material power, is able to use technology to deeply transform the Earth, and is in some sense ethically liable for the changes that occur, but the name of anthropos persists as a reminder that our planetary impact has physical but not metaphysical import.
Similarly, human culture and consciousness lose some of their salience in Anthropocene accounts of the Great Acceleration. Culture and consciousness, qualities which have resisted straightforward description in terms of matter and energy, tend to be assumed as part of the backdrop of humanity in the Anthropocene. The primary focus of the Anthropocene is the human-driven rupture of planetary matter and energy cycles, rather than the emergence of globalized human culture and new modes of thought. The material aspects and effects of anthropos remain at the center of the Anthropocene.
This twin emphasis on rupture and materiality combines to give Anthropocene discourse a predominantly negative evaluative charge. If humanity now drastically disrupts the Earth system in entangled ways, and if its ability to manipulate matter and harness energy is the main defining characteristic of the anthropos, then it is unclear how this collective protagonist can avoid bringing catastrophe on itself and other species. Perhaps human culture and consciousness, or a sense of greater significance, would allow the anthropos to learn to balance or redirect the technologically amplified destabilization of the Earth system, but these are the very features of the collective protagonist that are pushed to the background in the Anthropocene framework. Consequently, the prospect of such balance remains dim and the arrival of the new geological epoch appears ruinous for the living world.
The etymology of the Anthropocene highlights how it became the paradigm home to those narratives sounding the alarm about the sudden anthropogenic environmental, energetic, and material disturbance of the Earth in the 70 years of the Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene framework continues to be critical for mobilizing attention to human-driven rupture but a way through the crisis created by humanity as anthropos is difficult to discern within it."
(https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020EF001917)
Mark Whitaker's Critique of the Anthropocene as non-scientifically supported
Mark Whitaker:
"Comparative analysis of mass extinctions, natural caused versus socially caused, led to thinking about the debate around the term ‘Anthropocene’ defined as the period of the entire Holocene in which humans, it is said, became the dominant influence on other species’ extinctions during the entire Holocene as one piece. Typically, the Anthropocene hypothesis comes with an attempt to frame humans only as causing the “megafaunal” extinctions of the Holocene. However, broad‐brush statements, whether about humans or the ‘whole Holocene,’ are both based only on deductive assumptions more than empirical proof or nuance. To elaborate, what was found from this comparative analysis of mass extinctions, natural or social, is that there is more empirically wrong with this “Anthropocene” hypothesis than there is something right about it.
Four different rationales were found why the “Anthropocene” hypothesis is doubtful and is easily falsified.
All four rationales are based on existing empirical data.
The first rationale is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ is just a cloaked term entirely built from a previous assumption (not demonstrated) that Malthusian population scale is the direct driving force of human environmental degradation. Instead, what drives human environmental degradation is left up to us as people, capable of making good or bad ecological choices, case by case in materials and organizations. So, thus “Anthropocene” is a deductive term that propagandizes Malthusian policy solutions, which is a shame because such 240‐year‐old Malthusian models are pre‐scientific models and thus keep ignoring the empirical proof of the ‘dual heritage’ that we have as people to choose our future relationships with the environment for ill or for good. Since our ‘dual heritage’ gives us both degradative and sustainable impacts by choice, any claim of a ‘one‐way degradative Anthropocene’ empirically is wrong.
The second rationale is understanding what is causing the modern global mass extinction instead. Given the ‘dual heritage’ of our humanity in the past, the uniqueness of the current global mass extinction is thus hardly about human population though would be caused by choices of organizations and materials that are causing environmental degradation. This means the only cause of the modern global mass extinction drive has to be systemic. This brings up the question why there are or would be more prominent unrepresentative and degradative choices in recent centuries compared to the past, obviously since systemic mass extinctions failed to happen in the past, so there is something unbalanced and unique about the modern world, that when were at smaller scales, we were more balanced in the past with presumably stronger representative and sustainable choices keeping it that way from our ‘dual heritage’ operating in our past more strongly compared to the present. This brings up the question, from what would that modern imbalance in our ‘dual heritage’ derive?
From comparative analysis of the rise of modern global mass extinctions compared to smaller mere regional environmental degradation, two other systemic factors were found as to blame for our current systemic mass extinction beyond the generative logic of unrepresentative states per se:
(1) the rise of a global trading system and the greater power in scale and in geographic dynamics of a global hinterland that it gave greater power to more unrepresentative and degradative decision‐making, compared to a more regional past with less scale and less‐wide geographic dynamics that still had anti‐systemic opposition yet it now remained merely regional and thus divided and conquered by such global operations, and
(2) now its current result in a private global technocracy.
These are two chosen factors involved in this modern systemic mass extinction, which respectively undermine or increasingly directly try to suppress our dual heritage. In comparison, to be clear, this means that our dual heritage was more historically prominent before in its stronger regional ecological protection when we lived within only a process of systemic regional environmental degradation—where unrepresentative and degradative forces still only had regional boundaries that made them easier to challenge on their own terms of scale or geographical dynamics by other regionally representative and sustainable forces generally at the same scale and geographical dynamics. However, a growing global trading system and the first global‐oriented unrepresentative and degradative states involved in it, and now a global technocracy involved in it, have been undermining and now suppressing our more representative and sustainable feedback from our dual heritage. It is argued that this growth of scale and geographical dynamics of a global trading system created growing asymmetric power relation in the ‘dual heritage,’ and it is estimated that this slow expansion of a global trading system and various globallypowerful states’ global degradative impacts versus a still regional ecological renewal and ethical community protection has been occurring for about 1,500 years, since the 500s/600 CE, as outlined below.
So this second rationale why the “Anthropocene” is a bad term is that it is clear that human social impact changes over this period of the Holocene instead of ever remains a social constant like the term “Anthropocene” assumes. This is expanded into an outline of four changing phases of human‐environmental impact across the Holocene, in a moment.
Thus, to stop this modern systemic mass extinction requires us to work against the global technocracy causing this and to change the choices of materials and organizations in a global trading system to less degradative ones, as well as to facilitate a means in which different regional ecological and ethical communities can nest and magnify their power with each other in confederation to reach that global scale as well, to check and balance against the unrepresentative and degradative trends already at that global level that are unchecked. That is the Glomos plan. Therefore, in summary, a global technocracy is causing this mass extinction by blocking our greater attempts to slow it down or to end it entirely, by blocking our available better choices of materials and organizations that we have available already. This is discussed in Chapter 2. The result of this is to explain logically how a global technocracy, by blocking the sustainable and representative side of our dual heritage, is the cause of the current mass extinction, as well as why the Glomos plan is required to bring back that dual heritage that has been slowly undermined by a global trading regime over the past 1,500 years and/or been repressed by an increasingly more powerful systemic degradative force that is now the global technocracy. This is explained below as well.
The third rationale why Anthropocene is a bad term is that the entire Holocene is hardly one common stable climatic period either, though has many different climatic periods within it, bringing up the fact of ongoing naturally changing factors in mass extinction instead of only social ones.
The fourth rationale is a larger point of the same: that the Holocene itself is just part of an “odd” nearly 2 million year period within the Quaternary into the Holocene, odd because there have been in the past 2 million years only these regularly climatic periods of whiplashing and switching that are like ongoing syncopated ‘hot and cold’ periods. This has even occurred within Holocene itself. So, the point here is that one of many ongoing natural causes of the Holocene “megafaunal mass extinctions” can be from that ongoing syncopated short natural rhythm of climate that has continued throughout the Quaternary into the Holocene for at least 2 million years. (As said, the details of this appear later in Appendix 6). It is odd because that kind of rapid climate whiplashing in the past 2 million years has never happened before in the past 500 million years of global climate or even longer, so we should expect fresh odd natural patterns of mass extinctions in the Holocene, when they occur, to look differently than the geological past, and they do. So the term “Anthropocene” is really bad because it ignores the Holocene itself is hardly one stable unit of climate and natural influences. If the past 2 million years have been climactically variable, and if the Holocene itself is climactically variable, that voids the argument that all mass extinction in the Holocene have to be socially caused only, because there are other concomitant variations here at play, and so, no one can block out natural climate variability itself as another source of Holocene variation in causes of mass extinctions, if they are honest. Such arguments of the “Anthropocene” as well ignore that there is nothing special about the Holocene at all though it should only be analyzed as part of an ongoing odd 2‐million‐year period of strange climatic influence from odd syncopated natural climatic changes back and forth, between rapid hot and cold, geologically speaking, that are capable alone of causing unique kinds of mass extinctions focused only upon megafaunal extinctions. Plus, as some suggest now, there could have been a major unpredictable asteroid impact smashing into the ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere in the Younger Dryas (12,900 ‐ 11,700 BP; 10,874 BCE – 9,674 BCE] creating a global winter, or even sudden volcanism with its similar global cooling effects as now argued, or even both simultaneously should be entertained as other natural factors influencing megafaunal mass extinctions before in the late Pleistocene and into the Holocene.
Regardless of cause(s), the Younger Dryas was a period when the Earth entered a strange, sudden, relatively short, and even deeper cold shock for only 1,200 years that was far colder than the interstitial ice age within which it was occurring, and then, as the Earth went quite immediately thrown into where we are now in the warm interglacial of the Holocene (11,700 BP to present). Both of these factors would have contributed to wrecking ice sheets, and both would have likely set up the warming Holocene interstitial. Therefore, both combined would be an equal cause of megafaunal mass extinctions at generally at the same time more abruptly instead of only from longer‐term climate whiplashing itself. There is more detail below on this. To address this fourth rationale, our modern and recent Quaternary‐Holocene‐to‐present periods of ‘exclusively megafaunal’ extinctions are a very different pattern of extinction compared to the past, and this pattern of intermittent syncopated short ice ages and interstitial warm periods is itself a very different climatic regime compared to the past. This is compared to the past ‘full clade mass extinctions’ in which far more than megafaunal groups died and in which ice or warm periods instead lasted sometimes hundreds of millions of years at a time without interstitial periods.
Therefore, in trying to model the cause of these megafaunal extinctions in the Holocene, shallow people jump to an inference of simple causality that only one factor of human population scale is inferred to cause all examples of megafaunal extinctions. As noted in Appendix 6, no, much of the megafaunal extinctions occur even in places with the most minimal human populations, and they happen generally at the same scales in all regions simultaneously. The data of slightly higher percentages of megafaunal extinction in North America is not proof that people were involved, though could equally be proof of asteroid impact in this general zone of North American yielding the highest extinctions there, with equally high and yet slightly lesser scales of megafaunal extinctions splayed out in lesser percentages elsewhere as equally predictable. This is what is seen. Therefore, no, there are other causal factors of modern megafaunal extinctions that get politically ignored in the biased and ignorant rush to frame all people only as causing these modern megafaunal extinctions.
The related point here regularly ignored in its implications is how odd it is to have Earth’s climate in the past few millions of years to be a mix of syncopated hot and cold periods of very short duration, geologically speaking, sometimes barely over 100,000 years. This is bound to create very different natural climatic effects on both evolution as well as extinction. The species that innately would be most at risk of such a gyrating ‘striped’ climate regime for the past few millions of years would be megafauna, by simply natural causes alone, due to them being the apex predators that are ones most reliant upon a wide stable ecological food base. Therefore, when that stable ecological food base is lost in a rapidly whiplashing climate, expect a pattern of repeated mostly megafaunal extinctions to occur repeatedly in a gyrating short‐term climate of hot and cold periods, by natural factors only. Add an asteroid impact into this as a secondary variable, and the data makes sense. So on the one hand, to jump ahead, yes, data was found that the scale of the modern global systemic mass extinctions do reach already the scales of past natural mass extinctions, showing its seriousness as a problem to address. However, equally, no, it is very wrong and shallow to simply blame it on “the Anthropocene” if human impact is only one‐sided and even throughout the whole Holocene. This is because the rise of a global trading system and then a global technocracy have only been happening for about 1,500 years, instead of the whole Holocene, and because the Holocene itself (and as far back as the Quaternary) has had natural syncopated rapid climate changes that can lead to unique kinds of natural megafaunal extinctions with or without human impact (or asteroid impact) involved in them.
So, the term Anthropocene is not based on empirical data at all “about the Holocene” itself or about people as a common factor, though it is a term popularized more by corporate media framing from the late 1990s, for brainwashing people into believing an abstract and overly simplified story “about the [falsely unified] Holocene” instead of a story “from the data of the changing Holocene”, and “about all people treated as a timeless negative effect on the environment” falsely, instead of a more historical question about the various different social phases of human‐environmental impact in the Holocene that are as different as the changing Holocene climate. Thus, employing the term “Anthropocene” is only a mental projection and a badly oversimplified interpretive banner that people cling to, in essence, despite that projection unable to make good policy for sustainability because the four rationales above are far more important in understanding the recent Holocene, ourselves, and our choices of impact. In terms of the Glomos plan, the result of this was instead to frame the Holocene as having four different additive phases of different and overlapping systemic dynamics of human‐environmental interactions. These are described below and throughout the book.
Now let us summarize these overlapping phases of human‐environmental impact from the later Quaternary into the Holocene. These overlapping phases of different generative logics become themes throughout the book because the Glomos plan is formulated to solve problems created by the specific generative logics of the current period of a global trading system and a global technocracy causing modern global systemic mass extinction. Four consecutive, separate, and yet increasingly overlapping and additive system dynamics of human‐environmental impact seem a sound basis for this book’s discussion of the origins of this modern global systemic mass extinction. Remember, these are hardly thought of as separate replaceable or consecutive ‘stages’ in history, though as increasingly additive overlapping ‘phases’ and as increasing multiple factors of cause.
These four stages of human‐environmental impact cover the more recent edge of the full Quaternary period (2.588 MYA to present), particularly meaning the Late Pleistocene (c. 129,000 BP ‐ 11,700 BP) to the present Holocene (11,700 BP to present). This Late Pleistocene is measured roughly as starting at the warmer Last Interglacial period (130,000 BP – 115,000 BP) that soon went back into the Last Glacial period (115,000 BP ‐ 11,700 BP), and then near its end, it went into a period of ice sheet collapse known as the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial (Late Glacial Interstadial (LGI); 14,690 BP ‐ 12,890 BP), with a sudden warming Northern Hemisphere and a sudden cooling Southern Hemisphere within this final period of the Last Glacial Period. Then, the Last Glacial period (115,000 BP ‐ 11,700 BP) concluded with a sudden and relatively short and even colder shock called the Younger Dryas (12,900 ‐ 11,700 BP; 10,874 BCE – 9,674 BCE), which then went into where we are now: the warm interglacial of the Holocene (11,700 BP to present). In other words, we are still in the Quaternary ice age, because there is ice at the poles. However, we live in the Holocene, an interglacial warm period like many others in the past 2 million years of the Quaternary, shuffled between short hot and cold periods. So, we live in one of the many short warm periods over the past 2 million years. This makes the Quaternary an odd period overall in geological history since there has been a relatively odd syncopated instance of relatively cold or warm periods happing relatively quickly in geological time throughout most of the past 2 million years. This is an odd climactic whiplashing regime when compared to past long glacial periods or long warm periods that lasted tens to hundreds of millions of years at a time. So, you should expect odd patterns of natural extinction to happen throughout the climate whiplashing of the Late Pleistocene as well, and they are. During this topsy‐turvy period of climate whiplash across the Late Pleistocene (c. 129,000 BP ‐ 11,700 BP), nearly 65% of all worldwide “megafaunal” species (defined as having at least 45 kg of weight (around 100 pounds) became extinct. It was higher in North America (72%), South America (83%), and Australia (88%). Plus 100% of mammals over 1,000 kg (2,200 pounds) went extinct in Australia and the Americas, and approximately 80% globally. As said earlier, the additional variable of an asteroid hit in the Younger Dryas might have accelerated these megafaunal extinctions with a ‘global winter’ phenomena as its aftermath, or the recent discovery of the signature of a volcanic surge during this period could have the same effect, with massive volcanic aerosol injections into the atmosphere. However, keep in mind it could be both variables instead of has to be only one. "
(source: Glomos manuscript)
More Information
Articles
* Article: A Genealogy of the Anthropocene. The End of Risk and Limits. By Pierre Charbonnier. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales Volume 72, Issue 2, 2017, pages 301 to 328 The English edition of this journal is available at [1]
URL = https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-annales-2017-2-page-301.htm
"Our goal here will be to explain the emergence of this intellectual paradigm and assess the conditions for such a theoretical endeavor to succeed."
- Steffen, W. et al. 2011. The Anthropocene: From global change to planetary stewardship. AMBIO 40: 739-761. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-011-0185-x
Bibliography
"Authors like Hamilton, Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway, have made great efforts to conceptualise the radically altered human-nature relationship – to a point even at which we can no longer speak of a human-nature dichotomy at all. Most of these efforts are aimed at ‘worlding’ a new world; drawing up a new narrative framework in which the principal actor of the Anthropocene – the human – is no longer understood as the ruler of the world (and nature no longer as a passive backdrop). The irony in this is that it is our own power that ultimately forced us to awkwardly acknowledge a limitation of power in favour of the natural forces." [2]
Compiled by jasonmk1 [3]
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