The third of the new AWG articles is a long review essay with a colossal scope, by Mark Williams and 24 others: “The Anthropocene: a conspicuous stratigraphical signal of anthropogenic changes in production and consumption across the biosphere.” It’s open-access in Earth’s Future.
The title refers to the Anthropocene as a signal, not as an epoch. To think about the current catastrophe as the emergence of a new geological epoch is to credit it with a pretty huge scale: the catastrophe would have to be something unprecedented for thousands, maybe millions, of years. But this article is an invitation to think about the Anthropocene as an even more radical novelty. That’s not (necessarily) as an alternative to the Anthropocene-as-a-new-epoch way of looking at things: many of these 25 authors have been to the fore in proposing the idea of an Anthropocene epoch. But discussions of golden spikes take a back seat here. Maybe, in order to really understand the ecological presence of human modernity, you have to interpret it as something “more fundamental” still. Continue reading “New papers from the Anthropocene Working Group (part 3)”