For more than 15 years, the International Union of Geological Sciences has been discussing the issue of entering the “Anthropocene”, a new geological epoch acknowledging the irreversible impact of human activity on our planet. This winter, a crucial first vote was intended to bring the issue to a final vote at the International Geological Congress in Busan, South Korea, next August. However, the first vote rejected the proposal out of hand. The voting procedure was contested, but the all-powerful International Union and its obsolete statutes seemed to close the door to any further discussion, forcing the commission chairman to resign. What can we infer from this?
This article was first published in french, March 28 on AOC
Echoing the current debate, the exhibition “More-Than-Planet: Vision for a Life in a New Geological Epoch?” at Awareness in Art in Zurich, Switzerland, offers a series of events throughout the spring to provide a forum for artists, scientists, humanities scholars, environmental activists and citizens to discuss the implications of this vote.
For those who missed the front page of the New York Times on Wednesday, March 6, 2024, it pretty much sums up the case. Front and center is a large photo of a grinning Donald Trump, celebrating Super Tuesday surrounded by his inner circle, at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach. Just below it, a completely unrelated article headlined “Geologists Say It’s Not Time to Declare a Human-Created Epoch” demonstrates the extent to which rejecting the Anthropocene epoch serves conservative anti-environmentalist interests, even indirectly.
The New York Times article, published the day before on its website, laconically reported that “a committee of roughly two dozen scholars has, by a large majority (12 vs 4), voted down a proposal to declare the start of the Anthropocene”. How can this proposal, so crucial for future scientific and cultural orientations, be at the mercy of a decision by a restricted committee of all-powerful experts? How can the decision of this Sub-commission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) of the International Union of Geological Sciences sweep away in a single vote a proposal that has been substantiated and elaborated for over 15 years by a dedicated transdisciplinary working group?
Geologists divide the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history into a hierarchy of time intervals – eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages – called the geological time scale. We live in the Quaternary period, the most recent subdivision of the Cenozoic era, which began 65 million years ago. The Quaternary is itself divided into two epochs: the Pleistocene, which began 2.58 million years ago, and the Holocene, which began at the end of the last Pleistocene glaciation, 11,700 years ago, and has since presented stable climatic conditions that have enabled the development of humankind.
Stratigraphy is the sub-discipline of geology that studies and establishes the standards of geological strata. The Sub-commission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) is a constituent body of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), itself part of the International Union of Geological Sciences. To be validated, a geological time proposal must be successively approved by 60% of these three bodies. The SQS has three working groups, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) and two others working on the second half of the Pleistocene.
The Anthropocene Working Group was established in 2009 and comprises some 30 eminent researchers, mainly Earth scientists, but also specialists in the natural, archaeological, historical, environmental and social sciences. Its initial mission was to study the possibility of establishing the Anthropocene as the third epoch of the Quaternary, segueing from the Holocene. In its proposal submitted to a vote earlier this year, the group established that the epoch would begin with the “Great Acceleration” that began in the 1950s, a term chosen to designate the exponential and objective impact of the human factor on the equilibrium of the Earth System ever since those years, with the radioactive fallout from the thermonuclear tests carried out in the Pacific from 1952 as a geological marker anchored in the long term.
Fixing a geological time requires a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), or “golden spike”. In July 2023, a GSSP was proposed by the Anthropocene Working Group: Crawford Lake in Ontario, Canada, a small but very deep lake whose water is always still, and which records radioactive isotopes of Plutonium 239 from the fallout of thermonuclear testing, but also from numerous sediments of industrial acceleration, from pesticides to fossil fuel fallout and micro-plastics, all traces dating from after 1950. The half-life of Plutonium 239 is 24,000 years, i.e. twice as long as the current Holocene. The diagrams of the Great Acceleration are quite convincing of the sudden, brutal and multifactorial change on our planet triggered in the post-war period.
To define a new unit of geological time, an absolute time marker is needed, and the group considers that from 1952 onwards, acceleration has been exponential and quasi-synchronous across the planet, making the year a good candidate for the beginning of the epoch. The AWG’s choice also demonstrates the suddenness, severity, long duration and irreversibility of the Anthropocene. However, in parallel with the Anthropocene debates, in 2018 the ICS ratified a new age of the Holocene, the Meghalayan, dating back to a severe drought episode that lasted nearly a century around 4250 years before the year 2000, and which brought several empires and civilizations to an end. On this principle, an alternative proposal from the AWG would be to consider the post-1952 period as entering into a new stage of the Holocene, the Crawfordian, rather than a new epoch. This was supposed to have been submitted to a vote, before being apparently postponed in the conclave of the sub-committee.
But the choice of a date that is too recent seems to have upset stratigraphers and geologists. And to many, it seems, considering the Anthropocene as an “epoch” is too restrictive, as it would require determining its beginning, implying a very long timeframe and sweeping away years of Holocene research. In their view, it would be more accommodating to consider the Anthropocene as a geological “event” (like the Great Oxidation or the Cambrian Explosion), as an event does not require a precise start date1. This proposal is championed in particular by Philip Gibbard [1], the British geologist who initiated the Anthropocene group when he chaired the Quaternary sub-commission, before taking over the general secretariat of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) in 2016. The “event” proposal has the advantage of enabling an asynchronous approach to the Anthropocene, according to the group defending the position. In their plea, they argue that “Reframing the Anthropocene as an event facilitates analytical attention on multiple social and historical processes and important differences among them while also encouraging a more integrative perspective on human transformations of environmental and evolutionary processes from local to global scales (…) An event paradigm would similarly alleviate some of the concerns about the designation Anthropocene in the social sciences and humanities, where scholars have advocated other critical terms (e.g., Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Thanatocene, Technocene, Chthulucene) to replace the Anthropocene (…), cautioned against Eurocentrism (…), and have been careful to stress cultural, class, gender and racial distinctions with respect to the concept”, citing Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz [2], or Donna Haraway [3] and Kathryn Yusoff [4] , historians and authors in the humanities whose critical books have marked the past decade. Gibbard and his co-authors argue that “distinctions are generally lost or largely obscured in attempts to develop a globally synchronous approach to the Anthropocene”.
The arguments in favor of an asynchronous scenario are certainly relevant, but let’s return to the story of the vote. On March 5, SQS members opposed to the proposal to list the Anthropocene as a geological “epoch” intentionally leaked the result of their vote to the media, even before the publication of an official statement endorsed by its president, Jan Zalasiewicz, architect and ardent defender of the proposal to be voted on. Contacted by e-mail by the New York Times, Zalasiewicz declared that before getting carried away, there were “some procedural issues to consider”, but the New York Times journalist clearly did not probe more deeply into the objections of the chairman of the said commission . From this first sensationalist, even political, article, the news spread like wildfire.
“Null and void”
On March 6, the day after the voting results were published, Chairman Jan Zalasiewicz and Second Vice-Chair Martin Head decisively announced that the vote was a sham and should be considered “null and void”. Zalasiewicz claims that the “so-called vote” on the Anthropocene proposal had been initiated on February 1, 2024 by First Vice-Chair Liping Zhou and Secretary Adele Bertini, against his advice and their arguments demonstrating a premature procedure. Zalasiewicz had called in the preceding days for the vote to be frozen, pending a report from the ethics commission charged with investigating procedural malfunctions. Liping Zhou and Adele Bertini reportedly disregarded his recommendation, and even conducted the vote with little regard for protocol, Zalasiewicz pointing out that “Among the current 16 members who took part in ‘voting’, 11 have cast their votes while being ineligible to vote, since the term of office for each of them had exceeded 12 years (by a good margin, in most cases).” After this venerable number of years on the commission, they can no longer vote. To add insult to injury, the ethics report in question only arrived in the hands of the commission on the morning of March 5, after the result of the so-called vote had already been announced by the media. Zalasiewicz and Head write in the release: “The findings of that report included: that the AWG, in preparing its proposal, was unfairly treated, via conflicts of interest, application of different standards than to other working groups, and unreasonable requests and restrictions, while insufficient time was allowed for comment on the proposal, and the AWG was not asked to provide feedback on the discussions as would be normal practice. The Geoethics Commission further observed that the process as a whole between AWG/SQS/ICS/IUGS was dysfunctional; it thus recommended the urgent suspension of any voting procedures.”
All of which makes the whole affair look like a power grab by a large faction of old timers intent on shutting down the process from the outset. In the space of 24 hours, this was reflected in a series of articles in the U.S. press, from CNN to the Washington Post, from Science to Nature, in which well-known opponents of the proposal even chafed at the distractions of Zalasiewicz and the Anthropocene Working Group – including Californian Stanley Finney, Secretary General of the IUGS, who himself has been widely identified as opposed to the choice of the atomic bomb as a marker for some ten years now. In fact, he had the last word on March 20: the General Secretariat ruled that the vote had been confirmed, the annulment complaint rejected, and the vote of senior members authorized. Finley tells the scientific journal Nature that it was long-standing practice among such sub-commissions to allow members who had overextended their terms to vote anyway. “You can’t just throw them off if you want something done,” he explained. More generally, Finney acknowledged that “the IUGS has been working towards refreshing its committee membership more frequently, to increase gender, racial and geographic equity”.
The affair paints a less-than-flattering portrait of the International Union of Geological Sciences, an institution created at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1878, whose dysfunctional statutes seem to call for a necessary revision, just as they reveal the extent to which the union seems torn apart by cognitive biases and internal political conflicts. The affair in general and its resolution in English-language media also demonstrates how geological decisions are dominated by the powerful American and British secretariats, which seem to occupy the key positions in the International Union. Generally speaking, the industrial Global North dominates the Union’s governing bodies, while representatives of the Global South are nowhere to be found.
In the context of the Anthropocene debate, geology itself is accused of being a White man’s science, once again seeking to place the White man at the center of a new grand narrative. As Kathryn Yusoff writes in her 2018 essay A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, geology, extractivism, corruption, colonialism could not be more intertwined in History. Even today in the United States, 90% of geoscience graduates are White. Clearly, this lack of diversity in turn affects the quality and direction of Earth science research. In his recent book Nonhuman Subjects, Federico Luisetti, from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, criticizes the very use of the prefix anthropos by these eminent scientists from nations accountable for the environmental bill: “Racialized and subaltern people have not asked to be aggregated into a fuzzy biosocial Anthropos and held collectively accountable for climate meltdown and the pillage of ecosystems. The Anthropos is a fictional subject, an obfuscation of colonialism, class, race, and gender relations.”
Homo Anthropos Anthropos
How did we get here? Where does this questionable idea of an Anthropocene come from, which can be seen as the latest avatar of this desire for exceptionalism? In 1995, Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, then Vice-President of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), was awarded the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that widely-used chemicals were destroying the ozone layer in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Crutzen declared that his ozone research had convinced him that the balance of forces on Earth had changed dramatically. It is “utterly clear to me”, he declared, “that human activities had grown so much that they could compete and interfere with natural processes”. Five years later, in 2000, he proposed calling this geological era the Anthropocene in an IGBP newsletter article co-authored with mangrove marine biologist Eugene F. Stoermer – who had already proposed the term in the 1980s to refer to the impact and evidence of the effects of human activity on planet Earth.
In 2007, the Stratigraphic Commission of the Geological Society of London, chaired by Jan Zalasiewicz, called for a stratigraphic review of these issues, and submitted the results of a year’s investigation to the journal of the world’s largest geological association, the Geological Society of America, which published them on the cover of its February 2008 issue. The title took the form of a question: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” The authors concluded that the Anthropocene should be defined by a stratigraphic marker in sediments or ice cores, or simply by a numerical date.
A few months later, the ICS, the largest section of the International Union, asked Jan Zalasiewicz to convene a working group on the Anthropocene to study the possibility of officially defining the Anthropocene as a geological epoch, and to draw up a report on the subject. Several dates were put forward. Crutzen suggested the 1780s because of the increased concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) in ice cores, coinciding with the invention of the steam engine [5]. Others, such as paleo-climatologist William Ruddiman [6], examined the beginnings of agriculture and anthropogenic soil formation, suggesting that the resulting carbon dioxide and methane emissions had contributed to the rise in global temperatures, potentially preventing a return to the Ice Age. Some archaeologists suggested that the onset of the Anthropocene began with the first traces of human activity, which would date back over half a million years and encompass much of the Pleistocene. Others went so far as to propose that the entire Holocene should simply be renamed the Anthropocene, considering that sedentary human civilizations had first emerged during this period. A widely debated theory emphasized the intercontinental exchange of species after the European invasions of the Americas, and noted the impact of the genocides perpetrated by Europeans on CO2 levels – the death of some 50 million human beings resulted in a return of forest cover, leading to a significant drop in atmospheric CO2, with levels reaching their lowest point in 1610 [7]. Finally, in January 2015, 26 of the 38 members of the Anthropocene Working Group published an article suggesting that the Trinity nuclear test of July 16, 1945 in New Mexico, and its Plutonium 239 fallout, were the starting point of the proposed new epoch [8].
Pro-nuclear ecomodernism
Nine years on, with the Oscars having just rewarded the film Oppenheimer, we can only view the disaster of this March’s vote with circumspection. For Ian Angus, Canadian eco-socialist activist and author of Facing the Anthropocene (2016), “the ‘vote’ was a maneuver organized by a group of conservatives and ecomodernists who have long opposed any recognition of a recent qualitative change in the Earth System. The anti-Anthropocene current, which seems to have supporters in the leadership of the International Union of Geological Sciences, forced through an invalid ballot and then announced the result to the Times, in violation of the IUGS’s statutes.” Angus takes aim here at Erle Ellis, a geographer from the University of Maryland, who rejoiced in The Conversation as soon as the results were announced, and who until then had been defending the idea of a “long Anthropocene” within the Breakthrough Institute, a California organization defining itself as ecomodernist (pro-nuclear, anti-environmentalist, techno-solutionist). Founded at the same time as the AWG, the Institute quickly appropriated the concept of the Anthropocene in order to undermine its foundations, as part of a veiled challenge to Crutzen’s own postulates (and although the latter is also pro-nuclear and pro-geo-engineering, “as a last resort” [9] ), aiming for the “death of environmentalism“, and downplaying recent changes in the Earth System. By “gradualizing” the new epoch, the Institute turns the Anthropocene into a creeping phenomenon due to the gradual expansion of human influence on the landscape, an argument largely developed by Ellis [10]. For Ian Angus, this leads to a serious underestimation, undermining the basis for a necessary and urgent human response to slow the impacts of the Great Acceleration, echoing the arguments of philosophers and science historians Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald [11]. Following the confirmed choice of Lake Crawford as a stratigraphic marker in July 2023 – and perhaps a victim of personal attacks from lobbies – Erle Ellis finally resigned from the Anthropocene Working Group.
Ellis’s arguments were quickly challenged by Zalasiewicz and some of his colleagues in an article published in The Conversation on March 12, which argued that Ellis levels the temporality of human impact on a single X-axis, forgetting the Y-axis “used by scientists to show the magnitude of measurements such as temperature and mass”, and that when you look at the last 30,000 years, “the speed and magnitude of recent change jumps out at you”. All their arguments can be found in a long article written in the summer about the implications of choosing Lake Crawford. Ironically, however, the article was only published in IUGS’s Episodes magazine a few days before the results of the disputed vote [12]. Coincidence?
From the point of view of the anti-nuclear movement, should we suspect that the American atomic lobby doesn’t exactly appreciate the Anthropocene Working Group’s current proposal to choose as a fundamental marker the consequences of the expanded nuclear bomb industry in Japan? The United States tested its weapons of mass destruction on a scale of 1 in southwestern Japan in 1945, and the following year continued its nuclear exactions in the Pacific islands it had taken from that country shortly before – islands which had themselves previously been taken from their indigenous populations by the Japanese… Let’s not forget that the American occupation of Japan lasted until 1952, and that the occupiers did pretty much as they pleased in these territories during those years. The Ivy Mike bomb was dropped on November 1, 1952 and exploded on the island of Elugelab in Enewetak Atoll with a power of 10.4 megatons, almost 700 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, causing the island to vaporize completely. In Japanese popular culture, it is the thermonuclear shock that awakens Godzilla, the gigantic dinosaur from geological time immemorial. The 1954 film was censored in the United States. The number of A- and H-bomb tests continued to rise, reaching a peak in 1962. That year, the Unites States and the USSR executed 118 launches, representing a power of 170 megatons. (France would carry out its first aerial test at Mururoa in 1966.) The radioactive isotopes released during aerial tests were found in sediments all over the world, including in Lake Crawford, thousands of kilometers away. The 2021 paper by Gibbard et al. calls for a reconsideration of the Anthropocene as an event, and while it takes a closer look at the diachronic issue, it leaves out the impact of nuclear fallout.
Kong versus Godzilla
The dispute is not new. In January 2015, the Anthropocene Working Group opted for the year 1945, writing: “Humans started to develop an increasing, but generally regional and highly diachronous, influence on the Earth System thousands of years ago. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, humankind became a more pronounced geological factor, but in our present view it was from the mid‐20th century that the worldwide impact of the accelerating Industrial Revolution became both global and near‐synchronous. (….) The significance of the Anthropocene lies not so much in seeing within it the ‘first traces of our species’, but in the scale, significance and longevity of change to the Earth System. (…) Alternative possibilities for an Anthropocene GSSA are either 1950 CE (as being closer to this date) or 1954 CE to mark the first widespread appearance of artificial radioisotopes in the geological record, part of the clear, globally distributed signal from the more extensive above‐ground nuclear testing that took place mainly in the 1950s and early 1960s.” [13]
In its March 6, 2024 press release [14], the Anthropocene Working Group reaffirmed that: “The Earth System now clearly lies outside of the relatively stable interglacial conditions that characterized the Holocene Epoch beginning ~11,700 years ago: The Earth System changes that mark the Anthropocene are collectively irreversible, meaning that a return to the stable conditions of the Holocene is no longer possible; Anthropocene strata are distinct from Holocene strata. They can be characterized and traced using 100 durable sedimentary signals including anthropogenic radionuclides, microplastics, flying ash and pesticide residues, most of which show sharp increases in the mid-20th century, concurrent with the ‘Great Acceleration’ of population, industrialization and globalization; The base of the Anthropocene is clearly identified in the proposed stratotype section at Crawford Lake, Canada, by a sharp upturn in plutonium concentrations in annually laminated sediments deposited in 1952 CE, coincident with the beginning of thermonuclear bomb testing. This marker level has been traced with great precision in strata around the world including at the three proposed Standard Auxiliary Boundary Stratotypes (SABS) and other reference sections.”
Even if the Anthropocene is rejected, the concerns raised by the Great Acceleration figures remain. In 2007, we created the journal The Laboratory Planet, based on the intuition that from a “factory planet” it was necessary to move on to the analysis of a “laboratory planet” where “acceptable risk” is the adjustment variable for 1-scale experiments. We postulated that 1945 was the symbolic date of this transition, with the atomic bomb as marker and symptom. We were just beginning to hear about the “Great Acceleration” and the Anthropocene, but it was already clear to us that the construction of environmental monitoring, with its apparatus ranging from terrestrial micro-instruments to satellite observation, stemmed directly from the technologies and methodologies of Cold War nuclear deterrence.
Without the deployment of this military-industrial complex, we now understand that it would not have been possible to define either the Great Acceleration or the Anthropocene: the continuous monitoring of Earth System indicators is an indirect legacy. And so are the institutions themselves, and the technocracy that accompanies them; they offer only a narrow perspective on how to approach a new way of steering the Earth System. Those who consider only geo-engineering and nuclear power to “solve” the anthropogenic Great Acceleration are the victims of a cognitive bias. The proposal advanced by Zalasiewicz and the Anthropocene Working Group puts into perspective the disturbing destiny towards which nuclear weapons have collectively led us.
Christopher Nolan recalls that on July 16, 1945, after the first nuclear test of all time, Robert Oppenheimer declared “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita. Today, we are 90 seconds from midnight, according to the Doomsday Clock set up in 1947 by the University of Chicago’s Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on which “midnight” represents global disaster. The clock is a metaphor, not a prediction, for the threats to humanity posed by uncontrolled scientific and technological progress. Will the Anthropocene be the “geological event” of our own extinction?
Notes
[1] Gibbard PL, Bauer AM, Edgeworth M, Ruddiman WF, Gill JL, Merritts DJ, Finney SC, Edwards LE, Walker MJC, Maslin M, Ellis EC. A practical solution: the Anthropocene is a geological event, not a formal epoch. Episodes 2022;45:349-357. https://doi.org/10.18814/epiiugs/2021/021029
[2] Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene, The Earth, History and Us, Verso, 2016.
[3] Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble, Duke University Press, 2016.
[4] Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
[5] QUENET Grégory, “L’Anthropocène et le temps des historiens”, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2017/2 (72e année), p. 267-299. URL: https://www.cairn.info/revue-annales-2017-2-page-267.htm
[6] William F. Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago”, Climatic Change, 61-3, 2003, pp. 261-293; Id, “How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?”, Scientific American, 292-3, 2005, pp. 46-53
[7] Lewis, S., Maslin, M. Defining the Anthropocene. Nature 519, 171-180 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258
[8] Zalasiewicz, J. et al. Quat. Int. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045 (2015)
[9] Crutzen, P.J. Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma? Climatic Change 77, 211-220 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-006-9101-y
[10] Ellis EC et al, People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2021 Apr 27;118(17):e2023483118. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2023483118. PMID: 33875599; PMCID: PMC8092386.
[11] Hamilton, Clive, and Jacques Grinevald. “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?” Anthropocene Review (2015): 59-72.
[12] Zalasiewicz J, Head MJ, Waters CN, Turner SD, Haff PK, Summerhayes C, Williams M, Cearreta A, Wagreich M, Fairchild I, Rose NL, Saito Y, Leinfelder R, Fiałkiewicz-Kozieł B, An Z, Syvitski J, Gałuszka A, McCarthy FMG, Sul JID, Barnosky A, Cundy AB, McNeill JR, Zinke J. The Anthropocene within the Geological Time Scale: a response to fundamental questions. Episodes 2024;47:65-83. https://doi.org/10.18814/epiiugs/2023/023025
[13] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1040618214009136
[14] Available here: https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/03/07/alleged-anti-anthropocene-vote-is-null-and-void/
The exhibition “More-Than-Planet: Vision for a Life in a New Geological Epoch?” is held at Awareness in Art in Zurich, Switzerland, from March 20 to July 13, 2024. On April 11, More-Than-Planet features a lecture by Prof. Dr. Debjani Bhattacharyya, historian and Chair of Anthropocene History at the University of Zurich. The lecture is followed by a screening of the film Fly With Pacha: Into the Aerocene, in the presence of director Maximiliano Laina. The program of other related events will be published shortly on https://www.weareaia.ch/ and https://www.more-than-planet.eu/