Neither Here Nor There

It shook me up to learn there’s widespread agreement within the scientific community that we — we the planet — have entered a new geological age.

The “new age” part is no surprise.  I’m an earth-worshipping pagan, fer chrissakes.  I’ve been bearing witness to the passing of the old epoch and rise of the new since high school biology, when I found out what an ecosystem was and how hard it was to find a healthy one that wasn’t under siege in the greater Chicago area.  In my unscientific, intuitive way, I’ve always known that every Rhode Island-size chunk of rain forest that falls to the axe, every star that’s blotted out by city lights, every green and ancient valley that’s carved up by a high-speed motorway, every species that earns a place on the endangered list, every glacial centimeter that recedes is another nail in Mother Earth’s coffin.

Our mother, I’m saying.  Not the mother of the miniscule percent of current species that will survive global warming, ocean acidification and a dearth of biodiversity.  I’m talking about our mum — the planet that birthed, nurtures, protects and sustains the human race.

Yeah, fine, ages come and go.  Time (and photosynthesis-capable cyanobacterial slime) brought an end to the atmospheric era of volcanic gasses and created a delicate nitrogen and oxygen balance we affectionately call “breathable air.”  Smilodons didn’t make it out of the last Ice Age.  Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 200 million years, then vanished (along with virtually every other living thing) under a cloud of dust in the aftermath of a meteor impact, or due to a 6^o rise in temperatures planet-wide, or whatever the reason — I get it.  And I’m good with it.  Whether they’re precipitous occurrences or multi-millennial events, cycles of death and rebirth are natural to our world.  I don’t need convincing that the Industrial Revolution and rampant over-population have triggered one of these cycles; the idea isn’t foreign to me.  It doesn’t rattle me, either.

What’s rattled me is how quickly geologists have gotten behind the idea and how swiftly it’s permeated public media and consciousness.  Except in the area of applied technology, science tends to be laggard in affirming the obvious.  How long did it take biological and developmental scientists to “discover” that infants thrive when held and wither when left alone?  How long did it take physiologists to affirm that smoking cigarettes wasn’t good for our lungs?  How many decades did the plethora of earth, air and water scientists look at the damning evidence of global warming without being persuaded by it?

It was only six years ago that Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen suggested that the world’s timeline needed an official notch at the start of the 21^st Century to denote the end of the Holocene and beginning of the Anthropocene.  In January of 2008, a group of Brit researchers presented findings in support of Crutzen’s proposal in the geological journal GSA Today, thereby laying the scholarly groundwork for the International Commission on Stratigraphy to formally adopt “the Anthropocene” as the newest segment on the geological timescale.  “The dom­i­nance of huma­ns has so phys­ic­ally changed Earth,” they wrote, “that there is in­creas­ingly less jus­tifica­t­ion for link­ing pre- and post-in­dus­tri­al­ized Earth with­in the same epoch.”

Back in the ‘60s, astrologers were ga-ga over the notion of the dawning Age of Aquarius, a new “Age of Man,” where the inherent scientific genius and humanitarian beliefs of the Aquarian nature would manifest in a spiritually-transcendant reality, a technological eden that would empower our species to realize its fondest utopian ideals.  Well, we’ve got our “Age of Man,” alright.  It’s not quite what we’d hoped for.