Age of Aquarius, Revisited

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 6o 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 21st 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.

 

The 33rd International Geological Congress is going on right now, in Oslo.  By Thursday next, it may be official.  So, with a grateful nod to the elegance of irony, let me be the first to welcome you to the Anthropocene — the epoch of man — from which mankind may be conspicuously absent.

 

4 thoughts on “Age of Aquarius, Revisited”

  1. Ah, this is brilliant! Whatever the merits (or de-merits) of my own writing, the fact that “Age of Aquarius, Revisited” and its attendant replies have inspired Poetry from my fave poet has now and forever established “Neither Here Nor There” as a worthwhile web-journal!

    Thanks for the delightful word-play amid the serious thoughts. I, too, can’t distance my mind from some of these notions… the feed/greed connection may well trigger next Sunday’s post.

    Reply
  2. Glass Turning
    A Poem on the Declaration of the Anthropocene Epoch

    The Earth burns about the Son.
    Who feeds greedier than an infant at suck?
    Grasping at the Madonna’s dugs.
    We’re anxious pups
    grown long in the teet.

    Bees have been driven mad by the buzz of our greed.

    Swallow or spit,
    the ground glows,
    molten, and brittle.

    The air swelters
    with the new age of man
    and you stand,on the deck;
    The first crew to watch
    the Captains of science turn
    this particular glass of sand..

    Now
    time like a mortgage,
    is upside down.

    Noun,
    The ghost of Victims Past
    overrunsOverruns
    The Shapes oh Thinks
    t’Come.

    Meanwhile,
    They’ve loaded Lucy’s bones
    and cart her cross the sky.
    Tourists now flock,
    with their broods,
    to her relic and
    perchance purchase
    an indulgence of carbon credits.

    Reply
  3. Geologists might disagree that theirs is a science of historical reflection and contend that geology is equally the study of the immediate and ever-changing activity of our evolving planet–as much about plate tectonics as biostratigraphy. True, geology’s primary focus is the Earth’s rocks, soil and physical structure, not her life forms. But when planetary biota have a profound influence on that structure, they necessarily become a part of the geological picture.
    With that in mind, to officially recognize that post-industrial humans have left a measurable, indelible stratum on the surface of the planet, distinct from earlier strata and deserving of its own time marker, is hardly pushing the geological envelope. I might also argue that geology has largely been a reflective science because humans are the newbies on the block in chronological terms. This is, essentially, our first opportunity to identify an epochal shift in real time.
    In fact, it’s exactly that perspicacity that inspired my post. We expect geologists to wait for a geological stratum to be buried under another and its contents to fossilize before they acknowledge its existence. That some are proposing we relabel the present as “the Anthropocene” is, to me, a frightening affirmation of the intensity of the impact humans have had on Mama Earth.
    Finally, it was a blog, not research. I didn’t check out exactly where the proponents of the Anthropocene intend to notch the world timeline. My impression was, they’re talking about NOW. Setting it at the Industrial Revolution would be, as you say, a radical departure from standard geological practice. The IR may have instigated the shift, but it’s merely a cultural-historical event. The researchers argue, and I agree, that the human effect on the planet has reached levels of stratigraphic significance that constitute a geological event.

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  4. Well! This would be a remarkable step for the IGC. All other geological epochs have been determined by the ossified evidence of their completion. Because geology has for the most part been a study of rock and the remnants of past life contained therein. To identify an epochal shift as it happens redefines the parameters of geology. All previous eras were identified long after they had ended, and geology was a science of reflection, a constantly expanding record of Mama Earth’s past. To declare
    that an epoch is emerging is also to declare a shift in the definition of the purpose, practice and role of science.
    It suggests an endgame, because what observations can follow the age of the observer? This decision is also interesting because it invokes the arbitrary millennial moment, and merges science with public relations. Why the twentieth century? Wouldn’t the beginning of industrialization be a better marker of the causes of the events being observed?

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