The concept of the Anthropocene was born at a scientific meeting in Mexico in 2000, conjured by chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen. “We aren’t in the Holocene any more, we’re in… the Anthropocene,” he said, as the speed and magnitude of planetary impact by industrialised humanity was hammered home.
A proposal by the Anthropocene Working Group to define the Anthropocene as a geological epoch was rejected this March, after a vote of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, which set up the group. The vote was disputed and flew in the face of the mass of evidence presented, yet…