Names don’t save worlds.
I’m Gerd Dani from Rimini—writer, wheelchair wheels crunching over seaside grit, salty air in my lungs, gulls heckling like tiny comedians overhead. I run Free Astroscience, and I’m simplifying some big scientific ideas here so they land clearly in your hands. The coffee on my desk smells like toasted almonds, and it keeps me honest.
What Died, And What Didn’t
In March 2024, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) voted down the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch; on paper, we’re still in the Holocene . The debate in stratigraphy quieted like a lecture hall after the last slide clicks away, yet the term lives on in art shows, novels, conferences, and kitchen-table arguments—the cultural heartbeat didn’t stop.
The roots stretch back with the crackle of old pages: George Perkins Marsh, 1864, calling humans a force of nature; then Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, 2000, proposing the Anthropocene to flag our planetary-scale footprint. A formal process kicked off in 2009; a golden spike—a clear global marker—was required, and the Anthropocene Working Group picked radioactive fallout from the first atomic tests, recorded exquisitely in the layered mud of Crawford Lake in Ontario, a place that smells of wet leaves and cold limestone .
So no, a stamp on a rock isn’t the whole story.
The future of the idea lies beyond a vote, which already sounds like wind rattling shutters open to a wider view.
Three Instincts I Don’t Trust
First instinct: ditch the label. If it’s not an epoch, bin it—like clearing your inbox with one noisy keystroke and a shrug. That’s tidy, but the term is woven into public imagination with the persistence of ink on fingers—erasing it now only smears the page .
Second instinct: blame “humanity” in one lump. I hear that dull drumbeat everywhere, as steady as a bus engine idling at the lights. It slides into misanthropy—Agent Smith’s “virus” line pops like stale popcorn in memory—flattening the sharp differences in history, power, and responsibility .
Third instinct: fix carbon and we’re done. I love clean numbers as much as the hum of a well-tuned fridge, yet focusing only on CO2 misses biodiversity collapse, soil fatigue, and land-use choices that aren’t solved by exhaust pipes alone; the hinge called the Great Acceleration—post-World War II—changed the scale and speed of extraction, pollution, and land use in ways you can hear in the relentless drone of highways .
Let me test these instincts against one ordinary morning.
A Beach, A Lake, And A Spike
At dawn on the Rimini promenade, the Adriatic smells of salt and sunscreen memory, even before the sun warms the boards. My front casters hiss over sand like pepper, and I pluck a blue plastic bead from the tideline—smooth, deceitful, the size of a lentil. A fisherman curses softly, gulls heckle loudly, and I pocket the bead like a found confession.
Now jump—north-west, far away—to Crawford Lake. In its quiet layers, each season lays down a whisper, and in the 1950s that whisper turns sharp with fallout dust, a global fingerprint recorded without sentiment, reeds brushing each other like a hush at the water’s edge . That’s the golden spike the Working Group chose—nuclear tests as the global signal; it’s eerie, metallic—like the smell of a coin pressed to your tongue .
And yes, the Great Acceleration was a real planetary gear shift after the war, with extraction, land conversion, and pollution jumping by orders of magnitude—the difference between a bicycle bell and an air raid siren . The takeaway I keep: labels guide attention; attention drives choices.
From Epoch To Event
The sharp turn came when scientists proposed we treat the Anthropocene not as an epoch but as an Anthropocene Event—a process, not a box with start–stop dates, more river than calendar, and you can feel the current tug like a cold stream round your ankles . Events don’t need a single spike; they admit many pulses—early farming, rising cities, the Columbian exchange, steam and coal, and that postwar rocket-boost—each a drumbeat, different tempos in the same song .
We argue about a “Sixth Mass Extinction” with the tension of a newsroom humming at midnight, but this isn’t the Great Dying of the Permian; that cataclysm erased the vast majority of life, a scale we’d only approach with all-out nuclear war, while today’s crisis still cuts deep—genes thinning, species lost, habitats torn—like paper ripping in slow motion . The event framing keeps our eyes on motion, not medals.
If it’s a process, the next chapters are still unwritten, like fresh asphalt waiting for tyre tracks in the cool morning.
Naming Without Narrowing
Plenty of new names jostle for space—Capitalocene, Anglocene, Technocene, Plantationocene, even Chthulucene—each shines a different torch, each with a distinct smell: oil, gunpowder, ozone, sugarcane, damp soil . They illuminate power, empire, technology, plantations, kinship with more-than-human life—but when we hunt for one root cause, we act like there’s only one scent in the air; that’s false .
Different crises carry different fingerprints. Most climate pollution stacks up after about 1750 with coal and capital revving like a factory floor, while monocultures narrowing life’s variety reach back before stock tickers, and the ozone hole came from a small family of chemicals that squeaked by unnoticed until satellites blinked awake—each a separate texture under the same palm . Even nuclear tests are their own Cold War drum, a metallic clank distinct from the diesel cough of a cargo ship .
Multiple roots mean multiple tools, and that opens more doors than it closes.
What To Do Today
Carbon cuts matter—hard stop—and they need infrastructure shifts you can hear: quieter buses, heat pumps purring, bikes whispering over tarmac—yet biodiversity needs its own kit, not just a tailwind from decarbonisation . Food systems are a lever with bite; around 80% of agricultural land goes to animals, and you can taste the arithmetic in every plate—grassy, rich, and costly in space .
Don’t let the event framing let anyone off the hook; it widens responsibility, it doesn’t dilute it—older roots and younger roots both get pulled, like weeds coming up with a gritty rip in the garden bed . Policy matters, but so do the things that set the mood: a schoolyard tree that hums with bees, a menu that smells of herbs not just meat, a city night less petrol-fumed and more crisp.
Climate timelines run in decades; restoring the wider living world runs in lifetimes, and still we start before the kettle finishes its soft rattle on the hob .
The Opposite Of My Three Instincts
Keep the label, but use it to look sideways, not just forward; it helps us spot the currents under the surface fizz, like the muffled thud of waves beneath the pier. Ditch blanket blame; responsibility has dates, addresses, and receipts, and justice has a distinct texture—rough where it’s been ignored, smooth where it’s been held. Don’t stop at CO2; the living fabric under your shoe soles needs attention too—soil that smells alive, fields that rustle with more than one crop, rivers that sound like rivers again.
One small story, one crisp stat, one clear takeaway—that’s the shape I trust: a plastic bead from a Rimini tide line, 80% of farmland serving animals, and this simple line I’ll pin to my wall.
We won’t pick one root and win; we’ll hold many threads and pull together.
What Died, Reborn
The epoch bid failed, the Anthropocene as a word kept walking, and the event framing gives it lungs that don’t tire—the breath feels cool and steady now . We’re still inside a moving thing, and movement is a gift when you want to change course.
I hear the sea outside my window, a soft hiss like a match you just blew out, and I think about Crawford Lake, about Rimini plastic, about buses humming instead of roaring. Names don’t save worlds—choices do.
And we’re not out of choices yet.
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