Does the term “Anthropocene” name the present geological epoch?

More than a decade ago, Nobel laureate chemist Paul Crutzen, together with Eugene Stoermer of the University of Michigan, proposed that humans had driven the planet into a new geological epoch that could be called the Anthropocene. In 2002, Crutzen introduced the term again in a Nature commentary . How does this proposed reframing of Earth’s environmental challenges now stand, in the media and elsewhere?

In January 2011, a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A appeared, entitled ‘The Anthropocene: A new epoch of geological time?’ The first of its 13 articles cited ‘global change consistent with the suggestion that an epoch-scale boundary has been crossed within the last two centuries.’ The article reported, ‘Anthropogenic changes to the Earth’s climate, land, oceans and biosphere are now so great and so rapid that the concept of a new geological epoch defined by the action of humans, the Anthropocene, is widely and seriously debated.’

Soon that debate spread to the New York Times, Nature, and Science. The Economist ran a piece under the headline ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene .’

Now a website called Welcome to the Anthropocene lists the US National Science Foundation as a sponsor. Elsevier publishes a journal called Anthropocene . The editorial board includes Crutzen.

At Duke University, the library page Recording the Anthropocene enthuses that the term has been taken up ‘across a variety of academic and artistic disciplines and by the general public.’ At the University of Chicago, a May 2013 conference sought to examine the Anthropocene together with ‘major problems of political thought and human history, including such topics as political sovereignty, economic growth, empire, human rights, population change, and energy consumption and climate justice.’ The conference posting suggested a new importance for ‘the relationship between earth history, human history, and the history of life on the planet.’

Dictionary.com calls Anthropocene a ‘proposed term.’ The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it ‘unofficial.’ A completely unscientific Google search anecdotally suggests that journalists increasingly, but not extensively, call it a term worth using.

A 17 August New York Times op-ed considered New York City in relation to the planet’s ‘thin glaze of life-supporting chemistry.’ It stipulated, ‘We’re living in the Anthropocene, the newly named geologic epoch dominated by man. The city is a churning symbol of this new age, a metabolic node of the human superorganism.’

A Times piece from the next day, ‘Gorgeous glimpses of calamity ,’ carries the subhead ‘Man-made perils to the universe’s garden of life are evident from space.’ It begins by recalling the ‘Edenic picture’ of a ‘mesmerizingly beautiful’ planet seen from space by the earliest astronauts, but soon shifts to the ‘different, deeply unsettling picture’ seen from space more recently. The online version offers several photos and video clips. The planet ‘increasingly shows symptoms of distress,’ the article says, in many cases thanks directly to human activity. ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene,’ the article proclaims. It then calls for a planetwide sense of urgency and an international Manhattan Project ‘in which the best scientific minds would devise carbon-sequestration technologies that could clean the air of the heating elements we’ve put there—rather than simply seeking to limit the damage.’

An essay linked to a cover story at Time carried the headline ‘The trouble with beekeeping in the Anthropocene .’ The term has turned up recently in articles and commentaries at the Guardian ; at the Chronicle of Higher Education ; at Science, which reported that archaeologists are considering whether the Anthropocene really began thousands of years ago; and at the Huffington Post, in a piece by Robert Walker, president of the Population Institute .

At Businessday—which calls itself ‘the leading source of international business and economic analysis in west Africa,’ working in partnership with the Financial Times of London, Harvard Business Review, the Economist, and Reuters—a commentary framed its theme of sustainability in terms of the Anthropocene. Similarly, the word comes up in a commentary at Africa’s Mail & Guardian Online. Recent postings at Discover magazine embrace the term: one on conservation , another on the global water cycle , and a third that cites the Stanford University blog Generation Anthropocene .

It seems possible, or maybe likely, that at some point a dissenting voice will be heard—someone echoing the kind of opposition that’s heard concerning scientists’ climate consensus. Such a voice might argue that yes, of course, humans affect the planet, but that any effort to reframe environmentalist causes by adopting this term can only stem from a combination of leftist politics, researchers’ funding greed, academics’ devotion to political correctness, disrespect for scientific cautiousness, and a hubristic overestimation of puny humanity’s stature in the cosmos. If I see—or get tipped about—such an argument, I’ll report it.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.