This may well be some day known as the Anthropocene epoch or something similar, but it’s not really time to make that determination now. Geology deals with the measurable result of huge spans of time. To say that we’re currently in a particular epoch makes some assumptions about the future. They may be well-founded assumptions, but that’s not quite the same thing as layers of rock and fossils, which is what we look to geology for.
This kind of reminds me of the fuss about Pluto not being a planet. It’s a technical determination. It doesn’t mean humans aren’t having an impact on the planet, or that Pluto isn’t a significant object in the solar system.
You can call this the Anthropocene all you like, but you might have better luck trying to apply the term formally to a science that doesn’t first require a few million years to go by so we can actually look back and check and say ‘yep, that’s the Anthropocene epoch’.
Geology doesn’t actually require any amount of time to delineate different epochs, and the clear and measurable changes that have occurred clearly set our current time apart from the Holocene. Microplastics contamination, climate alteration, and atmospheric composition changes due to fossil fuels makes us extremely geologically distinct from 11,000 years ago, or even just 300 years ago.
I don’t claim to know where that line should be drawn, but lumping our current world together with the Holocene just because it wasn’t that long ago in geological terms, doesn’t make sense. Knowing nothing about our current society, looking at rock 5,000 years ago and rock from now, geologists would think some catastrophic changes had occurred.
I mean, it kind of needs time for there to be enough of a layer. You’re talking about a science that looks at the distant past and asking it to talk about at least the next several thousand years before they happen. It’s not the place to do it.
Something catastrophic could happen that makes the impact of the human-derived section of the layer we’re currently putting down miniscule by comparison. It’s unlikely, but the point is that we don’t know yet.
Geology isn’t really a good medium for activism of that particular variety.