Although there is a strong agreement among scientists that human activity has pushed the earth out of the stable patterns of the Holocene, debate is far from settled about whether this constitutes a new geological epoch and, if so, where to plant the golden spike between the epochs – the industrial revolution, the dropping of the atom bomb, the beginning of the ‘Great Acceleration’ in the 1950s? And if, as seems increasingly likely, this period in which human activity dominates the earth’s systems is officially ratified as an epoch by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which oversees the official geologic time chart, it will almost inevitably be called the Anthropocene, since the name already has such popular traction.
Falconer, Delia. Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss (p. 126). Simon & Schuster Australia. Kindle Edition.
Mementoes set in stone, of stone
read by the Earth’s lithographers who are
wondering where to set this Age’s golden spike.
Marking slow time: eons, eras, periods, epochs,
passages once set by gods or no gods.
Lithographic signatures etched by the slow swing
of something other than the swifter acts[1]
of Man/Woman.
Other than the naming[2],
always human in its intent & origin.
Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, Phanerozoic…
mark particularly these four eons,
the last punctuated – for us, importantly –
by life’s appearances, disappearances.
The great phanerozoic extinctions crafted by volcanoes or meteorites.
Or us.
And so we come, waving economic growth
tempered with democracy and
unfettered greed condoned by government
and social mores.
The ICS puzzling not over this time unit’s existence…
but where precisely to mark it.
Could it go way back, homo sapiens
constructing the earth’s own bio-die-verse wanings
with agriculture –
the move away from hunting, gathering
– and thus we were perhaps just another animal?
Do towns mark the rocks, does the gathering of crops[3]
and penned animals,
the emergence of swine and cow flus & poxes
in us?
Do we mark it in coal dust,
Sooty, oiled grains of global industry;
great stainings of public buildings?
Or does the dusting of nuclear isotopes
in rocks not 70 or so years ago
mark the beginnings of so many endings?
Does it matter: this naming, this spiking
of time, of eons?
If we’d rather not have a hand
in it, it may well do.
If we think that naming and dating and the whole whirl of life:
social, zoic, mono and multicellular, matters,
ups & downs, ins, outs, appearances, disappearances…
then maybe the anthropogenic convention matters.
Maybe.
[1] Those with another axe to grind will speak of LGBTQIA divisions in this Anthropocene but…
[2] It is the International Commission of Stratigraphy [ICS] who set dates and names for the geological time spans.
[3] And the cutting down of great swathes of forest.
Inkstained fingers 