Invite the Human(ities) to the Anthropocene

The Humanities are invited to the Anthropocene Event but not to the Anthropocene Series/Epoch: a response to Chvostek (2023)

“…Chvostek (2023) calls formalizing the Anthropocene an urgent and unifying step towards addressing climate change, yet she ignores the beginning of human‐induced climate change with CO 2 and CH 4 emissions from agriculture beginning over 5000 years ago, as well as extensive pollution of air and water, damming and channelizing most major rivers and the complete transformation of natural landscapes, etc. Her implied support for a recent beginning of the Anthropocene is comparable to that proposed by the AWG.…”

“…These chronostratigraphic units are the material records of Earth history and the passage of time, and therefore serve as the basis for the geochronological (numerical) units of the Geological Time Scale. Given the long established, rigorous stratigraphic basis on which chronostratigraphic units and their boundaries are established, the call by Chvostek (2023) to invite the Human(ities) to the Anthropocene Series/Epoch must be rejected. Conversely, the Human (ities) are indeed invited to and can contribute greatly to recognition and study of the Anthropocene Event.…”

The Anthropocene's stratigraphic reality and the humanities: a response to Finney and Gibbard (2023) and to Chvostek (2023)

“…In combining ‘cene’ (the suffix for the geological epochs within the Cenozoic Era) with ‘anthro’ (indicating the human), it summons us to think again about the relationship between the non‐human and the human. For this reason, as Ida‐Maria Chvostek (2023) notes, ‘Anthropocene’ has ‘breeched the levees of geology’ and been widely discussed beyond the natural sciences. It captures the zeitgeist , the sense of a world recently, definitively and irrevocably transformed through unprecedented global growth in human population, production, consumption, waste, migration and inequality.…”