Inventing the Present: Historical Roots of the Anthropocene

Abstract

In 1833, Charles Lyell proposed that the current post-glacial geological epoch be termed Recent. In the late 1860s, Paul Gervais suggested Holocene as a more appropriate name for the same epoch. In 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer jointly proposed that a new epoch beginning in the late eighteenth century should be named Anthropocene to connote that the human-determined geological signature is now, and for the foreseeable future will be, the predominant physical force shaping the Earth. Such a conclusion by geoscientists will not, and perhaps should not, pass unnoticed by politicians, environmentalists and other academic disciplines. Based upon a review of the early debates over the role of a deity in geological causation, the power of classification and nomenclature, and distinctions between organic and inorganic in geological processes, this paper traces the historical transition from Recent to Holocene to Anthropocene and concludes that the conceptual space for creating the modern Anthropocene was carved during the nineteenth-century foundation of geology.