Some experts aren’t big fans of us using the term “Anthropocene” to describe our current epoch. We’re still in the Holocene. Maybe the Holocene has gone into a truly anthropocentric era, but they remain unconvinced that humanity has reached a tipping point in which nature truly is bent to the ways of humanity.
I would argue that we are. A mass extinction followed the switch from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. Large numbers of megafaunal species fell to the wayside. Extinctions and extirpations occurred through those thousands of years in which began the switch from a hunter-gatherer ape to an agricultural demigod of a species.
In the past few centuries, though, we’ve gone into overdrive. We’ve conquered disease after disease. The human population is growing more and more every year, and the need for constant growth to accommodate so many hungry people is taking a real toll upon the world’s ecosystems.
Species are dying out, and yes, species are being created as we continue on with our mass tinkering. But who can say that we’re creating anything as magnificent as an Amur tiger, an African bush elephant, or blue whale. We are creating a world that favors the generalist and the small and unobtrusive. We are not creating world that favors the magnificent and predatory and fell and bestial.
It sings the song of the lowly Virginia opossum and the yappy red fox. It goes hard against the thylacine and the massive megafaunal wolf.
Humanity, now becoming more and more cloistered in urban settings, knows very little of the world that isn’t forged in steel or encased in concrete. The digital information revolution has not empowered the logical and reasonable. Instead, it has empowered the lynch mob and the demagogue that hits the mob’s sensitive buttons. Whole technologically advanced societies are now divided upon which of the various digitally connected lynch mobs one belongs to.
And so we have climate change deniers forcing environmental policy, and we have animal rights fanatics trying to ban anything in which humans have a true relationship with an animal that goes beyond the cutesy caricature of a silly cartoon.
Wisdom, reason, and true civil society will be the only ways to deal with the challenges of the Anthropocene, but if you look at the wealthy nations right now, especially my own, none of these forces operates well in the body politic. We have a first class baboon in the White House, who seems to think that all he needs to do is engage in demagoguery and that will save his bacon from whatever scandals surface. And we have an opposition party that doesn’t seem to understand anything, except that half the party hates the other half, and all those with actual power in the system seem to be much more concerned with courting donor money than trying to mobilize to fight against the Anthropocene’s looming darkness.
I’m sure that many other countries in the West are in the same boat, and in each case, warring lynch mobs are so ballistic across the great digital connections that allow us to have these things called social media that it’s becoming harder and harder to walk everything back, even just a little.
We loom a little closer each day to true ecological demise. We have cast our lot into the Anthropocene’s abyss.
Will we someday rise to the occasion?
Or are we really nothing more that aggression-prone tribal apes that somehow got lucky when it came to the evolution of our brains?
We will need more than that luck to save ourselves. We will need to use those brains. We will need to set aside the aggression.
And I just don’t know if our species, as brilliant as it is, can really do these things. I have to hope that we can.
Vain hope is better than true doom and gloom melancholia. At the very least, it makes waking up in the morning a little easier and going to bed at night a little less of an effort.
