The Anthropocene as Earth’s natural to unnatural history transition

The evolution of life on Earth has been bracketed by two momentous events. The first was enabling: the rise in atmospheric oxygen from photosynthetic cyanobacteria during the early Proterozoic. The second was disrupting: the alteration of all subsystems comprising the Earth System by Homo sapiens beginning in the Late Pleistocene and intensifying through the Holocene. Using this lens, the Anthropocene that has morphed this century from a term to a concept to a keyword to a zeitgeist is a profound, albeit in many ways inadvertent, outcome of the transformed pure-to-applied geology profession. It instructively highlights the natural to unnatural transition of Earth history with the human-modified upper part of the lithosphere as the archaeosphere which straddles the Geological and Archaeological Timescales. In Earth System terms, it informs a new ethos to challenge the estrangement from nature by most non-indigenous peoples and the blinkered approach to climate change deliberations by most policymakers.

In contrast to the Anthropocene Event approach by a diverse group who considered all of humanity’s Earth-surface-altering impacts, the stratigraphically focused Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) proposed a post-Holocene epoch/series with a 1952 GSSP centered on the mid-20^th-century Great Acceleration and peak of atomic bomb testing fallout. Starting its advocacy in 2015 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was created at the urging of Albert Einstein and Manhattan Project researchers to reflect on the catastrophic weaponry used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a questionable anomaly in Geological Timescale practice. Rejected in 2024 by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, International Commission on Stratigraphy and International Union of Geological Sciences, the AWG’s proposal also ignored several relevant breakthroughs in the human psyche. These included the Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on Planetary Health in 2015 and the UN’s Transforming our World agenda from 2015-2030.

Today, the sciences and humanities would be wise to integrate the prescient realizations of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) that nature would exist in the absence of humanity but that humanity cannot exist without nature and of James Lovelock (1919-2022) that there is no prescription for living with Gaia, only consequences. Arguably, today’s biggest dividend of Anthropocene thinking is that it provides a holistic foundation for urgent Earth System governance.