Those who are in the middle of an event, whether monumental or small, can never get a whole view of it, can never realize its significance as it is happening. So cautioned the great physicist Werner Heisenberg, who noted that until the curtain has long been closed on the first act, we will always lack the necessary time and distance to understand what has taken place and what effect it has had on other events.
We are to be forgiven, then, for not being able to comprehend all the implications of the fact that everyone and everything now alive today is part of a new world, geologically speaking. Humans are now the dominant force in the planet’s environment: We shape each and every ecosystem, alter the climate, and have direct bearing on whether almost every single species on the planet, plant or animal, lives or dies. We are now in an era called the Anthropocene, a term that includes the Greek word for “human being” and speaks to the reality that humans have become a geological force, the first species known in Earth history that has the power to remake the planet and perhaps even to destroy it.
All this is new, having taken place in less than the blink of an eye in geological time. (Indeed, it’s worth noting that the name “Anthropocene” has been in the dictionary for only the last dozen years.) No other species has been so ubiquitous or adaptable, none so unchained from the normal bonds of evolution and natural selection—and all in the blink of an eye. In just decades, we have extended our lifespans by a near-quantum leap. We replace parts of ourselves with metals and composites. We shrug off diseases that would have killed millions of people not long ago.
And our reach is everywhere. Even in places without humans, the human presence is palpable: soot from our chimneys carpets the South Pole, radioactive waste has been found in the deepest portions of the ocean. In May 2017, an uninhabited island in the Pitcairn group, about as remote a place as any on the planet, was found to be covered with more than 38 million pieces of plastic, the highest density of plastic debris ever recorded.
Robyn Woolston / Edge Hill University
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