(Opinion) When I lived in London some years ago, there was a national joke that the daily weather report on the BBC morning news was always ‘sunshine with periods of rain’ or ‘rain with periods of sunshine’.
It was assumed that the BBC put on one or the other depending on a well-kept secret algorithm.
And they were always right.
The weather is something we don’t joke about anymore. The first week of July was officially the hottest week ever recorded on Earth and it was just one of many weather-driven events of the recent past.
Geologists have speculated that we have now entered a new epoch, likely to be officially named the ‘Anthropocene’, the first new epoch since the Holocene Epoch, which began at the end of the last ice age 11,700 years ago when ice caps and glaciers began retreating and ended at the beginning of the 21st century.
Being at the birth of a new epoch – the first of our own making – is no small matter. It is truly an epoch event and would be worthy of planetary celebration had it not been brought on by our thoughtless disregard for our planet.
The term ‘Anthropocene’ combines the Greek word ‘anthropos,’ meaning human, with the suffix ‘-cene,’ which is commonly used in geology to denote a distinct time period.
Epochs form part of the Earth’s official timeline.
“Being able to pinpoint an interval of time is saying something about how we have had an incredible impact on our planet’s environment,” said Dr Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and WGA secretary.
The Anthropocene concept implies that we humans have become a geological force from mining to agriculture to industry, capable of influencing the planet’s climate, biodiversity, landforms, and other natural processes.
There is an interconnectedness between human societies and the environment, highlighting the need for greater awareness, responsibility, and sustainable practices to address these environmental challenges, if we are not too late.
How long the Anthropocene Epoch will last, and perhaps of greater import, when and, how it will end is a crucial question for which we don’t seem to have any positive answers.
In the very recent past we have experienced heat domes, the thousand-year floods, apocalyptic wildfires, the horrific orange sky, the heavy smoke cloud from Canadian forest fires to name just the most devastating events.
The prognosis for our dying planet doesn’t look encouraging despite last ditch efforts to cut global warming.
“When it’s 8 billion people all having an impact on the planet, there’s bound to be a repercussion.”
That’s something of an understatement by Colin Waters, an honorary professor at the Geography, Geology and the Environment School at the University of Leicester and chair of the Anthropocene Working Group.
The Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington pointed out that the “climate crisis is the most prominent impact of the Anthropocene, but huge losses of wildlife, the spread of invasive species, and the widespread pollution of the planet with plastics and nitrates are also key features.”
This summer’s convergence of extreme weather makes it feel like we’re living in a disaster movie. But those epic blockbusters all have an ending we can understand. We are certainly not sure what ours will be.
Perhaps like me, you find it excessively difficult to get your mind around all these extremes and to know what to do about them.
The bountiful barrage of numbers and stats easily start to blur. When everything is a disaster, it’s easy to become numb to climate-change news and just cross your fingers.
Writing in The Atlantic, John Hendrickson nailed it.
“The challenge of adapting is not unlike the challenge of fighting the human urge to succumb to nostalgia. It’s easier, and far more comfortable, to pine for the way things used to be.
It’s undoubtedly wiser to accept that we no longer live in the world we grew up in.”
“Everything is calm. Then. A slow shifting in the sky, as if the stars themselves were becoming unmoored. Then a falling shower of sparks. […]”
“That was the day the world changed: the day when the signs and wonders ceased, and the physical universe was revealed as a thin layer of icing on a vast dark cake of unknowable purpose.”
In novelist Margaret Atwood’s ‘MaddAddam’ trilogy, science fiction, dystopia, and environmentalism all come together, imagining a view of the future closer to reality than we may find comfortable or comforting.
What Atwood explores are the ethical implications of genetic engineering, the commodification of nature, and the devastating consequences of corporate greed and unchecked scientific progress?
It’s a compelling narrative about the future of humanity shaped by climate change, genetic engineering, and other Anthropocene themes.
In ‘MaddAddam’, Atwood writes: “When you’re young, you think it’s going to be solved by a grownup. When you’re grown up, you realize it’s not going to be solved at all.” –
She may well be right. “In the end, we’ll all become stories.”
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