Anthropocene

How Long?

I don’t know that there’s a consensus about when we decided this period of the earth’s history should be called the Anthropocene. Whether it’s an accurate name for the time when human activity came to have severe consequences for the planet, or simply another piece of our species’ arrogant and self-defeating sense that we are the most important species, is for another time – and maybe another species – to determine.

I took this photo

of a couple getting as close to “nature” as they knew how. They are in the parking lot of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in Sand Diego. They’ve been to Starbucks and are doing a FaceTime off the back of their truck.

What you can’t see in the photo is that right behind them are steep dunes leading down to a wide beach and the Pacific Ocean.

I read that more than 98% of species that have appeared on our planet since the earliest amoeba, have gone extinct. Most of them after a several million year tenure. Some have labeled this period the 6th Great Extinction, the most drastic loss of species since the Great Ice Age or the period following the meteor that crashed into Central America raising clouds and dust that cut off the sun.

The sobering reality is that the present extinction is being accelerated by us. Since the Industrial Revolution we have been steadily polluting the air, causing unstable climate. This unusually hospitable geologic era that has supported life unlike any other planet we have been able to find, has lasted longer than might have been expected. So maybe the time for our species, short-lived though it is, to flourish here, would be nearing its end even if we were less damaging to the environment.

The great debate among us is whether we have the willingness, or the ability, to alter our habits enough to test whether we could reverse our damage fast enough, to extend our stay.

Incredibly, our lust for power, even self-defeating power, has led us to make a political debate about whether we even need to adjust our behavior or can keep pushing forward behavior that has significantly contributed to the woes we are suffering.

Being human, I am rooting for us. I have grandchildren. I am in love with being here. I suppose the dinosaurs, who grew to unsustainable size, just as we have in different ways, felt the same way before the meteor finished their tenure.

I am even rooting for those two who chose to have their morning coffee off the back of their truck. Might they at least turn around and marvel at that beautiful Pacific from which we emerged so recently?