Life in the Anthropocene

From the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, to the Wright brothers memorial in North Carolina and the Coca-Cola museum in Georgia, museums fill my childhood memories. Even now, I’m always up for spending a Saturday at the local Cincinnati Museum Center.

During a recent visit to the museum’s ice age exhibit, I spotted a sign next to a taxidermied polar bear. “We’re living in the Anthropocene,” the sign proclaimed. “From anthro (meaning human) and cene (meaning recent). Its name reflects that humans have made a lasting mark on the planet.”

Increasingly, the media, science magazines, and museum signs breezily refer to the Anthropocene (pronounced AN-thruh-puh-seen). The term even showed up in the title of a 2018 documentary and an essay collection by popular writer John Green. A recent attempt to add the Anthropocene to the official geological time scale brought the term to the forefront of the news. For better or worse, the term is embedding itself into our cultural lexicon.

It might seem like inconsequential dithering by high-minded scientists who deal in millions of years with little relevance as you wrangle your kids’ soccer schedules and shop for overpriced milk. Who has time to wonder if we’re living in a new geologic epoch? Why does it matter? As esoteric as it seems, the Anthropocene has implications for understanding our place in the biblical timeline.

First, Some Geology

Secular geologists organize earth’s history into five tiers—eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages—each representing decreasing lengths of time. They devise this time scale based on the rock layers (strata) and fossils within those layers. Each division begins and ends with a boundary between the layers. Our current epoch is the Holocene, which supposedly started 11,700 years ago after the last ice age. (In case you’re wondering, Holocene comes from the French Holo “whole” and cene “new”: a wholly new epoch which started when the present warmer climate cycle became established.)

Atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen first used the term Anthropocene in 2000. Actually, he blurted it out in frustration at a scientific meeting where he claimed humans were affecting the natural environment so significantly that we had left the Holocene and moved into a new epoch entirely. The term stuck.

In 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), a small collection of geoscientists and other experts, formed to search for evidence that earth and its climate differ from the conditions of the past few thousand years. In other words, they were searching for evidence that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change and environmental pollution have chiseled their effects into the very rock strata and that the mark was significant enough to warrant labeling a new epoch.

A Place to Nail the Spike

First, the AWG had to decide when this new epoch began. Was it during the Industrial Revolution when factories began belching exhaust from their coal-fired machinery, or was it perhaps in 1945 when humans detonated the first atomic bomb? They decided on roughly 1950, at the start of what they call the Great Acceleration, a period when human population and activity increasingly began to affect the planet. From plastic production and air pollution to a rise of CO² in the atmosphere and even the mass production of broiler chickens, these trends supposedly display the great negative effect humans have had on the planet.

This small group of scientists scoured the globe, scoping out a spot that would mark the geologic boundary of this supposed new era—a place that showcases “the dangerous transformation humans have wrought,” as the Washington Post put it.1

This small group of scientists scoured the globe, scoping out a spot that would mark the geologic boundary of this supposed new era.

Would the location be in the ice of Antarctica, a coral reef in the Gulf of Mexico, a mountain bog in Poland, a bay in Japan, a volcanic crater in China? In July 2023, the AWG claimed that the most overwhelming evidence for humanity’s impact appeared in Ontario’s Crawford Lake, where a thousand-year record lies in layered sediment displaying plutonium isotopes, fossil fuel ash, microplastics, and nitrogen from fertilizer.

Crawford Lake in Ontario was the proposed boundary site for the Anthropocene. Photo by Whpq, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

At last, the AWG had found a place to nail their golden spike, marking the start of a new epoch. Welcome to the Anthropocene!

Well, turns out, not just anyone can tell the geologic time. For that, you have to get clearance from the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), which is not a galactical governing body in Star Trek. It’s a subcommittee of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), an entity within the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), an organization that officially recognizes and defines geological time units.

With evidence in hand, the AWG submitted their report in October 2023. But in March 2024, the SQS voted down their proposal, arguing that the AWG had not gathered sufficient evidence to justify marking the Anthropocene as a new epoch. They also rejected an appeal from the AWG.

Looks like we’re staying in the Holocene for a while longer.

Epoch in a Jiffy

Even many secular geologists are hard-pressed to understand the desire to so narrowly or urgently define this epoch. After all, epochs are not measured in decades but in millennia. And it has taken decades for scientists to designate past epochs.

Also, the CWG didn’t exactly follow protocol. All past epochs have been defined in retrospect, with geologists identifying strata before looking for a spike to mark the division in those strata. But the CWG scientists were looking for the undefined layer itself to support what seemed like their foregone conclusion.

A golden spike in Australia defines the boundary between the Cryogenian and Ediacaran periods. Photo by James St. John, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Furthermore, while other new geologic timescales are only made public after securing the SQS stamp of approval, the endeavor to legitimize the Anthropocene was widely discussed in science journals and popular media for years leading up to the AWG submitting their report. But that was by design. “Establishing [the Anthropocene] in the media before scientists are able to vote on [the proposal] might make it more difficult to reject,” suggested Erle Ellis, a former AWG member, before the final SQS ruling.2 So much for that plan.

Why the push for the Anthropocene? Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor serving on the AWG, said that the definition of Anthropocene “is a way for scientists to declare—as loudly as they can while still behaving as scientists—that the shifts going on around us are no small issue.”3

In other words, having the catchy term Anthropocene is a way to get people’s attention about anthropogenic climate change and perhaps a way of forcing the hand of policymakers to pass environmental laws.

In many ways, the plan to legitimize the Anthropocene was successful. The term continues to be used by scientists, social scientists, policy makers, media, and museums to call attention to the ways humans are affecting the environment.

“We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale,” said Francine McCarthy, a scientist at Brock University in Canada. “And behaving accordingly is our only path forward.”4

The Anthropocene and Me

A New York Times article said, “The geologic time scale divides Earth’s 4.6-billion-year story into grandly named chapters. Like nesting dolls, the chapters contain subchapters, which themselves contain sub-sub-chapters.”5

Biblical creationists also have chapters that divvy up earth’s history. But while evolutionary chapters are millions and billions of years long, we have just a few short chapters, Genesis 1–11, to interpret the age and geologic layers of the earth.

The Creator laid the earth’s foundational rocks on day three of creation week just about 6,000 years ago. Then, about 1,650 years after Adam’s sin in Eden, earth’s largest geologic upheaval occurred when God broke open the fountains of the deep, rupturing earth’s crust into tectonic plates. Both the flood and its catastrophic aftermath laid down sediment layers, formed fossils, and changed the earth and its climate forever.

Similar to the assumptions involved in proposing the Anthropocene, all the geologic boundaries have been designated according to secular scientists’ foregone conclusions that the earth formed over billions of years with millions of years between the formation of most layers. Secular geologists mark many of the geological boundaries by catastrophes, such as the meteorite impact at Chicxulub, which spread debris globally. But in a biblical perspective, those catastrophes are just rapid stages within the one humongous catastrophe of the global flood and its aftermath.

Old News

The attempt to legitimize the Anthropocene exemplifies the great trust that secular scientists put in humanity to determine our own fate.

Certainly we have much to do before we can claim to have faithfully obeyed God’s command to steward the earth. In our disobedience, humans will suffer consequences. But we must remember we are living in a fallen world where all will not be perfect until Christ returns to renew creation. In the meantime, we don’t possess the power to stop seasons and control the weather. Though the climate might fluctuate as the earth continues settling from the flood, God has promised that seasons will continue “while the earth remains” (Genesis 8:22).

The term Anthropocene is meant to highlight how humans have scarred the earth—and we have. In fact, you might say that earth’s history has been one long Anthropocene. Our sin brought a curse and destruction on the creation and will bring its final destruction.

But the Anthropocene also reminds us that the God who made the world for our home loved us enough to send his son to die for the very sin that marred his creation and separated us from him. Even in this fallen world, we can experience a restored relationship with our Creator and delight in the lingering beauty of our earthly home.

On this point we must agree with secular scientists: We are living in the Anthropocene. And, for now, that’s not such a bad place to be.