There have been living things on the Earth for thousands of millions of years. It is only during the last million years that one animal has become dominant. In that time, human beings have brought huge changes to the planet, so that today there are very few places untouched by human activity. In fact, many scientists would say that our actions have had such an enormous effect that the climate of the globe has been altered, with serious consequences for every living thing that shares our Earth.
Human activity has fundamentally changed our planet. We live on every continent and have directly affected at least 83% of the planet’s viable land surface. Our influence has impacted everything from the makeup of ecosystems to the geochemistry of Earth, from the atmosphere to the ocean. Many scientists define this time in the planet’s history by the scale of human influence, and label it as a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene.
Geological epochs are one of the definable units that geologists and paleontologists use to break down the broad concept of deep time. These units of time are defined by stratigraphic layers that are chemically or biologically distinct. Epochs are defined on a global level, and their beginning and end are dated to specific points in time. Hominines first appear by around 6 million years ago, in the Miocene epoch, which ended about 5.3 million years ago. Our evolutionary path takes us through the Pliocene, the Pleistocene, and finally into the Holocene, starting about 12,000 years ago. The Anthropocene would follow the Holocene.
Humanity’s self-image was Copernicus’ insight that the Earth orbits the sun, which displaced us from the center of the universe, and Darwin’s recognition that we are animals created by evolution. If these two discoveries undermined our collective sense of superiority, their significance pales in comparison to the traumatic shock of climate change. Climate change reveals once and for all that humanity has no special dispensation to transcend its material conditions. And unlike Copernican cosmology or Darwinian evolution, the climate crisis is not only a difficult idea that our collective psyche must absorb, but also a hard limit, a wake-up call, a threat to our very life on this planet. Unlike previous blows to our collective ego, the climate crisis kills us.
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