“Geological time is deep beyond all comprehension. If you were to run a 26.2-mile marathon covering the entire retrospective sweep of Earth’s history, the first five-foot stride would land you two Ice Ages ago and more than 150,000 years before the whole history of human civilization. In other words, geologically and to a first approximation, all of recorded human history is irrelevant.” 

Peter Brannen

First proposed by atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen in the early 2000s, the term Anthropocene seeks to call attention to the outsized impact humanity is having on environmental processes. The specifics of the term—including the starting date of the epoch—are under debate; some scientists argue that the Anthropocene began when humans first began to farm and cultivate the land, others place its start date during the Industrial Revolution, and others in the 1950s. 

Two 2019 articles authored by Peter Brannen discuss the debates that surround the term. In “The Anthropocene is a Joke,” Brannen first argued that the term was hubristic, vastly exaggerating “humanity's legacy on an ever-churning planet that will quickly destroy—or conceal forever—even our most awesome creations.” Brannen does not refute the destructive nature of human behavior, as we burn through fossil fuels and churn toxins into the earth. Rather, he suggests that it is either absurdly hubristic or wildly optimistic to name this epoch the Anthropocene, arrogantly asserting that we are at the very infancy of an existence that will persist on a geological timescale, rather than rapidly hurtling toward our own extinction. It is much more likely that, far into the planet’s future, the record of humanity’s existence will exist as just a few centimeters of ocean rock littered with trace isotopes. We are an event more than we are an epoch.

We are an event more than we are an epoch.

A brief two months after writing his first article on the Anthropocene, Brannen offered a rather public about-face, penning “What Made Me Reconsider the Anthropocene.” He begins the piece by reiterating the transience of human existence thus far, reminding us that:

Humans are congratulating themselves on an unearned geological legacy before we’ve proved ourselves capable of escaping the next century with our lives. And, besides, most of our proudest creations—whole cities and manufactured landscapes—will be destroyed by the ceaseless destruction of tectonics and erosion.

Yet he also shares the perspective passed along to him by paleontologist Scott Wing, who suggests that the value of naming the Anthropocene is simply that it allows us to “recognize that we have permanently deflected the course of evolution.” The Anthropocene is about human impact and human intellect—not about human existence. Whether humanity continues to live on this planet for another 50 years or 50 million years, we have undeniably initiated monumental change. We may kill ourselves in the process, but the consequences of our actions will reverberate far into the future.