On Friday 8 March 2024, the Flemish newspaper De Standard published an item that

most readers of the paper may have paid little attention to but which immediately had
my full attention. The headline at the top of the article was: 'The printed coDee mugs
can go in the bin: we are not yet oDicially living in the Anthropocene.' That this headline
caught my attention was no more than logical. Since I first heard about it from a speaker
during a guest lecture for one of my courses in the spring of 2017, the idea of the
Anthropocene became increasingly important to me as a key concept to make sense of
humanity's current situation in the world. Indeed, it was something that culminated in
the title of the course book for my courses on 'Perspectives on Religion and Meaning
(Dutch course title: Religie, zingeving en levensbeschouwing (RZL), literally 'Religion,
meaning-giving and life stances') at KU Leuven that was published in February 2020:
Mens zijn in het antropoceen ('Being Human in the Anthropocene). However, I was far
from the only one to use the term 'Anthropocene in the title of a publication. On the
contrary, as of mid-October 2024 the catalogue of the KU Leuven University Library
contains no fewer than some 15,000 publications with the word Anthropocene in the
title.

The success of the word Anthropocene is a phenomenon of the past 25 years.

According to Google Books' Ngram Viewer, prior to 2000, the word Anthropocene
occurred only very rarely. In contrast, since 2000, use of the term has increased year
after year, with exponential growth especially from, say, 2012 onwards. We can perhaps
attribute this success to the influence of Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist
Paul J. Crutzen (1933-2021), who is even often cited as the one who allegedly invented
the term 'Anthropocene. The story goes that, in February 2000, Crutzen, who had been
awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his contribution to the discovery of
which substances caused the hole in the ozone layer, suddenly proclaimed during a
meeting of the International Geo-sphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), a large-scale
international research programme on global change?? that we are no longer in the
Holocene because the world has changed too much under human influence and we
have consequently entered a new geological epoch. Crutzen is then said to have named
that new epoch the Anthropocene on the spot. Anthropocene is a compound of the
Greek word for human (ävOpwnos, anthropos) and the suDix-cene used in geology to
denote the most recent epochs (from the Greek Kavós, kainos, 'new')." However, the
term was not entirely new, something we can observe when consulting the Ngram
Viewer. Another scientist, US biologist and geologist Eugene

F. Stormer (1934-2012), had already used it informally during lectures and classes from
the 1980s onwards.® Crutzen and Stormer found each other and published a short
article on the Anthropocene in the IGBP's newsletter in 2000? Their article was the first
drop in the wave of publications on the subject that have since seen the light of day.
Indeed, since Crutzen and Stormer's publication, the term Anthropocene and the
depiction of humanity as a geological power to which it refers has become widespread
and widely adopted, not only in a variety of natural sciences, but also in humanities
such as philosophy and history, and even in popular culture.®

That humanity has a huge impact on the Earth is hard to deny. To illustrate this impact, I
turn briefly to the book The Human Planet by Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, two
British scientists aDiliated with University College London, among others. The Human
Planet was an important guide for me in exploring the Anthropocene while writing Being
Human in the Anthropocene. At the beginning of the book's introduction, Lewis and
Maslin list a variety of phenomena that point to humanity's all-encompassing impact on
the planet.' Some of the figures may no longer be entirely up to date, but I am only trying
to give an impression of our impact here, and finding out for myself how each of the
phenomena they mention has developed since then would take me far too long and
may also be beyond my expertise. For instance, both scientists report that people
worldwide move more soil every year than all other natural processes combined. The
same goes for the nitrogen we take out of the atmosphere to make fertiliser, among
other things.

Furthermore, humankind has already made enough concrete to cover the entire surface
of the Earth with a layer two millimetres thick, and microplastics are now in just about
all drinking water. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humankind has already
released more than 2.2 trillion metric tonnes of CO, into the atmosphere, which means
there is now some 44% more of it in the atmosphere than before. It is estimated that,
prior to the agricultural revolution, there were about six trillion trees on Earth. Today,
only half of that number remains. Large areas of the Earth's surface are used by humans
for growing crops and cattle raising. Every year, humans catch some 80 million tonnes
of fish and as many more tonnes are farmed. Populations of non-human animals that
are not domestic or farm animals are under pressure and shrinking. Species are
disappearing at breakneck speed. If we take the combined weight of all large mammals
currently living on the planet, only 3% of that weight comes from wildlife. The rest is
made up by humans (30%) and our livestock (67%). A final example that Lewis and
Maslin give is that about 245,000 km' of coastal waters have now turned into dead
zones' where, due to lack of oxygen caused by pollution, life is no longer possible.

The premise of Being Human in the Anthropocene was that the fact that humanity has
now emerged as a geological power (Lewis and Maslin even talk about a 'geological
superpower') " gives new urgency to age-old questions. The questions I had in mind here
were the big questions of life such as: Who are we? What are human beings? Who do we
want to be and who can we become? What is our place in the cosmos? What is true
happiness, a good life, wisdom, a meaningful existence? These are obviously questions
that people have wrestled with again and again throughout history. Over the centuries,
they have formulated answers to those questions with the help of religions,
philosophies, systems of ideas and wisdom traditions. The questions still remain. Each
generation seems to have to take them up again. And in doing so, the current generation
cannot ignore the Anthropocene and humanity's status as a geological superpower.
Indeed, it seems inevitable that the way the Anthropocene will develop will have a major
impact on our life and living together, and consequently on what will (still) be possible in
terms of happiness and a good and meaningful existence. It is also likely that we will
need a good dose of wisdom to steer the Anthropocene in the right direction or even
simply survive it. Humans live by grace of stories. We need stories to live and live
together. But what stories can and should we tell about ourselves now that we have
entered the age of humankind as a geological superpower?

Being Human in the Anthropocene could actually best be understood as an argument

for spirituality. Looking back on the book, I cannot but conclude that the implicit
premise of the entire project was that the Anthropocene provides an argument for
spirituality and also makes it clear that we need spirituality. It therefore seems
necessary to explain in this introduction how spirituality was fleshed out in Being
Human in the Anthropocene. This is also how we will understand it in what follows.

1.⁠ ⁠WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?

To elaborate a model of spirituality in Being Human in the Anthropocene, I looked to a

domain in which the notion of spirituality has taken oD, notably healthcare. According to
Philip Sheldrake, a researcher who specialises in the study of spirituality, healthcare is a
domain in which spirituality is increasingly prevalent." The incorporation of spirituality in
healthcare is a consequence of the growing understanding that health is more than the
adequate functioning of individual organs and body processes. Patients are more than a
collection of organs and functions, but form a psychosomatic whole that is also a hub
of relationships with diverse others near and far. Health is therefore more than the
absence of physical defects, but also has to do with psychological well-being and social
integration. 12 A decade or so back, when I was looking for articles on what spirituality
actually is, I came across a lively debate on this question in academic nursing journals.
In one of these arti-cles, 13 a so-called concept analysis of the concept of spirituality'
was undertaken. Rather than coming up with a new definition of 'spirituality themselves,
the authors of the article growing in our thinking about the world. However, it would be
one-sided to think that

spirtual growth can be purely a result of thinking diferenty After ail, how a person thinks

about life and the world, ie a personis outlook on life, is rooted in profound experiences,

deep seated emotions, long-standing habits and belonging to groups. You don't change
something like that just by a bit of thinking alone; it requires formation of the entire
person.
Itmay even be the case that we actually need to begin by starting to behave diferenty,
This

seems to be the lesson of quite a few spiritual traditions that emphasise certain
practices and techniques (meditation, for example) that are meant to transform and
change the thinking and feeling of those engaging in the practice. Within the framework
of this book, the emphasis is necessarily on the intellectual aspect of spirituality. Its
importance, although limited, cannot be underestimated. In this regard, I concur with
the view of Philip Sheldrake, the spirituality scholar whom we have already encountered
above, that spirituality must grow in conversation and confrontation with the growth of
human knowledge in general.

Moreover, Sheldrake further argues, our spirituality must be challenged by the dramatic
events of twentieth-century history (he explicitly mentions the Holocaust and
Hiroshima).

I also wish to endorse this point made by Sheldrake.29

Now that we have a view of what is meant by spirituality' in this book, we can return to
the idea of the Anthropocene and consider how the depiction of a new geological epoch
characterised by humanity as a geological superpower was ultimately not recognised,
as I learned on 8 March 2024 via De Standaard.

process e

2.⁠ ⁠HOW THE ANTHROPOCENE

WAS FINALLY NOT RECOGNISED

At the time I wrote Being Human in the Anthropocene, research into a possible
recognition of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch was still in progress. A first
step towards this was taken in 2008 when the Geological Society of London's
committee on stratigraphy? overwhelmingly agreed to a proposal to further explore the
idea of the Anthropocene.?

This was still far from an oDicial acknowledgement, just a confirmation of the fact that a
lot of geologists thought it was an interesting idea (which was also reflected in the fact
that the term was starting to gain acceptance) and that they thought it was worth
looking into further. However, for the Anthropocene to be recognised as an oDicial
geological epoch and added to the geological time scale, a well-defined procedure had
to be followed within the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), a subsidiary
organisation of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). Indeed, making a
change to the geological time scale starts with the creation of a working group within
the relevant subcommittee of the ICS. This working group investigates the matter,
compiles the necessary evidence and formulates a proposal to the subcommittee it
falls under. A qualified majority of at least 60% of the members of the working group
must support the final proposal. A vote then follows within the subcommittee. If the
working group's proposal again achieves a qualified majority of at least 60%, the
proposal goes to the ICS. If it again achieves the same qualified majority there, it goes to
the IUGS, where it still needs to be ratified by the executive committee.32 In order for
the Anthropocene to possibly be recognised as an oDicial geological epoch, a working
group had to be set up within the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), the
subcommission that deals with stratigraphy in the Quaternary, the current geological
period that started some 2.58 million years ago and includes the Pleistocene in addition
to the Holocene.33 This happened in 2009 when the Anthropocene Working Group
(AWG) saw the light and started its activities.

The AWG presented its preliminary results and recommendations on 29 August 2016 at
the 35th quadrennial congress of the IUGS (in Cape Town, South Africa).34 At that time,
the working group also announced the outcome of a non-binding, indicative vote on key
pending questions related to the Anthropocene. The vote took place via email
immediately prior to the meeting at which the answers were announced. Thirty-five
members participated in the vote. The results were as follows:

3.

Almost all AWG members (34/35) responded positively to the question whether the
Anthropocene is a stratigraphic reality and therefore geologically substantiated (one
person abstained). Humanity's recent impact on the planet is such that it is and will be
visible in the geological record. Indeed, the result of our impact is suDiciently large,
globally distributed, rapid and irreversible.

A large majority (30/35) agreed to formalise the Anthropocene as part of the geological
time scale (three dissenting votes, two abstentions).

A majority (20.5/35)35 preferred to formalise the Anthropocene as a new epoch rather

than an era or a period, but also not as a new stage within the Holocene. This would
mean that the Holocene ends with the start of the Anthropocene, but that the
Quaternary does continue. The Anthropocene would thus be the third epoch within the
Quaternary (after the Pleistocene and the Holocene). 4.

5.

6.

There was more unaninity on the best time for the Anthropocene to begin: 28.5 our

of 35 participants preferred +/- 1950, In doing so, the AWG deviated from Crutzen and
Stoermers original idea. They had linked the start of the Anthropocene to the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution and had proposed the symbolic date of 1784, because that
was the year in which Scottish engineer James Watt (1736-1819) invented the steam
engine that was the basis of the industrial Revolution?* By now putting forward 1950,
the AWG opted to let the start of the Anthropocene coincide with the Great
Acceleration', the explosive growth in human development and associated impact on
the functioning of the Barth since the end of World War II." In doing so, the AWG did not
want to deny that humanity's impact on the planet goes back much further in time, but
it did emphasise that that earlier impact was rather limited, regional rather than global,
gradual, and mainly limited to the land.

There was also a clear majority (25.5/35) to define the Anthropocene using a golden
spike rather than numerical age (only 1.5 votes went to the latter option, 8/35 expressed
uncertainty about which was the best option). A golden spike is the point in the
sequence of rock layers at a well-defined and carefully chosen location that marks the
beginning of a new geological epoch (and thus the base or bottom of the layer formed in
that particular epoch).38 That point could be, for example, the appearance of a
particular fossil or a sedimentary layer with a distinctive feature. For example, the
beginning of the Cambrian (541 million years ago) is marked by the appearance of
fossilised burrows of a creature known as Treptichinus pedum, which may have looked
like modern priapulid worms. The creatures themselves were not fossilised (perhaps
because they had no hard parts), but the characteristic, U-shaped burrows they made
are. This golden spike is located on Fortunehead, a headland near the Canadian town of
Fortune (southeastern Newfoundland). The beginning of the Palacogene (66 million
years ago), in turn, is marked by a sedimentary layer with an unusually high
concentration of iridium, an element that is very rare on Earth but came along with the
meteorite that triggered the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period and
marked the end of the age of dinosaurs. This golden spike is located about five
kilometres southwest of the Tunisian town of El Kef. To establish the beginning of the
Anthropocene, the AWG's preference was to find a golden spike

the geological time scale.

because this is the most common and accepted method of delineating segments of
Once it came to the question of which element from the recent geological record should
now be selected as a marker for the start of the Anthropocene, there was no longer a
majority: The following possibilities received support: the appearance in the geological
record of ash particles resulting from the use of fossil fuels (2 votes); A change in the
ratio of carbon isotopes (2 votes);39 the appearance of plastic in the geological record
(3 votes); the increase in CO, concentration in the atmosphere (3 votes); the increase in
the concentration of carbon-14, the radioactive isotope of carbon, as a result of above-
ground testing of nuclear weapons (4 votes); and the appearance of plutonium in the
environment (10 votes). Three members suggested alternative markers: the
concentration of lead in the environment; the presence of
'persistent organic pollutants' or POPs,1 and the presence of so-called technofossils.
41

Two members were unsure and six abstained.

disagreeman+s

So the main task facing the AWG in 2016 was to reach agreement on how to mark the
beginning of the Anthropocene and where the golden spike should then be placed. For
on this it would ultimately depend whether the working group's proposal to recognise
the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch would have a chance of success within
the higher bodies of the ICS and the IUGS. Indeed, not all geologists agreed with
recognising the Anthropocene, and critics included some of the leading figures within
the ICS and the IUGS. Critics of an oDicial recognition of the Anthropocene as a new
geological epoch criticised the AWG for its methodology. This was because it reversed
the standard working method within strati-graphy: rather than starting from the
geological record to look for elements that would justify a distinction between time
periods, the working group tried to stratigraphically substantiate post factum a proposal
of a new geological epoch that had arisen from considerations other than purely
stratigraphic ones by looking for a golden spike in a predetermined time period.

According to critics, this violated the discipline's ground rules as laid down in the
International Stratigraphic Guide. Critics also found it problematic that the AWG
discarded other possible starting points of the Anthropocene. Indeed, there have been
very diDerent proposals over the years about the start of the Anthropocene (as
discussed at length in Chapter 8 of Being Human in the Anthropocene). The start of the
Anthropocene has been linked to the conquest of fire, the disappearance of the
megafauna" at the end of the Pleistocene, and the agricultural revolution. Those who
placed the start of the Anthropocene less far in the past often suggested a concrete
year. As already seen, Crutzen and Stormer proposed 1784. In their book, Lewis and
Maslin oDered 1610. Another leading voice in the debate, the American-born Australian
chemist Will SteDen (1947-2023), was even more precise: in 2015, he and his co-
authors argued that the Anthropocene began in the New Mexico desert on Monday 16
July 1945 at 5:29 am MWT (Mountain War Time, the time zone New Mexico was then part
of) with the detonation of the first atomic bomb, the so-called Trinity Test.* However,
many geologists found it hard to accept such a recent beginning of the Anthropocene:
how can we possibly conclude on the basis of soil layers only a few decades old that a
new geological epoch has begun, something that usually lasts many thousands if not
millions of years? However, according to Catalan palacoecologist and biologist Vainued
workorn 1981), the AWG did not really care about such objections and simply continued
working. " From
2018, the ICS leadership did start insisting that an oDicial proposal should now be
delivered

to the SQS as a matter of urgency. However, the AWG argued that it needed more time
to decide on the placement of the golden spike. The ICS reluctantly allowed this." In
early 2019, the AWG confirmed some of the choices made informally at the 2016 Cape
Town meeting through an oDicial vote. The results were made public on 21 May. Both the
proposal

to make the Anthropocene an oficial geological epoch that would be marked by a

golden

spike and the choice to start it around 1950 were approved by a large majority (29 in
favour, four against, no abstentions) 48 All that remained for the working group to do
was to make a decision on where to place the golden spike. At that moment, 12 sites
were still in the running." By early 2023, two candidates remained: Sihailongwan Lake in
northeast China and Crawford Lake in Milton, Ontario (near Toronto, Canada) 5 Finally,
on 11 July, the AWG announced that the choice had fallen on the Canadian lake. This
happened during the fourth International Congress on Stratigraphy STRATI 2023 in Lille
(France) and was made public the same evening during an online press conference as
part of the Max Planck Climate Conference for a Sustainable Anthropocene (at 7 pm).51

To understand what justified this decision, we can turn to an extensive but accessible
article that appeared in The Washington Post on 22 June 2023 (prior to the decision
being announced, that is).52 The article says that Crawford Lake was created many
thousands of years ago when a sinkhole in the limestone rocks of southern Ontario
filled with water.

The lake is limited in area (only 2.5 hectares), but very deep (up to 24 metres). As a
result, the upper water layers (aDected by sun and wind) do not mix with the underlying
water layers. At the bottom, it is also too cold and dark to allow for any life. So the
bottom is not stirred up. As a result, the material at the bottom of the lake is nicely
arranged according to when it sank down. Moreover, due to infiltration of groundwater
through the porous limestone, there is also a constant supply of oxygen, preventing
certain chemical processes that could otherwise alter the sediment at the bottom. The
material that sinks to the bottom is primarily the constant flow of organic material
entering the lake. During summer, when the water gets suDiciently warm and the acidity
is just right, calcite crystals also form in Crawford Lake. These are white in colour and
when they sink to the bottom, they form a white layer there. This creates an alternation
of dark and white layers, a bit like the annual rings of a tree. Just as a particular ring of a
tree can be precisely linked to a particular year, each white layer in the bottom of
Crawford Lake can be dated. Of course, all sorts of other material from around the lake
also enters the water and then sinks to the bottom. As a result, a sample of the bottom
of Crawford Lake allows researchers to look back in time and determine exactly when
certain changes in the environment took place. Most relevant in the context of the
search for a golden spike for the start of the Anthropocene was the observation that a
peak in the presence of radioactive plutonium occurred around the middle of the last
century. This element hardly occurs naturally in the environment and so the observed
spike in the bottom of Crawford Lake can only be the result of the nuclear bomb tests
that took place many thousands of kilometres away during that period, whose
radioactive fallout spread through the atmosphere to eventually end up in the sediment
at the bottom of Crawford Lake as well. That bottom also revealed other indications of
humankind's increasing impact on the Earth: ten to a hundred times more light isotopes
of nitrogen and eight times more fly ash in five years, both due to increased use of fossil
fuels, thinner layers of calcite due to acidification of the lake as a result of acid rain, and
later, after the acid rain problem was eliminated, thicker layers of calcite because more
of it was produced in the lake due to global warming. Certain bacteria disappeared
locally and the amount of elm pollen also dropped drastically because around 1950
many elms in the area died of Dutch elm disease. Dutch elm disease is a deadly fungal
infection spread by several species of bark beetles. The disease is thought to have
reached North America by beetles that hitchhiked with a transport of wood from the
Netherlands (hence the English name for the disease). This is, then, another example of
humanity's impact on the planet and its ecosystems: increasing globalisation and
international trade allow all kinds of species to move to places where the local
ecosystem has no defence against them.

Dutch elm disease, by the way, is thought to have originated in East Asia.

All these elements seemed to make the bottom of Crawford Lake an ideal golden spike
for the Anthropocene. As announced on 11 July 2023, the golden spike was finally
placed on the sediment layer corresponding to 1952 because of a clear spike in the
presence of 239Pu and 240Pu, two isotopes of plutonium, in the successive sediment
layers of the lake. In addition, the AWG also proposed 1 November 1952 at 7:15 am
local time (31 October at 7:15 pm GMT) as the symbolic beginning of the Anthropocene:
it was the moment when, on the island of Elugelab in the Enewetak atoll (part of the
Marshall Islands, in the Pacific Ocean), the very first hydrogen bomb ever, named Ivy
Mike, was detonated (incidentally, the island was completely wiped oD the map by the
blast).54

After the choice of Crawford Lake was announced in July 2023, the ICS president
unilaterally imposed a deadline on the AWG to submit the oDicial proposal to the
SQS.55 That proposal had to be there by 29 September 2023 at the latest. Nevertheless,
the AWG was able to obtain an extension and was given until 31 October. In the end, the
AWG's proposal was ready on 31 October, 15 minutes before midnight, although the
AWG requested extra time for additional analyses of the bottom of Crawford Lake.
However, most voting members of the SQS felt that enough was enough now and
deemed that the report provided was suDicient to make an informed decision. The
standard procedure provided for 30 days for discussion, but at the end of the period
(late December), two members of the SOS who were also involved in the AWG, British-
Polish geologist and palacontologist lan Zalasiewic. (born 1954) and Canadian
alynologist® and stratigrapher Martin ). Head," argued that additional time for discussion
was necessary, something that most SOS members opposed, but eventually happened
anyway. Eventually, the discussion ended in late January 2024 and voting began on 1
February, even though Zalasiewicz and Head had once again asked for extra time. The
voting finally ended on 4 March and the outcome was an overwhelming rejection of the
AWGs proposal. The proposal could convince only four of the 19 voting members of the
SQS (12 voted against, three abstained).

The result of the vote was leaked the next day on the website of The New York Times and
even made the newspaper's front page the following day." It so happened that AWG
members learned of the rejection of their proposal through the media even before they
were oDicially informed about it. In fact, according to the 'Word from the Chairman' in
the AWG's 13th newsletter, this had not even happened by 16 March. The New York
Times featured two members of the SQS defending the decision, Jan A. Piotrowski (born
1959, working in Aarhus, Denmark) and Mike Walker (aDiliated with the University of
Wales in Lampeter, UK). Their main argument was basically that the beginning of the
Anthropocene proposed by the AWG was not long enough ago and thus did injustice to
the impact of humanity that preceded 1952. What of the agricultural revolution,
Piotrowski wondered, and of the Industrial Revolution and of colonisation? In the article
from De Standard with which we began this introduction, the journalist also gauges the
reaction of Leuven geologist Manuel Sintubin. Sintubin agrees with the criticism of the
AWG's proposal. 'The proposal to declare the Anthropocene as the successor to the
Holocene comes too soon for most colleagues, he said. 'It is not suDiciently mature.'
Possibly the choice of a golden spike in a Western country also worked against the
proposal, Sintubin added. At the time the choice of Crawford Lake became known,
Chinese geochemist Han Yongmin (Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Xian) already reacted dismissively: according to him, Sihailongwan Lake was
'more globally representative because it is less influenced by factors from the
immediate environment (unlike Crawford Lake, which is close to the big city of Toronto).
The signal in Sihailongwan Lake, which functions in a similar way to Crawford Lake,
would thus more purely represent global developments than its Canadian counterpart."
We may suspect, though, that there were also personal reasons behind this argument:
Han was, after all, involved in the analysis of the soil of the Chinese lake.

Immediately after the leak of the outcome of the vote, Zalasiewicz and Head issued a
press release requesting that the vote be declared invalid due to procedural errors and
because the SQS did not study the available evidence in suDicient depth. Further, it also
became known that the vote was going ahead even though in the meantime there was a
report by the IUGS Geoethics Commission on unfair and improper treatment of the
AWG by higher bodies within the IUGS. In a letter to the other members of the SQS that
immediately appeared on Hill Heat, a website that tracks US climate policy, Zalasiewicz
reported that the IUGS executive committee at its meeting a good week before (26-28
February) had, however, disregarded most of the Geoethics Commission's
recommendations. He also argued that the contents of the report should have been
shared with the members of the SQS so that they could have taken them into account
when voting. The AWG itself also issued a press release." In it, it expressed its doubts
about how everything had played out and it continued to stand firmly behind its own
proposal.

It was all to no avail because on 20 March, the executive committee of the IUGS
released a statement saying that the 17 members of the organisation's executive
committee had virtually unanimously confirmed the SQS's earlier decision as valid (15
members voted in favour, one person abstained and one person could not vote due to a
conflict of interest).2 With this, the proposal to oDicially recognise the Anthropocene as
a new geological epoch within the Quaternary following the Holocene was definitively
oD the table. So, according to the oDicial geological time scale, the Holocene simply
continues. And so, as De Standaard put it, Crawford Lake will not become a geological
hotspot and not a tourist attraction where souvenirs - such as printed coDee mugs and
tea towels - would sell like hot cakes. And so the coDee mugs and other gadgets may be
put back in storage or even, as mentioned in the title of the article with which we started
this introduction, thrown in the dustbin.

The rejection of the AWG's proposal by the SQS and its confirmation by the IUGS
executive committee naturally provoked several distinctly negative reactions.
Immediately after the result of the vote was leaked in The New York Times, Naomi
Oreskes (born 1958), a well-known American historian of science, co-author of
Merchants of Doubt (2010) and herself a member of the AWG, reacted. She claimed the
SQS had made its decision on non-scientific grounds, adding that the committee
denied the light of day: rejecting the AWG's proposal could only indicate an inability or
unwillingness to see what is patently obvious, that the Anthropocene has begun. It was
even more sharply articulated by lan Angus (born 1945), Canadian ecosocialist, editor
of Climate & Capitalism and author of Facing the Anthropocene (2016). He interpreted
the voting down of the AWG's proposal as a maneuver organized by a group of
conservatives and ecomodernists who have long opposed any recognition of a recent
qualitative change in the Earth System. French author, journalist and artist Ewen
Chardronnet (born 1971) then suggested in turn that the AWG's proposal was voted
down under pressure from the nuclear lobby because the proposed golden spike put
too much emphasis on the impact of all things nuclear.65
All this naturally brings us to the question of what we can still do with the term
Anthropocene now that the recognition of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch
is oD the table.

3.⁠ ⁠IS THE TERM

'ANTHROPOCENE'

STILL USEFUL?

The most radical conclusion would be the one drawn on 15 March 2024 in De Standards
weekly podcast on science and technology. There we heard the view that the term

'Anthropocene henceforth lacks any scientific legitimacy and has the same value as
terms like 'unconscious' or Frankenfood' (Frankenstein food'). However, this conclusion
was more radical than that of the IUGS itself in its statement on the decision to confirm
the SQSs choice. Indeed, at the end of that statement, we can read that the IUGS
expects the term

'Anthropocene to continue to be used not only in the natural sciences, but also outside
them.

The term was even referred to as invaluable for describing human-environment

interactions.

Some scientists saw in voting down the AWGs proposal an opportunity to move away
from an overly strict interpretation of the term 'Anthropocene. American
palaeoecologist Jacquelyn L. Gill, for instance, argued that it is more meaningful to
continue using the word as a broad and vague concept. She articulated this as follows
in an article published on Nature's website on 14 March 2024:

66

It's a term that belongs to everyone. To people working in philosophy and literary
criticism, in the arts, in the humanities, the sciences [.] I think it's far more meaningful in
the way that it is currently being used, than in any attempts that stratigraphers could
have made to restrict or define it in some narrow sense. [...) It serves humanity best as a
loose concept that we can use to define something that we all widely understand,
which is that we live in an era where humans are the dominant force on ecological and
geological processes.67

In the same article, British biologist and ecologist Chris D. Thomas (born 1959) (York
University) called the whole discussion about when the Anthropocene did or did not
actually start as basically without importance and even ridiculous: Many people in the
humanities who are using the phrase find the concept of the articulation of a particular
year, based on a deposit in a particular lake, a ridiculous way of framing the concept of a
human-altered planet?« We can therefore confidently continue using the word
'Anthropocene because it neatly summarizes the sense that humans are part of Earth's
system and integral to its pro-cesses. The term 'helps move us away from the notion
that somehow humanity is apart from the rest of nature and natural systems' and,
moreover, provides a shared ground on which diverse disciplines can engage with each
other and start working together.)

Even within geology, some still see a future for the word 'Anthropocene, no longer as a
new geological epoch (which needs a clear starting point, marked with a golden spike),
but as a geological event by analogy with, for example, the Great Oxidation Event (2.4
billion years ago), the Cambrian Explosion (around the beginning of the Cambrian, +/ -
541 million years ago)" or the five mass extinctions that have taken place since then.
This view was launched with the help of a letter from six scientists posted on Nature's
website on 14 September 2021.2 One of the signatories of the letter was British
geologist Philip L.

Gibbard (born 1949). Gibbard is not one of the least. He is a former chairman of the SQS
and was still part of the group at the time it reviewed the AWG's proposal. Meanwhile,
he had also become secretary-general of the ICS. The idea of the Anthropocene as a
geological event was then developed in an article in Episodes, the journal of the IUGS,
and an abridged version appeared the following year in the Journal of Quaternary
Science, each time with Gibbard as first author? Five other scientists joined the author
group in writing both articles, including the aforementioned Mike Walker, who was also
a member of the SQS that was to review the AWG's proposal. As a matter of fact, Walker
would later defend the view of the Anthropocene as a geological event in the article in
The New York Times that would leak the SQS's decision. Incidentally, the other member
of the SQS who spoke in The New York Times, Jan Piotrowski, also defended this view
(but was not involved in the aforementioned publications). Other members of the
author team whose names caught my attention were the aforementioned Gill and
Maslin as well as William F. Ruddiman and Erle C. Ellis, two scientists who had already
made their appearance in Being Human in the Anthropocene.

William F. Ruddiman (born 1943) is an American palaeoclimatologist known for the

controversial early anthropogenic hypothesis discussed in Chapter 8 of Being Human in
the Anthropocene. This hypothesis holds that from the moment humanity started
growing crops and raising cattle, it was already putting enough CO, and methane into
the atmosphere to avert another ice age. Indeed, given the alternation of ice ages and
warmer periods during the Pleistocene, it was to be expected that after the warming at
the beginning of what is now known as the Holocene, the world would gradually
descend into another ice age.
The fact that this did not happen was thus caused by humanity, according to Ruddiman,
and would justify a very early onset of the Anthropocene. Since Ruddiman launched his
Mypotats, th dat on ths no tag ed methane ver being pao th de" Lering

Astl the quetion of how much extra CO, and rindustia Revoluton, ino the atrogphee

by growing crops and cate raising prior to the industrial Renolution, more fundamental
coments have also been made on Ruddiman's presuppositions For example, Kyle
Keeler, profesor of environmental sciences at a fayte in which the agricultural a
objected

thai Ruaiman has a one sided view ofagriculture in which the agricultural revolution ts

seen as a fal from the paradise ofhunter gatherer existence. Agriculure is seen as huma

nitys domination of the environment and as by definition pernicious to the planet and

the foundation for al the negative developments humanity has known since then (such

as colonialis and capitalism) in this context, Keeler speaks of paleolithic nostalgid and

regards Ruddiman's depiction as a secularised version of the story of the Fall as it

appears in the Bible. As an alternative to this depiction of agriculture as pernicious, he
refers to the farming practices of the original inhabitants of the Americas and how their
stories lead to the depiction of agriculture as a partnership between human and non-
human nature, and as a learning process of trial and error, with no depiction of a fall and
no nostalgia and no desire for the restoration of a lost state. 6

The American environmental scientist Erle C. Ellis (born 1963) then appears in Being
Human in the Anthropocene as the author of a booklet on the Anthropocene in Oxford
University Presss Very Short Introductions series, as a member of the AWG and as a
signatory of 'An Ecomodernist Manifesto' (2015), which was written 'with the conviction
that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even
great, Anthropocene?" Since the publication of Being Human in the Anthropocene, Ellis
had, however, resigned from the AWG, of which he had been a member since its
inception in

2009. He did so on 12 July 2023, i.e. immediately after the group announced its choice
of a layer in the Crawford Lake sediment as the golden spike for the start of the
Anthropocene.

In his resignation letter, he gave two reasons. First, he had to note with regret in his heart
that the AWG had gradually developed a tunnel vision on the problem of defining the
Anthropocene, leaving no room for dissent or a broader perspective on the matter. This
began, according to Ellis, with the indicative vote in Cape Town in 2016, but had only got
worse since then as the debate over the choice of a golden spike has been settled.
Meanwhile, Ellis argued, the group existed only to promote one single narrow
perspective. The second reason Ellis gave for his resignation was that the way the AWG
tried to define the Anthropocene actually made it an esoteric issue. Ellis did not make
the comparison himself, but we might think here of the cliché of medieval theologians
discussing how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. Unfortunately, Ellis argued,
the discussion about the definition of the Anthropocene is not a purely esoteric issue
with no real consequences. The AWG's proposal would mean radically dividing in two
the history of human impact on the planet, and this is harmful because it denies the
deeper history and the ultimate causes of Earth's unfolding social-environmental crisis'.
Is colonialism not important? Or the Industrial Revolution? The way the AWG tries to
define the Anthropocene, Ellis concluded, is therefore misleading. He also expressed
his hope that the idea of the Anthropocene would continue to be helpful in better
understanding and shaping human interaction with the planet. Unfortunately, according
to him, the AWG no longer contributed to this and even the opposite was the case.
Leaving the group was then his only option.?8

Ellis reiterated his objections to the AWG's approach and the proposal to think about
the Anthropocene as a geological event in a contribution to the website The
Conversation that appeared the day The New York Times leaked the results of the vote
within the SQS.?°

To this came a response the following week from the AWG's president and secretary
(geo-grapher Colin N. Waters [Leicester, UK and geologist Simon D. Turner [University
College London]) along with Zalasiewicz and Head. This response amounted to saying
that the critics of the AWG's approach were mistaken in their criticism. For this, the four
authors relied on the original meaning they believed Crutzen had given to the word
Anthropocene:

66

When Paul Crutzen first proposed the term Anthropocene in a moment of insight at a
scientific meeting in 2000, it was not from realisation that humans have been altering
the functioning and geological record of the Earth, or to capture all their impacts under
one umbrella term. He and his colleagues were perfectly aware that humans had been
doing that for millennia. That's nothing new.

Crutzen's insight was wholly diDerent. He said that the Earth system - that is, the really
fundamental things like atmospheric composition, climate, all ecosystems - had
recently sharply departed from the stability that they had shown for thousands of years
during the Holocene epoch, a stability which allowed human civilisation to grow and
flourish.

It makes no sense, Crutzen said, to use the Holocene for present time. He conceived
the Anthropocene as the time when human impacts intensified, suddenly, dramatically,
enough to push the Earth into a new state.*
This response makes it clear that depicting the Anthropocene as an epoch that began
only recently does not preclude recognition that humanity's impact on the planet goes
back many thousands of years. In a later article, published in Nature on 29 August 2024,
Zalasiewicz, Waters, Turner and Head, along with US historian Julia Adeney Thomas,
noted tha the begining of a geological epoch is no taher when i at the moment when a
pricular ransion in the Farth; system begin, bulaisation, the is ficts become sut. crati
arte and measurabil." Industrialisation, colonisation, the agricultural revolution and
even the control of fre; they all contributed to the Anthropene, of course, but that doe
enot mean they are all part of it. Rather, they belong to what we can call the prelude

to the Anthopocene In Being umar in the Anthropacene supested in this contex the

dtinction between the Palacanthropocene and the Anthropocene proper: The term

Palleoanthropocene was introduced in 2013 in an article of which Crutzen was als one

of the co-authors " That artice desctibed the Palaeoanthropocene as the period betwen

the first, barely recognizable, anthropogenic environmental changes and the industrial
revolution when anthropogenically induced changes of climate, land use and
biodiversity began to increase very rapidly? This description obviously (still) assumed
that the actual Anthropocene began with the Industrial Revolution, but it can obviously
be easily adapted to an Anthropocene starting in the mid-twentieth century. Thus,
according to the AWGs view, the Industrial Revolution was also part of the
Palaeoanthropocene. Of course, the way the authors described the
Palaeoanthropocene immediately raised the question of when the Palaeoanthropocene
had actually started and, as I noted in Being Human in the Anthropocene, it is diDicult to
determine when humanity's impact on its environment was suDiciently large for the
Palaeoanthropocene to begin. Ultimately, as I also noted in Being Human in the
Anthropocene, non-human animals also try to bend the environment to their needs and
thus influence it (think, for example, of earthworms churning up soil or beavers building
a dam). I then put forward the control of fire as a plausible starting point of the
Palaeoanthropocene because it played an important role not only in the increase of the
impact of humans on their environment, but also in the development of humankind in
general (being able to cook food undoubtedly played a role in the growth of our brains
since we can get more energy from cooked food). With that, the Palaeoanthropocene
goes

even two million years old. 34

back deep into the Pleistocene, as the control of fire is at least 400,000 years and
maybe The word Palaeoanthropocene has been used sporadically in scientific
publications since it was proposed, but did not become widely used. In 2022, in an
article in Earth-Science Reviews, the AWG proposed an alternative way of distinguishing
between the Anthropocene proper and a preceding period when human impact had not
yet pushed the Earth out of its Holocene state. For this, they joined the proposal to
understand the Anthropocene as

a geologial event The AWG itself obviously wants to reserve the term Anthropocene for

the geological epoch in which the Earth is out of its Holocene state. The human impact
preceding it is then referred to in the article as the Anthropogenic Modification Episode
(AME) The term episode is deliberately chosen here and refers to a particular type of
geological happening, one that extends over a very long time span and whose impact is
felt globally and for a longer period.& In contrast, the authors of the article reserve the
term

'event' for things that last (relatively, in geological terms) for a short time, although that
does not preclude a geological event from changing the course of the Earth's system. An
example is the meteorite that sealed the end of the dinosaurs. Moreover, it seems
appropriate not to use the term Anthropocene to denote a geological episode or event:
indeed, the suDix

-cene inevitably evokes the idea of a geological epoch." What it should be, then, is not
so clear. 'Anthropogenic Modification Episode is a good suggestion, but it is quite a
mouthful and so may not be so easily assimilated by a wide audience.®8

According to Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton (born 1953), the main reason why
most scientists have a hard time accepting the Anthropocene as a geological epoch is
the fact that they have not (yet) internalised the revolution brought about by the
emergence of Earth System Science. As a result, the term 'Anthropocene is fitted into
the old disciplines of science with which these scientists are familiar and 'with which
they are comfortable?" However, according to Hamilton, the depiction of the
Anthropocene only makes sense and can only be correctly understood within the
framework of Earth System Science.

The foundation of Earth System Science is the discovery of the Earth as a whole, as a
totality, as a complex, dynamic, ever-evolving totality comprised of myriad interlocking
processes." Speaking of the Earth as a system also means that the Earth is more than an
elaborate mechanism subject only to mathematical laws of cause and eDect'. Instead,
it is

'a self-organizing dynamic system characterized by emergent properties'. Emergence

means that the system possesses properties that arise exclusively in the interaction
between the components of the system: they cannot be found in any individual element
of it and evade all cause-and-eDect explanations'" It is the appearance of the Earth as a
system that made possible the specific interpretation the AWG gave to the
Anthropocene. Hamilton therefore puts it very clearly. The term 'Anthropocene does not
refer to the steady increase in human impact on the landscape or the increasing
adaptation of ecosystems by humans."

'The Anthropocene does not begin, Hamilton further explains, when humans first play

"a significant role in shaping the earth's ecosystems"; it begins when humans first play a
significant role in shaping the Earth, that is, the Earth that evolves as a totality [...]?93
The term 'Anthropocene refers to the fact that humanity has recently begun to influence
the Earth System as a whole. In this way, humanity's impact has not only increased
further, but has changed in nature substantially.*

For Hamilton, then, it is justified to talk about the Anthropocene because humanity has
taken the Earth System beyond the variability that characterised it during the Holocene.

The Earth System has now changed irrevocably." It is now in a situation it has never been
in since the dawn of human civilisation. The Holocene as we have known it is also never
coming back. Even if our impact were to cease immediately and completely, its eDects
would still be felt in the Earth System for many thousands of years and some things will
never reove the Co, molecule we emit nov could re that have died optere for thousand

orcoven* of housands of years, and animal species that have tied out will never return.

attough over a long period of time the Earth System rurse, becaus reach a new stale o

eqwtibrum (an egvilfbrium that is always precarious, of co un se icrause non -human

factons

can also disupt the systen) t wil no longer be the state in which humanity flourished.n

It is also important to bear in mind that change in complex systems is not always
gradual.

Specife to a complex system like the Barth is that an accumulation of small changes
can lead to a sudden, drastic change. This kind of transition is known as a phase change
and

it invoves the system changing from one state to another (such as the transitions betwe

ice ages and warmer periods during the Pleistocene, which often occurred abruptly) As
the Barth System moves further away from the boundaries within which it was during
the Holocene, the likelihood increases of certain thresholds being exceeded and the
system reaching a tipping point that causes it to transition to a new state."

In fact, according to Hamilton, the start of the Anthropocene marks a break in Earth
history of the greatest profundity?» Indeed, the start of the Anthropocene splits the
Earth's history into two halves.00 For the first time in our planet's long history, the
course of the Earth System is no longer determined solely by unconscious and
unintentional physical factors (such as weathering, volcanic eruptions, meteorite
impacts, plate tectonics and changes in how the sun's rays fall on the Earth).
Henceforth, there is an influence on the Earth System that is radically diDerent from all
previous ones, namely a non-physical factor (obviously with physical consequences):
the element of volition'. Indeed, humanity's impact on the Earth System 'does not just
happen'. As Hamilton argues, '[global anthropogenic impacts] are the consequences,
intended or otherwise, of decisions taken by human minds'.

Hamilton therefore suggests that in relation to humanity, it is therefore important not to

speak of a geological force but of 'a geological power'. The major distinction between
humanity and previously mentioned factors is that humanity can also decide not to
exert its influence. A power can abstain, a force cannot. 101

What is important here is that human power does not work alongside non-human
forces, but through them, by altering their operation. This also implies that the (modern)
distinction between human history (as made by conscious beings with intentions) and
the history of the planet (which unconsciously and indiDerently pursues its path) is
obsolete.

Henceforth, the two have become intimately intertwined. They blend into each
other.?02

The Earth is therefore no longer merely a stage and the backdrop for human history, but
it becomes an actor who explicitly and increasingly so claims a role in the play. At the
same time, humanity is the one who woke up this actor and ensured that it now comes
to interfere with what is happening on stage. From now on, the Earth steers our history
and our history determines the further course of the history of the Earth System. The
future of humanity and the future of the Earth System are therefore henceforth
intimately intertwined. The fates of both are linked, fused even. And for Hamilton, it is
crystal clear: the core message of Anthropocene science is that humanity is no longer in
control of its own destiny. 103 Yes, we have great power, but we are faced with an
adversary that oDers defiance. Moreover, this is an adversary that risks becoming more
contrarian, more irritated and more uncontrollable the more we disrupt it. So our power
is far from absolute. 104

Hamilton's arguments make it clear that by failing to recognise the Anthropocene as a

new geological epoch, an important opportunity was missed to make clear how
profound and far-reaching humanity's impact on the Earth System is, and how great the
risks of destablisation and disruption this poses are. Actually, we can compare
humanity to a ship sailing blindly into uncharted territory. It is hard to overestimate the
scale of the rupture referred to by the term 'Anthropocene. The world as we know it,
including our conceptions of ourselves, society, the world and any ultimate reality: it
was all created during the Holocene. Now that we have put the Holocene behind us (not
oDicially, but in the facts as established by Earth System Science), nothing can really be
taken for granted. Everything is possibly in question. Everything may have to be
reconsidered. 105 I would therefore like to continue to use the term 'Anthropocene as it
was fleshed out by the AWG.

If the Anthropocene leads to (possibly) everything changing and nothing remaining the
same, it cannot fail to aDect our way of being in the world as well. It is therefore
abundantly clear that spirituality cannot avoid the new reality indicated by the term
'Anthropocene, if we want to at least take Sheldrakes lesson seriously (see earlier) and
not let spirituality degenerate into a form of world flight and denial. So we will have to
learn to relate to the Earth System, that new object that is the result of countless data
collected by satellites and other high-tech measuring instruments and processed by
powerful computers. 106 How can such an entity become the object of personal
thought, feeling and action? We are also challenged to relate to humanity as a
collective, as a geological power, as the anthropos from the term 'Anthropocene. As
individuals, we each make up only an unsightly and insignificant particle of it. Taken
individually, our impact on the Earth System is nil and completely negligible, both for
better and for worse. But for the collective we are part of, it is diDerent. That can match
volcanoes, meteorite impacts and plate tectonics in terms of impact on the Earth
System. There is therefore a great tension between individual powerlessness (not just
with regard to the Earth System, but also with regard to the col-lective) and the power of
the collective.

Humanity's great collective power as anthropos seems to suggest that we are in urgent
need of what we can describe, with a term used by Hamilton, as species thinking? 107
We need to start thinking, feeling and acting as one. At least according to space
philosopher Frank White, our survival depends on this. He articulated this as follows in
the documentary titled Overview (2012): We have to start acting as one species with
one destiny; we are not going to survive if we don't do that? 108 Can we not read in this
statement a plea for spirituality as ve Rested it out eatier in this introduction? in his
interest s connectednes and se te edene, transcending shot termism and save nere? iso
then the challenge-

is ov ve can/should shape spirituality now that we have entere the Anthropocene and is
how van grow in the connectedness and self transcendence we seem to need to survive
the Anthropocene. What resources are available to us for this?