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The word Anthropocene, unknown twenty years ago, now appears in the titles of three academic journals, dozens of books, and hundreds of academic papers, not to mention innumerable articles in newspapers, magazines, websites, and blogs. There are exhibitions about art in the Anthropocene, conferences about the humanities in the Anthropocene, and novels about love in the Anthropocene. There is even a heavy metal album called The Anthropocene Extinction. Rarely has a scientific term moved so quickly into wide acceptance and general use.
Behind what might appear to be just a trendy buzzword are important scientific discussions that have radical implications for the future of life on Earth. Three leading authorities on the science of the Anthropocene express the issues clearly:
The term Anthropocene...suggests that the Earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state.* 1
Socialists cannot ignore a change of this magnitude, or treat it as just one aspect of our program. As the Brazilian ecosocialist and atmospheric scientist Alexandre Costa writes, "The fight to avoid a catastrophic outcome to this crisis engendered by capitalism is the fight to safeguard the material conditions for survival with dignity of humankind.... Socialism is not possible on a scorched Earth."2
In 1995, Paul Crutzen, then vice-chair of the International GeosphereBiosphere Program (IGBP), received a Nobel Prize for showing that widely used chemicals were destroying the ozone layer in earth's upper atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic effects for all life on Earth. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said that his research on ozone had convinced him that the balance of forces on Earth had changed dramatically. It was now "utterly clear," he said, "that human activities had grown so much that they could compete and interfere with natural processes."3 Over the next five years that insight developed until, at an IGBP meeting in 2000, he argued that human activity had driven the earth into a new geological epoch, which he proposed to call the Anthropocene.
Crutzen and...