By Dr. Robert Thorson

Let’s revise the geological time scale and create a new epoch called the Anthropocene. This would help spare us from the self-flagellation and negativity about how bad we humans are for the environment. We’re not ruining the environment. We’re reshaping it so rapidly that we’ve created a new geological epoch, even when held up against the standard of deep time.

The environmental writer Bill McKibben was onto this idea when he published “The End of Nature” in 1989. Though I liked the book, I didn’t like the title, which I thought smacked of hyperbolic hubris and was contrary to the “rocks-on-the-table” proofs of the geological record. McKibben emphasized three main problems – greenhouse gases, stratospheric ozone and acid rain – to demonstrate that humans have taken the globe into their own hands and have thus ended Nature, at least in a spiritual sense.

But geologists know that our planet has experienced short-lived, suffocating bouts of greenhouse gas far worse than what we imagine today. They know that the first half of prehistory was a time of hardly any ozone at all. And many geochemists believe that acid rain helped dissolve the dinosaur eggs and poison their world with toxic metals after the great asteroid strike about 65 million years ago. That’s the kind of acid rain we mammals can appreciate.

Ever since pre-history, the bones of frightening beasts and the exotica of unusual shells have been turning up in our backyards. The beasts – which had been interpreted mythically as monsters – were eventually discovered to have been real, but from earlier times. Most famous are the dinosaurs. The exotica – for example the insect-like trilobites of the Cambrian, the stalked sea-lilies of the Silurian and the pearly ammonites of the Jurassic – were used to sort out the Earth’s prehistory long before the actual numerical dating of rocks with radioactive isotopes. Even the early naturalists understood that the story of life on Earth was one of protracted periods of gradual change, punctuated by mass extinctions and abrupt turnovers.

The geological time scale was put together in northern Europe during the 19th century. Blocks of time called epochs, periods, eras and eons were nested one into another. They are analogous to the nested blocks of calendar time we call days, months, years and decades.

It was clear to the developers of the time scale that their world was very unlike the preceding interval when woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, cave bears, giant beavers and club-wielding “cavemen” dominated the land. Hence, they differentiated two fairly recent epochs, the Holocene and the Pleistocene. The Holocene describes the postglacial world now known to be about 11,000-14,000 years long. Pleistocene describes the most recent ice age and the previous cold-to-warm flip-flops that preceded it during the last 2 million years.

Now, a third epoch is needed. The turnover dates to 1780, when the so-called Industrial Revolution was ushered in by widespread use of James Watt’s steam engine. Factories, trains, steamer ships, automobiles and eventually airplanes rapidly evolved, as though new species on the near side of an extinction event, replacing the mill villages, clipper ships, horses and hot-air balloons on the far side.

From then on, he who had steam power had population and military might. Continents were cleared of trees to feed the iron horse. Coal became king. Petroleum juiced the power surge. Nuclear energy zapped it.

In the past two centuries alone, the exponential rises of non-muscle power has allowed us crafty human beings to dominate the terrestrial planet, more significantly than did the dinosaurs of the last days of the Maastrichtian Epoch of the Cretaceous Period of the Mesozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon.

As a consequence, the climate may never go glacial again. A quarter of atmospheric CO(-2) was put there by us. Half the species on Earth may be extinct by the end of the century. Forests are disappearing at an annual rate more than 10 times the surface area of Connecticut. Rivers are no longer the same.

So let’s make it official. Nature hasn’t ended. But the business as usual of the Holocene Epoch has been replaced by the Anthropocene, the age of “man.” There’s no turning back the clock, nor the sands of time.