{"id":111477,"date":"2026-09-09T18:04:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T22:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=111477"},"modified":"2026-09-09T18:05:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T22:05:01","slug":"opinion-jan-zalasiewicz-colin-waters-and-martin-head-discuss-the-anthropocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2026\/09\/opinion-jan-zalasiewicz-colin-waters-and-martin-head-discuss-the-anthropocene\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Waters and Martin Head discuss the Anthropocene"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece written by Jan Zalasiewicz, Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester; Colin Waters, Honorary Professor of Geology at the University of Leicester; and Martin Head, Professor of Earth Sciences at Brock University,<\/em>\u00a0originally appeared in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Anthropocene\u00a0became part of the zeitgeist after Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen launched the idea in 2000. This is the notion that a crescendo of human impacts has recently propelled the Earth out of the relatively stable climatic conditions of the Holocene epoch, during which human civilisation developed and flourished, to produce a new kind of planet.<\/p>\n

Then, the idea seemingly crashed to earth in 2024 when the International Commission on Stratigraphy\u00a0rejected\u00a0its incorporation into the official geological timescale. So where are we now? Has our planet not changed? Is the Anthropocene idea dead? One can be forgiven for being confused.<\/p>\n

But the Anthropocene was never only a question of what to call a chunk of geological time. The planet we live on is becoming hotter, more polluted, biologically degraded and its surface and underground increasingly reshaped by human activities. Once the stuff of sci-fi, these symptoms are now real and won\u2019t disappear \u2013 they\u2019re ever more a matter of life and death for millions of people.<\/p>\n

We and our co-authors have just published two articles in the journal\u00a0Nature Reviews Earth & Environment\u00a0that explore these questions from different angles. One\u00a0details the evidence\u00a0presented in our 2023 proposal to make the Anthropocene a new formal epoch: evidence then scrutinised in closed session by the geological bodies sitting in judgment, but only now published in peer-reviewed form. Over a hundred lines of evidence, from 12 exhaustively studied locations around the world, show that, geologically, the Anthropocene is rock solid.<\/p>\n

The Earth really did change, as an interconnected system, in the mid-20th century; and a level dated to 1952, when the first thermonuclear blast spread plutonium particles worldwide, marks an effective geological boundary for this new time interval. The evidence presented was not disputed. The official rejection was instead over whether a geological epoch \u2013 usually measured in millions of years (though the Holocene epoch is less than 12 millennia) \u2013 should be declared after just seven decades.<\/p>\n

The idea is still spreading<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our second study looks beyond this question of formal geological status, charting the Anthropocene as\u00a0an idea that is still spreading and making waves. In recent years, dedicated institutes and networks have sprung up in Stockholm, Jena, Vienna, Daejeon and Beijing. And their strength lies in bringing different disciplines together, where the social sciences and humanities are as \u2013 or more \u2013 important than the Earth sciences.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s good reason for this. The science of the Anthropocene is multi-faceted and sophisticated. Yet the patterns that emerge are often astonishingly simple: human activity accelerated in all sorts of ways at roughly the same time. The iconic\u00a0hockey-stick-shaped graph\u00a0of rising global temperature has many counterparts, whether charting the rise of plastics and aluminium production, the consumption of supermarket chickens, or the use of telecommunications.<\/p>\n

These are all aspects of the so-called\u00a0\u201cgreat acceleration\u201d: the rapid growth, since the mid-20th-century, of population, industrialisation and globalisation that transformed humanity\u2019s impact on the Earth. This simple pattern of steep growth pervades the Anthropocene \u2013 but its human causes and consequences are much harder to pin down. Myriad interlocking forces are at work here, analysed by such disciplines as history, economics, law, education and politics, and explored by literature and the arts.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not simply academic analysis. We need to influence this planetary transformation, avoiding the worst-case scenario of a\u00a0hothouse Earth, and mitigating changes that are unavoidable. Take the international law of the sea, that underpins the regulation of national boundaries and of rights over maritime spaces. For four centuries, this assumed a context of changing human politics and nations, but a stable configuration of land and sea\u00a0\u201csince time immemorial\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the Anthropocene, this stability no longer holds: melting sea ice, rising seas and eroding coasts are altering the geography on which some of those rules were based. Legal scholars are having to devise new ways of\u00a0adapting international law, aimed at upholding rights and keeping the peace on a fast-evolving planet. To prepare us all for the challenges ahead, educationalists are designing\u00a0curricula\u00a0that can allow students, present and future, to cope with a world where many old certainties no longer hold.<\/p>\n

Seeing the planet as a whole<\/strong><\/p>\n

But is the Anthropocene needed? After all, its individual features, such as climate transformation, sea-level rise, global freshwater use, biodiversity loss and\u00a0homogenisation, concrete production, and technological hyper-evolution, are actively being studied.<\/p>\n

The problem is that these issues are not separate (even if they\u2019re often treated as such in our still-siloed knowledge framework). They\u2019re all tightly interconnected and all part of a single Earth system that is transforming as a whole. Hence, our analysis \u2013 and our political responses \u2013 need to be systemic, and not ad hoc, simply firefighting each symptom as it flares up. No other concept reflects this planet-wide transformation in its proper context of deep time.<\/p>\n

Does the Anthropocene need to be formal? Well, this would help greatly. The Anthropocene has gathered many interpretations since it was first proposed, some very different from its original, essential meaning of a marked departure from Holocene stability. Formal stabilisation would help us all talk about the same thing: a useful quality, when it refers to the planet we all share.
\n\"The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jan Zalasiewicz, Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester; Colin Waters, Honorary Professor of Geology at the University of Leicester; and Martin Head, Professor of Earth Sciences at Brock University, recently published a piece in The Conversation discussing how the idea of the Anthropocene is changing how people see the world. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":111480,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,41],"tags":[4425,5512],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111477"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111477"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111481,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111477\/revisions\/111481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}