Further to last week...

Hello everyone! Hope you're all having a good start to your reading week.

At the end of last week's post I asked whether you thought we'd already played the "human card" in defining the Holocene. Now, what I meant by this is that in the very first paragraph of the formal ratification paper for the Holocene (Walker et al 2009), human evolution and activity are recognised as key features of the epoch, alongside climate change, sea-level rise, and faunal migrations. If we've already acknowledged that humans are a key characteristic of the Holocene, why do we need to re-recognise this in the Anthropocene? Isn't the recognition given in the Holocene's ratification enough? Gibbard and Walker (2013) argue without including humanity's impact in the Holocene, the Holocene is simply another interglacial (warm period) alongside many others in the Pleistocene. Human influence is one of the defining features of the last 11,700 years. Therefore, they conclude that during the Quaternary Period (last 2.8 million years), on a climatic basis there is no justification for a new epoch (Gibbard and Walker 2013). Gibbard and Walker (2013) insist this "human card" cannot be used twice over for the Anthropocene...

However, one could argue that the "human card" played in the Anthropocene is very different from the first use in the Holocene. This time around, we're not just recognising human activity, but instead recognising human dominance of Earth Systems and the mass geological forcing that humanity holds. As someone commented on my last post, perhaps a modified version of this "human card" will be played many more times over into the future as human influence on the planet develops and changes.