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Paul Crutzen, who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for work on the Ozone layer. The Anthropocene refers to "the current epoch in which humans and our societies have become a global geophysical force" (Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill 614). The scale of humanity's effect on the earth has risen from the local scale to the global.
In addition, humanity is losing the ability to control the effects that it is having. It is no longer enough just to "stop" negative behavior or to have a "sustainable" relationship to the environment. As MacKenzie Wark says, "The human is no longer that figure in the foreground which pursues its self-interest against the background of a wholistic, organicist cycle that the human might perturb but with which it can remain in balance and harmony, in the end, by simply withdrawing from certain excesses" (Wark xii).
The start of the Anthropocene is usually taken to be the year 1800, marking the rise of industrialization in the Western World. Specifically, Crutzen et al. designate the increase of atmospheric CO2 as the main indication of the influence of humanity on nature. They state that a rise of around 25 ppm of CO2 from 1800 to 1945 indicates humanity's influence greater than the margin of error for such studies (Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill 616). Changes in the measurement of CO2 are used to divide the Anthropocene into three stages: Stage 1, 1800-1945; Stage 2, the Great Acceleration, from 1945-2015, marks the entrance of the Earth into the sixth great event of extinction (617); and Stage 3, from 2015 onward, which is defined by taking the Anthropocene into consideration when making public policy (Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill 618-9). Although the timing of Stage 3 is a bit hopeful (the study was published in 2007), the concept of the Anthropocene has become rather wide-spread, although not officially adopted (our current era is the Holocene, which started around 12,000 years ago).
In Capitalism and the Web of Life Jason Moore states that starting the Anthropocene with the rise of industrialization "makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity's strategic relations of power and production. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all" (Moore 170). Limiting the Anthropocene to problems arising from industrialization limits its solutions to those also located in industrialization; as Moore says, "to locate the origins of the modern world with the steam engine and the coal pit is to prioritize shutting down the steam engines and the coal pits (and their twenty-first century alternatives)" (Moore 172).
Donna Haraway suggests for the "Chthulucene" to replace the Anthropocene. She asks, "when do changes in degree become changes in kind, and what are the effects of bioculturally, biotechnically, biopolitically, historically situation people (not Man) relative to, and combined with, the effects of other species assemblages and other biotic/abiotic forces?" (Haraway 159). Haraway's term foregrounds both the interconnectedness and the strangeness of many different scales. As she says, "'my' Chthulucene…entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages – including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus…Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses" (ibid.).
J.G. Ballard’s The Drought With the death of the river, so would vanish any contact between those stranded on the drained floor. For the present the need to find some other measure of their relationships would be concealed by the problems of their own physical survival. None the less, Ransom was certain that the absence of this great moderator, which cast its bridges between all animate and inanimate objects alike, would prove of crucial importance. Each of them would soon literally be an island in an archipelago drained of time. (Ballard 1968: 11-12)
The cause of this fission of qualities is nuclear waste, meaning a significance decrease in precipitation due to "a thin but resilient mono-molecular film formed from a complex of saturated long-chain polymers, generated with the sea from the vast quantities of industrial wastes discharged into the ocean basins during the previous fifty years" (31). The "millions of tons of highly reactive industrial wastes" which formed this film includes "unwanted petroleum fractions, contaminated catalysts and solvents" which "mingled with the wastes of atomic power stations and sewage schemes" (ibid.). This film covers enough of the world's oceans to disrupt the cycle of precipitation. The film creeps back after all attempts to clean it.
They set off along the coast road below the cliffs. The motor camps stretched ahead of them to the right, the backs of trailers jutting out over the empty pavement. On the left, where the cliffs had been cut back at intervals to provide small lay-bys, single families squatted under make-shift awnings, out of sight of sea and sky, gazing at the camps separating them from the beach" (Ballard 1968: 91).
Even when Ransom drives to the top of a small hill, he cannot see the end of the crowd: Half a mile ahead they climbed a small rise, and could see the endless extent of the camps, reaching far into the haze beyond the cape ten miles away" (Ballard 1968: 92).
