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How long does it take to fall in love?
Minutes, days, years?
Is there a specific moment, a cross on the calendar, that marks the point of no return at which you no longer need that person?
This week it became official: geologists have definitively shelved the Anthropocene and I, naturally, thought about love.
The proposal that was worked on for 15 years implied that we have entered a new geological epoch, marked by human activity.
But stratigraphers, who determine where we are by looking at the layers of the sediment cake, consider that we still belong to the Holocene.
It is a highly discussed decision that is reminiscent of the demotion of Pluto to a planetoid: there are those who understand it as an academic arbitrariness that arouses a defensive response.
An editorial in
Nature
, a beacon of global science, points out that the decision “has created confusion and concern, because the term is understood and widely used by scientists, as well as by people outside of research, to refer to a moment in the history of the Earth in which humans are having serious biophysical impacts on the planet.”
Geologists had considered 1950 as the determining date: the year in which the Anthropocene began and the Holocene ended, due to the peak of plutonium from the detonation of atomic bombs.
Hadn't we left a mark on the planet before?
That's why I ask myself, at what moment did
my girl leave a
lasting mark on me?
Was it with her flirtations on Facebook, with her first kiss, when I went to live with her in Tenerife, when our first daughter was born?
It has changed my life, I already live in another vital era, it is indisputable.
But it is not easy to locate that turning point.
In the first scientific discussions about the Anthropocene, the example was given of a bridge over the Missouri River, which would have begun to be built in the Holocene and had been completed in the Anthropocene.
The same object that belongs to two geological epochs perfectly locates the absurdity of the approach.
Meanwhile, the concept has been consolidated in all the sciences, because it defines very well an indisputable fact: that humanity has profoundly transformed the planet.
It is not just the impact of fossil fuels, radionuclides dispersed globally by atomic weapons or synthetic materials such as plastics dispersed globally.
If we put all human constructions on the planet on a scale, they would weigh the same as all terrestrial life combined, from whales to sequoias.
Three quarters of the Earth's surface have already been transformed by our hands and machines, and a very small percentage of ecosystems remain unaltered.
The skies and waters are polluted (the biggest surprise of the pellet crisis was discovering that this happens all the time on all coasts).
The planet's circulatory system is weakening, with the main ocean current that regulates the climate, the Atlantic, close to collapse.
Seven of the nine thresholds that allow human life on Earth have already been surpassed.
No wild animals
Not to mention the animals.
We have eaten the canary in the mine of planetary risk fried in a KFC: only 6% of mammals and 29% of birds are wild animals, the gigantic majority are livestock and poultry.
We are accelerating a new mass extinction of species recorded on the planet.
The Sixth Extinction
, specifically, which is also the title of the book that popularized this catastrophic event and that earned its author, Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer: “The term Anthropocene encapsulates our new relationship with the planet.
The impacts of humanity now rival the great forces such as volcanism, erosion or plate tectonics, which have shaped the Earth for billions of years,” the author, BBVA Foundation Biophilia Prize winner, responds by email.
And she remembers a conversation with Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, the Dutch chemist who brought the term into scientific debate: “He once told me that he wanted it to serve as a warning to the world.
“It’s a good way to look at it.”
When Crutzen raised this concept for the first time, it was the result of a heated debate, in the midst of a heated debate on the human impact on the environment sponsored by the United Nations.
Someone kept mentioning the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago: “After hearing that term many times, I lost my temper, and interrupted the speaker,” Crutzen recalled in
Christian Schwägerl's
The Anthropocene .
One witness remembers what he said exactly: “Stop using the word Holocene.
We are no longer in the Holocene.
We are in the… the… the… (searching for the correct word)… the Anthropocene!”
Faced with Crutzen's spontaneous outburst, the geologists go at their own pace.
The New York Times
reports
that they are still trying to decide the exact date of the beginning of the Late Pleistoncene, 130,000 years ago.
As the only Spaniard in the Anthropocene Working Group, Alejandro Cearreta, told me when we first reported on this: “We are slow to act, our unit of time is the million years.”
A runaway planet
The Earth is already what a single species has caused it to be.
An alien who had passed through here 300,000 years ago and returned today would be amazed.
He would be a very long-lived alien, that too.
And he would have witnessed the first steps of another species of primate, but which is now capable of modifying life from within, editing the very DNA of creatures, and even generating artificial intelligence, creating life forms that did not exist and to destroy everything that exists completely.
Until a few decades ago, humanity could not destroy itself and now it has a handful of methods at its disposal.
But it is also capable of interacting with other worlds: we have taken humans to the Moon and artifacts to all the neighboring planets.
We have even diverted an asteroid artificially.
In geological terms, we are one step away from being a multiplanetary species, as Elon Musk likes to say, who wants to lead us to create another Anthropocene on Mars with the same colonial, extractive and unsustainable mentality that has led us to the current global crisis.
Fly to planet B to destroy it and need planet C.
Kolbert believes the concept serves to shape the idea of a sustainable future: “It makes clear that we are responsible for the fate of the planet, even if we don't really control it.”
As he explains, we are determining its future, but that does not mean we have the reins, because we are running away with natural cycles: “The more we control nature, the less real control we have over it.”
Macroecologist David Nogués-Bravo, who studies the past to predict the future, is sure that the term is still valid for all fields of science because it is “really useful, in a variety of disciplines, as a way of thinking about relations between humans and the planet.”
And he goes into more detail: “It creates a powerful narrative that is supported by scientific evidence, and that is that the changes we are seeing on the planet, from climate change to the accelerated loss of biodiversity, are the direct effect of the disastrous management of natural resources. ”.
The concept was popularized in 2011 by a cover of
The Economist
magazine , which is not exactly the Garibaldi tavern in Lavapiés, and which last year warned that the real problem is not when the Anthropocene began, but how it will end.
The Cretaceous ended with a gigantic crater at Chicxulub and with the tyrannosaur's cousins evolving into poultry.
But it is not necessary to be pessimistic, on the contrary: warm-ups like Crutzen's are very helpful.
He won the Nobel Prize along with the Mexican Mario Molina for warning about what was happening to the ozone layer, an existential danger that humanity was capable of solving.
In that sense, the
Nature
editorial warns: “There is no doubt that the world is in an Anthropocene (...) and that it is necessary to correct course.”
Perhaps the best thing is that the Anthropocene is not a geological stratum, but a much less rigid social, cultural and scientific concept.
There is no single experience that defines love.
If we compress the history of planet Earth, its 4.5 billion years, into a single year, human civilization appeared the last second before midnight on December 31.
Can one fall in love in a second?
And leave a mark forever on the planet?
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