Despite our early existence compared to Earth’s age (humans have only been around for 200.000 years, whereas the planet emerged 4.6 billion years ago), the mark we are leaving on our world is already pretty obvious.
We’ve started by chopping down trees in order to clear the land for agriculture. Then we’ve settled permanently and created the first civilisations, that is to say, the first cities. We have also managed to develop complex technologies and learned how to use external sources of energy, including fossil fuels, with consequences we would soon find out.
And it was over the last two centuries — which cover the Industrial Revolution (18th century) and “The Great Acceleration” onset around the 1950’s — that the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable.
Humanity has brought about such a planetary change that Paul Crutzen, a Dutch Nobel laureate chemist, could no longer agree that he was living in the Holocene — the current geological epoch which began around 10.000 years ago. So back in 2000, he and a colleague, Eugene Stoermer, decided to coin what they considered to be the new geological epoch we were entering as the Anthropocene — the age of man.
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