A better Anthropocene?

[Extract] Every now and then a concept comes along that shifts fundamentally, and in an enduring way, the ways in which we think and act. Rather more often, concepts come along that promise much but change little. Concepts that look set to capture the zeitgeist only to prove passing fads. Misdirections perhaps. Reinventions of the wheel. Unnecessary layers of semantic complication. So what is it with the Anthropocene? Useful neologism or gratuitous jargon? There is no doubting the popularity of the term among environmental scientists and social scientists. Increasingly common reference to ‘the Anthropocene’ in publications across the natural and social sciences suggests scholars have accepted, by-and-large, the basic proposition that we humans have become a force of nature in our own right (Steffen et al.2007).It suggests we have accepted that our interventions in the Earth’s biosphere are now so profound as to be written in its geological record. That the likely con-sequences are so great as to threaten undermining the climatic and ecological stability characteristic of the Holocene inter-glacial period. The great irony (or tragedy) in this being that we enter a period of heightened uncertainty which is entirely of our own making