Welcome to the Anthropocene

After 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, what does it mean to have arrived at this point in history, the Anthropocene? The change has come upon us with disorienting speed. It is the kind of shift that typically takes two or three or four generations to sink in. Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is unfolding, that the life-support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our survival. Yet in the face of these facts we carry on as usual. Most citizens ignore or downplay the warnings; many of our intellectuals indulge in wishful thinking; and some influential voices declare that nothing at all is happening, that the scientists are deceiving us. Yet