Obsessing over the Anthropocene’s “golden spike” misses the point of the Anthropocene

This is a good write-up of the latest step in the long and somewhat contentious process of making the Anthropocene “official”:

In the same week as the world’s population ticked over to 8 billion people, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) began voting on a short list of locations around the world they believe contain evidence showing when the Anthropocene began.

That said, I must confess that I dislike how most media discussion of the Anthropocene nowadays seems to overly focus on the search for the ‘golden spike’, which is actually beside the point for 99% of people.

Both of these things are true:

1. Humans are a geological force. The signs of this fact are everywhere we look, and we urgently need to grapple with it.
2. This is so recent from a geological perspective that the rock record is only just starting to register this fact.

I’d strongly argue that the first is much more important: the decisions we make now determine our planet’s geologic future. Yet all the focus is the pettifogging debate over the second, and the implication that the Anthropocene is not ‘real’ unless and until everyone agrees on a single point where we can label it is really dangerous.

It’s hard to draw a boundary on a transition you’re in the middle of. Cockroach geologists millions of years hence will have no trouble discerning the signal our civilisation is generating in rocks forming right now. I’d be perfectly content to leave the golden spike to them.