The Depth of Winter
3/14/24 – Remembering the beauty of the hard season here in the north
Hello everyone:
Given the name of my writing project here, I should note that a geological committee has, for now, voted down the proposal to name a new Anthropocene epoch on the geologic time scale. To be clear, though, they do not oppose the idea of the Anthropocene. The planet-shaping reality of our impacts isn’t in question. What a majority of committee members opposed, for technical reasons, was the dating of the Anthropocene to the mid-20th-century. Humans, after all, have been modifying the planet at scale for far longer than that. So the scientific discussion continues, even as the transformation intensifies. “We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale,” one scientist told the Times. “And behaving accordingly is our only path forward.”
A reminder: For those of you interested in listening to rather than reading these Field Guide essays, I have finally recorded a few recent ones: Running AMOC, Who is We?, and Co…
