The Pervasive Power of Story in Climate Change

“Anthropocene” is a great word, an important word in climate change. If we reach back to our high school Earth Science classes, we can recall related words like the Mesozoic or Paleozoic periods—those are geological eras. Eras span hundreds of millions of years. Within eras, we have epochs. The Anthropocene is the current epoch, depending on who you ask.

If you could slice into the Earth’s crust and zoom in on the Anthropocene layer, the human evidence you will see includes radioactive fallout, microplastics, industrial byproducts, urban sediments, technofossils (cell phones and electronics), and tracts of long-lasting and globally distributed chemicals like DDT. It’s not pretty.

The narrative of the Anthroprocene is one where humanity’s effects on the environment are in the Earth’s crust and if we take a good look, we see a story of climate change being written as we as live it.

There is some controversy around this epoch, when it started and if it even exists. The rigor of that conversation spans every academic area we can think of—politics, science, spirituality, art, ethics and philosophy.