Abstract

Between 2000 and 2020, scientists and non-scientists alike gradually embraced the idea that humankind had created a new epoch, the »Anthropocene,« or the age of humans. In 2000, the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer proposed that a new epoch be declared given humankind’s many impacts on the natural environment, particularly climate change. By May 2019, 29 of the 34 members of the Anthropocene Working Group had voted to declare the invention and testing of nuclear weapons as the marker for the end of the Holocene and the beginning of the Anthropocene.