Global Action Plan International

From an article by Mike Davis, June 2008

The world’s foremost commission of earth scientists says:

We are now living in the Anthropocene epoch.

The Holocene epoch – the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization – has ended, and the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.”

The London Society is the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes."

This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments.