The Anthropocene Working Group and the Global Debate Around a New Geological Epoch
This is a book about boundaries, cultural as well as chronostratigraphic. In March 2024 the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) rejected a proposal to establish a new post-Holocene Epoch of the Geological Time Scale. The Holocene-Anthropocene Series boundary would have been defined in a stratotype section in Canada, at a plutonium spike linked to a hydrogen bomb test in 1952. Did this rejection kill off the concept of a (geologically fleeting) time-period characterised by an anthropogenic shift in Earth System dynamics? It did not, and this book is an account of how the geological establishment instead maintained a boundary between itself and the major cultural phenomenon that the Anthropocene has become.
The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) is a sociological study of science in progress, the book itself exemplifying the working group’s determination to transgress the boundaries between geological and broader cultural viewpoints. The volume covers an appropriately broad, and largely extra-geoscientific, range of disciplines, including the organisation and management of science, the history of science and the environment, and sociology in general. It follows the history of the AWG’s formation and its explicitly interdisciplinary composition; the development of its mission and philosophy; and the events leading to the IUGS’s rejection of the proposed new Epoch. Throughout, the emphasis is on the nature of personal and organisational interactions within the Group, with other institutional bodies, and with the rapidly increasing levels of public awareness, debate, and agitation about the Anthropocene and the ‘Great Acceleration’ in global change that started around the 1950s.
As Jan Zalasiewicz (founder and prime mover of the AWG) states in his Foreword, we geoscientists are unaccustomed to being the objects of research; some readers of this book might share his feelings of discomfort. Others will find some of the sociological perspectives (and their jargon) challenging as well as fascinating. Older readers may, like myself, marvel that a chronostratigraphic boundary in 1952 would relegate their own First Appearance Datum to a previous Epoch. But this interdisciplinarity is the whole point, raising questions for geoscientists of how the rest of society views our arcane deliberations over Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Points while the planet’s dynamics run out of control. If you haven’t yet read anything about the Anthropocene, this book is an interesting place to start.
Reviewed by David Smith
DETAILS
BY: Martin Bohle et al. (2025) Springer, 201 pp. (hbk/ebook)
ISBN: 9783031851773
PRICE: £109.99 (hbk), £87.50 (ebook) springer.com
