How humans became a geological force, told by two earth scientists.
Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin (Yale UP / Pelican, 2018, 465 pages) trace the deep past into the Anthropocene through four threads: the environmental changes we’ve driven, the energy and social transitions behind them, the candidate start-dates for the epoch, and what comes next.
Their famous proposal for the starting gun: 1610, the “Orbis spike”, when the collision of the Americas and Europe (and the death of some 50 million people, with forests regrowing over abandoned farmland) left a measurable dip in the ice cores. A geological epoch that starts with a genocide’s fingerprint.
Their central question: can humans flourish on a rapidly changing planet, or is the future grim survival, or extinction?