Prior to the recent human population explosion and the explosive growth of human technology, transitions between geological eons, eras, periods, and epochs were caused by global events such as the onset of widespread glaciation, giant asteroid-induced plant and animal extinctions, or the breakup and reassembly of continents. Only one species, our own, has the dubious distinction of having wrought so much change on the earth as to warrant the naming of a new epoch. And we did it with our internal combustion engines, guns, dams, agricultural clearings, toxins, suburbs, and invasive exotic species. Whether it's the Borocene or the preferred, Homogeocene, the key feature of this new epoch is lack of diversity. As a professional biologist, my main gripe about our having driven the planet into the Homogeocene is the extinction of so many species of plants, mammals, birds, insects, etc.
Biology is the study of life and every day there is less life to study.
At the current rates of deforestation, human population growth, global warming, and toxin production, probably only half of the species present at the end of the last century will still exist at the end of this century. This tragedy is unparalleled in the history of our planet not in the number of extinctions, but in their rapidity and mono-specific causal agent. We shall be odd bed-fellows, but human diversity is disappearing at rates only comparable to the rates of loss of biological diversity. Toppling of the Tower of Babel might seem like a blessing, but so much cultural diversity is lost when a language disappears that loss of even a single native tongue should concern us all. As was probably the case during past transitions between epochs, the onset of the Homogeocene is itself not particularly homogeneous.