24 Jan 2011: Opinion 
 
 Living in the Anthropocene: 
 
 Toward a New Global Ethos 
 
 A decade ago, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen first suggested we were living in the “Anthropocene,” a new geological epoch in which humans had altered the planet. Now, in an article for Yale Environment 360, Crutzen and a coauthor explain why adopting this term could help transform the perception of our role as stewards of the Earth. 
 
 by paul j. crutzen and christian schwägerl 
 
 It’s no longer us against ‘Nature.’ It’s we who decide what nature is what it will be. 
 
 To accommodate the Western lifestyle for 9 billion people, we’d need several more planets. 
 
 We must build a culture that grows with Earth’s biological wealth instead of depleting it. 
 
 MORE FROM YALE e360 The Anthropocene Debate: 
 
 Marking Humanity’s Impact Elizabeth Kolbert writes that scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene. 
 
 READ MORE Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Journalistwrites that scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene. 
 
 It’s a pity we’re still officially living in an age called the Holocene. The Anthropocene — human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth — is already an undeniable reality. Evidence is mounting that the name change suggested by one of us more than ten years ago is overdue. It may still take some time for the scientific body in charge of naming big stretches of time in Earth’s history, the International Commission on Stratigraphy , to make up its mind about this name change. But that shouldn’t stop us from seeing and learning what it means to live in this new Anthropocene epoch, on a planet that is being anthroposized at high speed.For millennia, humans have behaved as rebels against a superpower we call “Nature.” In the 20th century, however, new technologies, fossil fuels, and a fast-growing population resulted in a “Great Acceleration” of our own powers. Albeit clumsily, we are taking control of Nature’s realm, from climate to DNA. We humans are becoming the dominant force for change on Earth. A long-held religious and philosophical idea — humans as the masters of planet Earth — has turned into a stark reality. What we do now already affects the planet of the year 3000 or even 50,000.Changing the climate for millennia to come is just one aspect. By cutting down rainforests, moving mountains to access coal deposits and acidifying coral reefs, we fundamentally change the biology and the geology of the planet. While driving uncountable numbers of species to extinction, we create new life forms through gene technology, and, soon, through synthetic biology.Human population will approach ten billion within the century. We spread our man-made ecosystems, including “mega-regions” with more than 100million inhabitants, as landscapes characterized by heavy human use — degraded agricultural lands, industrial wastelands, and recreational landscapes — become characteristic of Earth’s terrestrial surface. We infuse huge quantities of synthetic chemicals and persistent waste into Earth’s metabolism. Where wilderness remains, it’s often only because exploitation is still unprofitable. Conservation management turns wild animals into a new form of pets.Geographers Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty argue we are no longer disturbing natural ecosystems. Instead, we now live in “human systems with natural ecosystems embedded within them.” The long-held barriers between nature and culture are breaking down. It’s no longer us against “Nature.” Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be.To master this huge shift, we must change the way we perceive ourselves and our role in the world. Students in school are still taught that we are living in the Holocence, an era that began roughly 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. But teaching students that we are living in the Anthropocene, the Age of Men, could be of great help. Rather than representing yet another sign of human hubris, this name change would stress the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as stewards of the Earth. It would highlight the immense power of our intellect and our creativity, and the opportunities they offer for shaping the future.If one looks at how technology and cultures have changed since 1911, it seems that almost anything is possible by the year 2111. We are confident that the young generation of today holds the key to transforming our energy and production systems from wasteful to renewable and to valuing life in its diverse forms. The awareness of living in the Age of Men could inject some desperately needed eco-optimism into our societies.What then does it mean to live up to the challenges of the Anthropocene? We’d like to suggest three avenues for consideration:First, we must learn to grow in different ways than with our current hyper-consumption. What we now call economic “growth” amounts too often to a Great Recession for the web of life we depend on. Gandhi pointed out that“the Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man’s greed.” To accommodate the current Western lifestyle for 9 billion people, we’d need several more planets. With countries worldwide striving to attain the “American Way of Life,” citizens of the West should redefine it — and pioneer a modest, renewable, mindful, and less material lifestyle. That includes, first and foremost, cutting the consumption of industrially produced meat and changing from private vehicles to public transport.Second, we must far surpass our current investments in science and technology. Our troubles will deepen exponentially if we fail to replace the wasteful fossil-fueled infrastructure of today with a system fueled by solar energy in its many forms, from artificial photosynthesis to fusion energy. We need bio-adaptive technologies to render “waste” a thing of the past, among them compostable cars and gadgets. We need innovations tailored to the needs of the poorest, for example new plant varieties that can withstand climate change and robust iPads packed with practical agricultural advice and market information for small-scale farmers. Global agriculture must become high-tech and organic at the same time, allowing farms to benefit from the health of natural habitats. We also need to develop technologies to recycle substances like phosphorus, a key element for fertilizers and therefore for food security.To prevent conflicts over resources and to progress towards a durable “bio-economy” will require a collaborative mission that dwarfs the Apollo program. Global military expenditure reached 1,531 billion U.S. dollars in 2009, an increase of 49 percent compared to 2000. We must invest at least as much in understanding, managing, and restoring our “green security system” — the intricate network of climate, soil, and biodiversity. To reduceCO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to safe levels, we need to move towards “negative emissions,” e.g. by using plant residues in power plants with carbon capture and storage technology . We also need to develop geoengineering capabilities in order to be prepared for worst-case scenarios. In addition to cutting industrial CO2 emissions and protecting forests, large investments will be needed to maintain the huge carbon stocks in fertile soils, currently depleted by exploitative agricultural practices. For biodiversity, green remnants in a sea of destruction will not be enough — we need to build a “green infrastructure,” where organisms and genes can flow freely over vast areas and maintain biological functions.Finally, we should adapt our culture to sustaining what can be called the “world organism.” This phrase was not coined by an esoteric Gaia guru, but by eminent German scientist Alexander von Humboldt some 200 years ago. Humboldt wanted us to see how deeply interlinked our lives are with the richness of nature, hoping that we would grow our capacities as a part of this world organism, not at its cost. His message suggests we should shift our mission from crusade to management, so we can steer nature’s course symbiotically instead of enslaving the formerly natural world.Until now, our behaviors have defied the goals of a functioning and fruitful Anthropocene. But at the end of 2010, two United Nations environmental summits offered some hope for progress. In October, in Nagoya, Japan, 193 governments agreed on a strategic plan for global conservation that includes protecting an unprecedented proportion of Earth’s ecosystemsand removing ecologically harmful subsidies by 2020. And in December, in Cancún , countries agreed that Earth must not warm more than 2 degrees Celsius above the average temperature level before industrialization. This level is already very risky — it implies higher temperature increases in polar regions and therefore greater chance of thawing in permafrost regions, which could release huge amounts of CO2 and methane. But at least, Cancún and Nagoya turned out not to be cul-de-sacs for environmental policy. After years of stalemate and the infamous Copenhagen collapse , there is now at least a glimmer of hope that humanity can act together. Between now and 2020, however, the commitments on paper must be turned into real action.Imagine our descendants in the year 2200 or 2500. They might liken us to aliens who have treated the Earth as if it were a mere stopover for refueling, or even worse, characterize us as barbarians who would ransack their own home. Living up to the Anthropocene means building a culture that grows with Earth’s biological wealth instead of depleting it. Remember, in this new era, nature is us. ||||| Experts say human impact on Earth so profound that Holocene must give way to epoch defined by nuclear tests, plastic pollution and domesticated chicken 
 
 Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday. 
 
 The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration. 
 
 The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene. 
 
 “The significance of the Anthropocene is that it sets a different trajectory for the Earth system, of which we of course are part,” said Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester and chair of the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), which started work in 2009. 
 
 “If our recommendation is accepted, the Anthropocene will have started just a little before I was born,” he said. “We have lived most of our lives in something called the Anthropocene and are just realising the scale and permanence of the change.” 
 
 Prof Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and WGA secretary, said: “Being able to pinpoint an interval of time is saying something about how we have had an incredible impact on the environment of our planet. The concept of the Anthropocene manages to pull all these ideas of environmental change together.” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest High levels of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, derived from artificial fertilisers, could be taken as evidence of the onset of the Anthropocene. Photograph: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters 
 
 Prof Chris Rapley, a climate scientist at University College London and former director of the Science Museum in London said: “The Anthropocene marks a new period in which our collective activities dominate the planetary machinery. 
 
 “Since the planet is our life support system – we are essentially the crew of a largish spaceship – interference with its functioning at this level and on this scale is highly significant. If you or I were crew on a smaller spacecraft, it would be unthinkable to interfere with the systems that provide us with air, water, fodder and climate control. But the shift into the Anthropocene tells us that we are playing with fire, a potentially reckless mode of behaviour which we are likely to come to regret unless we get a grip on the situation.” Rapley is not part of the WGA. 
 
 Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and former president of the Royal Society, said that the dawn of the Anthropocene was a significant moment. “The darkest prognosis for the next millennium is that bio, cyber or environmental catastrophes could foreclose humanity’s immense potential, leaving a depleted biosphere,” he said. 
 
 The Anthropocene epoch could inaugurate even more marvellous eras of evolution Read more 
 
 But Lord Rees added that there is also cause for optimism. “Human societies could navigate these threats, achieve a sustainable future, and inaugurate eras of post-human evolution even more marvellous than what’s led to us. The dawn of the Anthropocene epoch would then mark a one-off transformation from a natural world to one where humans jumpstart the transition to electronic (and potentially immortal) entities, that transcend our limitations and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth.” 
 
 The evidence of humanity’s impact on the planet is overwhelming, but the changes are very recent in geological terms, where an epoch usually spans tens of millions of years. “One criticism of the Anthropocene as geology is that it is very short,” said Zalasiewicz. “Our response is that many of the changes are irreversible.” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Human activity has left a permanent layer of airborne particulates in sediment and glacial ice. Photograph: Pool/Reuters 
 
 To define a new geological epoch, a signal must be found that occurs globally and will be incorporated into deposits in the future geological record. For example, the extinction of the dinosaurs 66m years ago at the end of the Cretaceous epoch is defined by a “golden spike” in sediments around the world of the metal iridium, which was dispersed from the meteorite that collided with Earth to end the dinosaur age. 
 
 For the Anthropocene, the best candidate for such a golden spike are radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests, which were blown into the stratosphere before settling down to Earth. “The radionuclides are probably the sharpest – they really come on with a bang,” said Zalasiewicz. “But we are spoiled for choice. There are so many signals.” 
 
 Other spikes being considered as evidence of the onset of the Anthropocene include the tough, unburned carbon spheres emitted by power stations. “The Earth has been smoked, with signals very clearly around the world in the mid-20th century,” said Zalasiewicz. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Another candidate to be considered as evidence of the Anthropocene is plastic pollution. Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Other candidates include plastic pollution, aluminium and concrete particles, and high levels of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, derived from artificial fertilisers. Although the world is currently seeing only the sixth mass extinction of species in the 700m-year history of complex life on Earth, this is unlikely to provide a useful golden spike as the animals are by definition very rare and rarely dispersed worldwide. 
 
 In contrast, some species have with human help spread rapidly across the world. The domestic chicken is a serious contender to be a fossil that defines the Anthropocene for future geologists. “Since the mid-20th century, it has become the world’s most common bird. It has been fossilised in thousands of landfill sites and on street corners around the world,” said Zalasiewicz. “It is is also a much bigger bird with a different skeleton than its prewar ancestor.” 
 
 The 35 scientists on the WGA – who voted 30 to three in favour of formally designating the Anthropocene, with two abstentions – will now spend the next two to three years determining which signals are the strongest and sharpest. Crucially, they must also decide a location which will define the start of the Anthropocene. Geological divisions are not defined by dates but by a specific boundary between layers of rock or, in the case of the Holocene, a boundary between two ice layers in a core taken from Greenland and now stored in Denmark. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The domestic chicken is a serious contender to be a fossil that defines the Anthropocene for future geologists. Photograph: Alamy 
 
 The scientists are focusing on sites where annual layers are formed and are investigating mud sediments off the coast of Santa Barbara in California and the Ernesto cave in northern Italy, where stalactites and stalagmites accrete annual rings. Lake sediments, ice cores from Antarctica, corals, tree rings and even layers of rubbish in landfill sites are also being considered. 
 
 Once the data has been assembled, it will be formally submitted to the stratigraphic authorities and the Anthropocene could be officially adopted within a few years. “If we were very lucky and someone came forward with, say, a core from a classic example of laminated sediments in a deep marine environment, I think three years is possibly viable,” said Zalasiewicz. 
 
 How the domestic chicken rose to define the Anthropocene Read more 
 
 This would be lightning speed for such a geological decision, which in the past would have taken decades and even centuries to make. The term Anthropocene was coined only in 2000, by the Nobel prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen, who believes the name change is overdue. He said in 2011: “This name change stresses the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as stewards of the Earth.” Crutzen also identified in 2007 what he called the “great acceleration” of human impacts on the planet from the mid-20th century. 
 
 Despite the WGA’s expert recommendation, the declaration of the Anthropocene is not yet a foregone conclusion. “Our stratigraphic colleagues are very protective of the geological time scale. They see it very rightly as the backbone of geology and they do not amend it lightly,” said Zalasiewicz. “But I think we can prepare a pretty good case.” 
 
 Rapley also said there was a strong case: “It is highly appropriate that geologists should pay formal attention to a change in the signal within sedimentary rock layers that will be clearly apparent to future generations of geologists for as long as they exist. The ‘great acceleration’ constitutes a strong, detectable and incontrovertible signal.” 
 
 Evidence of the Anthropocene 
 
 Human activity has: 
 
 Pushed extinction rates of animals and plants far above the long-term average. The Earth is on course to see 75% of species become extinct in the next few centuries if current trends continue. 
 
 Increased levels of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere at the fastest rate for 66m years, with fossil-fuel burning pushing levels from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 400ppm and rising today. 
 
 Put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles are now virtually ubiquitous, and plastics will likely leave identifiable fossil records for future generations to discover. 
 
 Doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils in the past century with fertiliser use. This is likely to be the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5bn years. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| The rapid industrialisation of the last century has caused the Earth to enter its first new geological epoch in more than 11,500 years, scientists believe. 
 
 An international team of researchers say the worldwide spread of plastics, new metals and concrete, combined with manmade climate change, has pushed the planet into the Anthropocene epoch. 
 
 While human activity has left visible traces on the Earth since before the current Holocene epoch, which begun around 9,700 BC, the scientists argue that the recent changes to global systems are sufficiently simultaneous and significant to justify the adoption of a new geological time unit characterised by human domination. ||||| A composite image of the Western hemisphere of the Earth. Credit: NASA The human impact on Earth's chemistry and climate has cut short the 11,700-year-old geological epoch known as the Holocene and ushered in a new one, scientists said Monday. 
 
 The Anthropocene, or "new age of man," would start from the mid-20th century if their recommendation—submitted Monday to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa—is adopted. 
 
 That approval process is likely to take at least two years and requires ratification by three other academic bodies. 
 
 But after seven years of deliberation, the 35-strong Working Group has unanimously recognised the Anthropocene as a reality, and voted 30-to-three (with two abstentions) for the transition to be officially registered. 
 
 "Our working model is that the optimal boundary is the mid-20th century," said Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester. 
 
 "If adopted—and we're a long way from that—the Holocene would finish and the Anthropocene would formally be held to have begun." 
 
 Scientists refer to the period starting from 1950 as the "Great Acceleration", and a glance at graphs tracking a number of chemical and socio-economic changes make it obvious why. 
 
 Concentrations in the air of carbon dioxide, methane and stratospheric ozone; surface temperatures, ocean acidification, marine fish harvesting, and tropical forest loss; population growth, construction of large dams, international tourism—all of them take off from about mid-century. 
 
 One of the main culprits is global warming driven by the burning of fossil fuels. 
 
 A telltale surge in the spread of invasive plant and animal species is also a legacy of our species. 
 
 But the working group is not allowed to take any of these measures into consideration unless they show up in the geological record. 
 
 If it can't be measured in rocks, lake sediments, ice cores, or other such formations—the criteria used to determine dozens of distinct eons, era, periods and ages going back four billion years—it doesn't count. 
 
 This, however, is not a problem when it comes to the Anthropocene, said Zalasiewicz. 
 
 "We are spoiled for choice," he told AFP. "There's a whole array of potential signals out there." 
 
 Micro-plastics, for example—a synthetic, man-made substance—"are now components of sediment around the world, both in land and in the sea." 
 
 And the rise in atmospheric CO2 shows up in ice cores reaching back tens of thousands of years. 
 
 Golden spike 
 
 Past shifts in the biosphere—the realm of the living—show up in sediment and rock, especially mass extinctions marking boundaries when up to 95 percent of all lifeforms disappeared within the geological blink of an eye. 
 
 The wipeout of non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period is one such die off, though far from the most dramatic. 
 
 The word "Anthropocene"—first proposed in 2002 by Nobel chemistry laureate Paul Crutzen—has been adopted by environmentalists as a rallying cry against Big Oil, and is viewed by some conservatives as a stalking horse for what they see as aggressive, economy-choking policies to combat climate change. 
 
 There are sceptical scientists too. 
 
 "The drive to officially recognise the Anthropocene may, in fact, be political rather than scientific," said Stanley Finney, a professor at California State University at Long Beach and chair of the International Commission on Stratigraphy—one of the bodies that must validate the new epoch. 
 
 Finney's main objection is that not enough time has elapsed for a new epoch. 
 
 "It's duration is that of an average human lifespan," he wrote in a pointed commentary, published by the Geological Society of America. 
 
 If the Anthropocene is voted into existence, scientists will have to pick a "golden spike" to mark the transition. 
 
 The spike nails down a date, but also pinpoints a primary "signal" at a specific location. 
 
 The working group was divided on what that essential signal might be, but traces of nuclear bomb explosions emerged as a favourite. 
 
 As for what form the evidence will take, Zalasiewicz said it is still early days. "Fast-growing coral form a layered archive that traps chemistry nicely," he noted. 
 
 To mark the start of the Holocene, scientists chose an ice core sample drilled in 2003 from the central Greenland ice sheet at coordinates 75.10 degrees N/42.32 degrees W. 
 
 The core is archived in a freezer at the University of Copenhagen. 
 
 Explore further: Search is on for 'golden spike' signaling start of Anthropocene ||||| The duties of the Anthropocene Working Group—a thirty-nine-member branch of a subcommission of a commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences—are both tedious and heady. As the group’s chairman, Jan Zalasiewicz, whom Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about , in 2013, says wryly, “People do not understand the very slow geological time scale on which we work.” Yet the A.W.G.’s forthcoming recommendations may bring an end to the only epoch that any of us have ever known—the Holocene, which began after the last ice age, about twelve thousand years ago, and lasts to this day. The group’s members are pondering whether the human imprint on this planet is large and clear enough to warrant the christening of a new epoch, one named for us: the Anthropocene. If it is, they and their fellow-geologists must decide when the old epoch ends and the new begins. 
 
 In a paper published today in the journal Nature , Simon Lewis, of the University of Leeds, and Mark Maslin, of University College London, propose that the Anthropocene’s “golden spike”—the line between it and the Holocene—be set at either 1610 or 1964. Geologic time periods are usually bounded by markers in rock or ice: for instance, the beginning of our current era, the Cenozoic, is identified by a dusting of iridium that fell across the globe about sixty-six million years ago. (The element, otherwise rare in Earth’s crust, may have been dropped here by the same asteroid that purportedly killed off the dinosaurs.) The year 1610 is distinguished in Antarctic ice cores by a dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In the decades after the Europeans—and their germs—arrived in the Americas, some fifty million people died; huge swaths of abandoned farmland reverted to forest, and the trees absorbed more carbon than the crops. The year 1964, meanwhile, is discernible in rock layers by its high proportion of radioactive isotopes—fallout from nuclear-weapons testing. 
 
 Some members of the Anthropocene Working Group approve of aligning the birth of the new epoch with that of the atomic age, which coincides conveniently with the mid-twentieth-century explosion in human population and industrialization. Lewis and Maslin, neither of whom are A.W.G. members, lean toward the 1610 date, arguing that the movement of species across the Atlantic around that time caused a “clear and permanent geological change to the Earth system.” Zalasiewicz notes that there are many variables to consider. “We have to try to understand humans as a driver of geology, just as we’ve previously understood massive volcanic outbursts and meteorite impacts,” he told me. “Those are very simple, by comparison.” The important thing, he stressed, is that the epoch be defined using traditional scientific criteria. After Paul Crutzen, a Dutch atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate, coined the expression, in 2000, Zalasiewicz said, “People were using ‘the Anthropocene’ as if it were a real geological term—without inverted commas, without any sense of irony. We had to do something about it.” 
 
 The Anthropocene Working Group will deliver its recommendations to the International Commission on Stratigraphy next year. But millennia from now, when the remnants of our civilization are crushed into thin layers of rock, it will hardly matter where the Anthropocene’s golden spike lies—in 1610, in 1964, or, as Crutzen originally proposed, in the late eighteenth century, when James Watt designed his steam engine. The key question is how a formally designated human epoch will shape scientific thought in the meantime. As Naomi Oreskes, a science historian and A.W.G. member, put it, “It is geologists saying, ‘We are witnesses to this profound and problematic transition. And we want the world to talk about it.’ ” The challenge of the Anthropocene is to learn to see ourselves not at the open end of Earth’s timeline but within its bounds, as fossils in the making.
– If you're under the age of about 66, then big news: You've lived your entire life in the Anthropocene epoch, or the age of man. At least, that what scientists who voted Monday in Cape Town, South Africa, would like to see after seven years spent considering the question. The AFP reports that the declaration of an official end to the Holocene—the current, nearly 12,000-year-long epoch that began at the end of the last major ice age—is a good two years off. The 35-member Working Group on the Anthropocene's vote acts as a recommendation to the International Geological Congress, which is one of several academic bodies that will need to approve it. More: Smithsonian has a very readable "What is the Anthropocene" primer from 2013, which gets at one of the hearts of the debate: How to decide the precise point in the geological record (think rocks and ice cores) that demarcates when humans began to affect the Earth. The AFP explains that the start of the Holocene was determined by an ice core drilled from the central Greenland ice sheet; it's kept in a freezer in Denmark and is said to provide "unprecedented clarity." As for what "golden spike" will define the new epoch, the Working Group recommends the nuclear bomb tests that occurred around 1950 and scattered radioactive elements around the planet. The Guardian has more. Working Group member Jan Zalasiewicz says countries have traditionally been eager to submit a golden spike sample, but that there might be some hesitation this time around due to what the Telegraph calls the "negative associations" of the Anthropocene. The New Yorker in 2015 looked at debate about that Anthropocene golden spike (other arguments place it in 1610 and 1964), but saw that as secondary to the effect of the designation, regardless of its starting point. It quotes a Working Group member thusly, "It is geologists saying, 'We are witnesses to this profound and problematic transition. And we want the world to talk about it.'" To that end, Paul Crutzen—the man who coined the term Anthropocene in 2000—in 2011 wrote a column for Yale Environment 360 that suggests three answers to the question: "What then does it mean to live up to the challenges of the Anthropocene?"