7. Anthropocene, present
So here’s where things went wrong. A single species managed to heat and pollute the globe and cause mass extinction. Humans are as intelligent and inventive as we are gluttonous and torpid in the face of obviously needed change. Some naysayers dislike this epoch’s moniker—Anthro, for humans—because they do not believe we could so aggressively change the entire planet’s cycles, while others think it’s a bit egoistic to name a cycle after ourselves (they suggest we’re still in the Holocene, the epoch that started about 11,700 years ago). The Anthropocene is a term used to describe the time in which human actions have come to define the global landscape. When exactly it started is cause for debate; the advent of agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, and the dropping of the atomic bomb have all been pitched as arrival points for this epoch.
