“In the middle of things” is a relatively common plot device. The reader or audience first encounters the action and characters in the context of an unknown past. At some point, by verbal revelation or by a scene introduced with a caption like “Five years ago,” the author brings the bewildered audience up to speed: “Oh, so this is how we got here…,” “Now I know why she’s sad…,” and “I get it; the aunt is her real mother….”
In Medias Res
It’s “in the middle of things” where a group of debating geologists recently found themselves. The International Union of Geological Sciences rejected the addition of the Anthropocene to the long list of eras, periods, epochs, ages, stages, and phases that comprise the geologic time scale. In spite of arguments, the members rejected “the age of Man (“anthrop,” Greek for ”Man,” or more generally “human”) and the term Anthropocene that some wanted to emplace in the scale that includes Holocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, all the way back to Jurassic and earlier time.
The rejection was contentious because there’s good evidence that since the rise of agriculture and the proliferation of our species, humans have altered Earth’s surface to a considerable degree. Think Aral Sea, reservoirs like Lake Mead, sea walls, and levees. Think denuded forests, asphalt, concrete, and steel cities, open pit and deep mines, and plundered ground water, natural gas, and oil. And think extinctions: The Dodo, mammoths and mastodons, the western black rhino…
The human impact is undeniable and ongoing, but can its true significance be understood as we understand periods now long gone whose effects we can see in total and in retrospect? Ordinarily, autobiographies and biographies come near the end or after the end, not before.
That’s not to argue against insight into the present. Just about every intelligent person knew, for example, where Biden’s open border policy would lead though the magnitude of that policy’s effects won’t be fully felt for years. Similarly, just about anyone with a modicum of insight knows that human activities, like highway construction and both urbanization and suburbanization alter habitats and exacerbate natural rates of extinction and species stress.
But to rank an Anthropocene age with, say the Maastrichtian, that time frame at the end of the Cretaceous associated with the dinosaur extinction event, is a premature designation. The past is easy to categorize in generalities, such as the Enlightenment of the 18th century or the Roaring 20s of the last century, but the present? What categorizes your present in the context of an incomplete lifespan?
Of course, that some period is ongoing doesn’t in itself inhibit us from categorizing. But Earth has a 5.6 billion-year history marked by biotic and abiotic events. The time frame of the past allows us to mark beginnings and endings on grand scales. We can see Earth-altering events encapsulated by relationships left in fossil and petrological records. In contrast, our current modifications to the planet might be fleeting, just as, for example, natural drainage systems are fleeting. The destiny of drainage divides like the Appalachians on either side of which rivers flow to the Gulf or to the Atlantic, is to be worn down. Sure, that’s a multi-million-year process, not visible to short-lived people in the present, but it is happening, nevertheless. What’s the end of the Anthropocene look like? Right. We have only conjecture, good conjecture, but still just conjecture.
The Present Is Always the Middle: That’s Why We Prophesy
Prophets—every age has its share of them. Well, maybe our age of political polling and scientific predicting has more than previous ages. Prophecies—even negative ones—provide us with a sense of security that comes with predestination. The climate alarmists are steeped in this security, ironically so because the prophets they follow have failed to predict their supposed consequences repeatedly over the past quarter century. A grey-beard Al Gore, dressed in kaftan and descending from Mount Sinai like Charlton Heston's Moses holding the Ten Commandments admonishes us to keep holy the IPCC, to abandon our black calf made of coal, and to amend our ways by going green lest we suffer the consequences of Earth’s wrath in never-before-seen storms, and droughts, and coastal inundations, all of which his sacred tablets proclaim with surety.
But hasn’t the past 12,000-year period been only a middle, one of maybe as many as 11 interglacial periods of the Pleistocene and Holocene that marked the last 2,58 million years? Even if the prophet Gore had been alive 13,000 years ago and had all of current science at his disposal, could he have predicted the Younger Dryas and its drop in temperatures that interrupted the Pleistocene warming? Could he in the midst of change have been able to point out the beginning of that cooling 12,800 years ago or its ending 11,700 years ago?
Nevertheless, we often follow prophets and adopt the generalizations of historians who frame beginnings and endings. Those geologists who recently argued about the legitimacy of the Anthropocene played the roles of both prophets and historians. Those arguing for the Anthropocene cited among other phenomena the anthropogenic rise in greenhouse gases, somehow, equating fossil fuel emissions with agriculture, deforestation, and fresh water impoundment. Yet, neither agriculture nor any other human activity had any effect on ending the Younger Dryas, a period that occurred and ended before humans adopted their modern lifestyles.
Was the end of the Younger Dryas the beginning of the Anthropocene? Were its beginning sometime around 12,800 years ago and its ending about 11,700 years ago abrupt events? The Younger Dryas didn’t end in a day or few years like the Maastrichtian extinction of the dinosaurs—though it might have begun the way the Maastrichtian ended with a bolide impact event. *
Sudden Beginnings and Endings
It is inevitable that every human will encounter some sudden beginning or ending: An unexpected job opportunity or job loss, a winning lottery ticket or slot machine hit, a fire that destroys a residence, a car accident that alters life, or a chance encounter with a soulmate that leads to a lifelong commitment.
Our lives are marked by many such events. They interrupt “middles” and initiate new episodic sequences. But more sweeping sets of episodes, like beginnings of epochs and periods, are usually foggy smears of time. The attempt by some geologists to frame the Anthropocene met with failure precisely because of such smearing. But the attempt gives all of us a point of departure for examining our lives.
So, I urge you to see your life in the context of beginnings and endings and to ask whether or not you currently find yourself in medias res—assuming you could actually determine a middle when “middle” in fact occurs only in the context of a beginning and ending.
*Nothing in this blog is meant to deny the temporal markers we call beginnings and endings. There seems to be evidence that the Younger Dryas began “all of a sudden” with an unpredictable impact event 12,800 years ago just the way the dinosaur extinction event occurred to end the b See “The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence” in Earth Science Reviews online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825221001781 . The abstract has the following statement: “Firestone et al., 2007, PNAS 104(41): 16,016–16,021, proposed that a major cosmic impact, circa 10,835 cal. BCE, triggered the Younger Dryas (YD) climate shift along with changes in human cultures and megafaunal extinctions. Fourteen years after this initial work the overwhelming consensus of research undertaken by many independent groups, reviewed here, suggests their claims of a major cosmic impact at this time should be accepted.”
In Medias Res
It’s “in the middle of things” where a group of debating geologists recently found themselves. The International Union of Geological Sciences rejected the addition of the Anthropocene to the long list of eras, periods, epochs, ages, stages, and phases that comprise the geologic time scale. In spite of arguments, the members rejected “the age of Man (“anthrop,” Greek for ”Man,” or more generally “human”) and the term Anthropocene that some wanted to emplace in the scale that includes Holocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, all the way back to Jurassic and earlier time.
The rejection was contentious because there’s good evidence that since the rise of agriculture and the proliferation of our species, humans have altered Earth’s surface to a considerable degree. Think Aral Sea, reservoirs like Lake Mead, sea walls, and levees. Think denuded forests, asphalt, concrete, and steel cities, open pit and deep mines, and plundered ground water, natural gas, and oil. And think extinctions: The Dodo, mammoths and mastodons, the western black rhino…
The human impact is undeniable and ongoing, but can its true significance be understood as we understand periods now long gone whose effects we can see in total and in retrospect? Ordinarily, autobiographies and biographies come near the end or after the end, not before.
That’s not to argue against insight into the present. Just about every intelligent person knew, for example, where Biden’s open border policy would lead though the magnitude of that policy’s effects won’t be fully felt for years. Similarly, just about anyone with a modicum of insight knows that human activities, like highway construction and both urbanization and suburbanization alter habitats and exacerbate natural rates of extinction and species stress.
But to rank an Anthropocene age with, say the Maastrichtian, that time frame at the end of the Cretaceous associated with the dinosaur extinction event, is a premature designation. The past is easy to categorize in generalities, such as the Enlightenment of the 18th century or the Roaring 20s of the last century, but the present? What categorizes your present in the context of an incomplete lifespan?
Of course, that some period is ongoing doesn’t in itself inhibit us from categorizing. But Earth has a 5.6 billion-year history marked by biotic and abiotic events. The time frame of the past allows us to mark beginnings and endings on grand scales. We can see Earth-altering events encapsulated by relationships left in fossil and petrological records. In contrast, our current modifications to the planet might be fleeting, just as, for example, natural drainage systems are fleeting. The destiny of drainage divides like the Appalachians on either side of which rivers flow to the Gulf or to the Atlantic, is to be worn down. Sure, that’s a multi-million-year process, not visible to short-lived people in the present, but it is happening, nevertheless. What’s the end of the Anthropocene look like? Right. We have only conjecture, good conjecture, but still just conjecture.
The Present Is Always the Middle: That’s Why We Prophesy
Prophets—every age has its share of them. Well, maybe our age of political polling and scientific predicting has more than previous ages. Prophecies—even negative ones—provide us with a sense of security that comes with predestination. The climate alarmists are steeped in this security, ironically so because the prophets they follow have failed to predict their supposed consequences repeatedly over the past quarter century. A grey-beard Al Gore, dressed in kaftan and descending from Mount Sinai like Charlton Heston's Moses holding the Ten Commandments admonishes us to keep holy the IPCC, to abandon our black calf made of coal, and to amend our ways by going green lest we suffer the consequences of Earth’s wrath in never-before-seen storms, and droughts, and coastal inundations, all of which his sacred tablets proclaim with surety.
But hasn’t the past 12,000-year period been only a middle, one of maybe as many as 11 interglacial periods of the Pleistocene and Holocene that marked the last 2,58 million years? Even if the prophet Gore had been alive 13,000 years ago and had all of current science at his disposal, could he have predicted the Younger Dryas and its drop in temperatures that interrupted the Pleistocene warming? Could he in the midst of change have been able to point out the beginning of that cooling 12,800 years ago or its ending 11,700 years ago?
Nevertheless, we often follow prophets and adopt the generalizations of historians who frame beginnings and endings. Those geologists who recently argued about the legitimacy of the Anthropocene played the roles of both prophets and historians. Those arguing for the Anthropocene cited among other phenomena the anthropogenic rise in greenhouse gases, somehow, equating fossil fuel emissions with agriculture, deforestation, and fresh water impoundment. Yet, neither agriculture nor any other human activity had any effect on ending the Younger Dryas, a period that occurred and ended before humans adopted their modern lifestyles.
Was the end of the Younger Dryas the beginning of the Anthropocene? Were its beginning sometime around 12,800 years ago and its ending about 11,700 years ago abrupt events? The Younger Dryas didn’t end in a day or few years like the Maastrichtian extinction of the dinosaurs—though it might have begun the way the Maastrichtian ended with a bolide impact event. *
Sudden Beginnings and Endings
It is inevitable that every human will encounter some sudden beginning or ending: An unexpected job opportunity or job loss, a winning lottery ticket or slot machine hit, a fire that destroys a residence, a car accident that alters life, or a chance encounter with a soulmate that leads to a lifelong commitment.
Our lives are marked by many such events. They interrupt “middles” and initiate new episodic sequences. But more sweeping sets of episodes, like beginnings of epochs and periods, are usually foggy smears of time. The attempt by some geologists to frame the Anthropocene met with failure precisely because of such smearing. But the attempt gives all of us a point of departure for examining our lives.
So, I urge you to see your life in the context of beginnings and endings and to ask whether or not you currently find yourself in medias res—assuming you could actually determine a middle when “middle” in fact occurs only in the context of a beginning and ending.
*Nothing in this blog is meant to deny the temporal markers we call beginnings and endings. There seems to be evidence that the Younger Dryas began “all of a sudden” with an unpredictable impact event 12,800 years ago just the way the dinosaur extinction event occurred to end the b See “The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence” in Earth Science Reviews online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825221001781 . The abstract has the following statement: “Firestone et al., 2007, PNAS 104(41): 16,016–16,021, proposed that a major cosmic impact, circa 10,835 cal. BCE, triggered the Younger Dryas (YD) climate shift along with changes in human cultures and megafaunal extinctions. Fourteen years after this initial work the overwhelming consensus of research undertaken by many independent groups, reviewed here, suggests their claims of a major cosmic impact at this time should be accepted.”
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