Ruminations

                                     "This is the story of how one species changed the planet.” So begins ‘Welcome to the Anthropoceneʼ (1), a short movie that inaugurated the Rio Conference on Sustainable Development last year. The movieʼs narrative captures the essence of a rapidly emerging discourse that implicates humanity as a whole in the precipitation of a new epoch. The Anthropocene concept – formally introduced over a decade ago (2) – has captivated both academics and journalists of late. The conceptʼs renaissance accompanies the broad recognition that the domains of nature and culture are far more entangled than traditionally conceived (3,4). The Anthropocene is helping to frame the range of human-environment interactions more comprehensively than, say, climate change, species loss, deforestation or other narratives of environmental change. The wider world is not waiting for the geologic community to formally recognize a new epoch: unlike plate tectonics or biological ev