What’s in a name?
The word anthropocene fell into common usage after Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist, and the late biologist Eugene Stoermer, used the term in the Global Change Newsletter in May 2000.
They pointed to the explosion in the human population, the mass use of fossil fuels, demands on fresh water, the destruction of habitats and the dramatic loss of species as evidence for “the central role of mankind” in shaping the Earth’s geology and ecology. The word joins the Greek word 'anthropos', for human, to the suffix 'cene', meaning new or recent, to suggest an epoch defined by recent human activity.
The epoch we live in – the Holocene – comes from the Greek 'holo' for whole. The name stands for the past 10 to 12,000 years and seems to have been proposed by Sir Charles Lyell in 1833. It was adopted by the International Geological Congress in 1885.
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