It is said that you don't know what you’re feeling until it has a name.
Ours is an ever-increasingly anxious era. Plagues and calamities abound. They aren’t the only thing that’s going on, of course. Technologies of all sorts are advancing at an exponential rate. That’s exciting. It’s possible that humanity will be able to use them to deal with the threats our planet faces. But technologies can also create and amplify dangers.
This is the Age of Humanity.
The complicated forces impacting everything lead to our consumption of extraordinary amounts of information. So much to know! So many distractions! It’s impossible to know all that one wants or needs to know. These cognitive limits generate this epoch’s distinctive neurosis.
Anthropocene is a word that defines our time. This is the Age of Humanity. All previous geological epochs have developed pretty much without having to pay too much attention to Humanity. Humanity pays a lot of attention and thinks it’s a big deal, but the Anthropocene is when it started to disturb the natural system in an extreme fashion.
Given that atmospheric pollution, environmental disregard, and war are three of Humanity’s signature activities in the Anthropocene so far, the odds are pretty good that it will be the shortest of the Earth’s epochs and equally as disastrous as a bunch of meteors hitting our home simultaneously. We’re on the verge of doing to ourselves what the dinosaurs had done to them by nature.
On the other hand, if Humanity takes a learning-oriented approach to the management of our situation the Anthropocene go on forever.
If Humanity takes a learning-oriented approach to the management of our situation the Anthropocene goes on forever.
Adventures in the Anthropocene is my report as a citizen of the Anthropocene. It will contain a variety of ideas and information. Politics, Culture, Science, Social Evolution…lots of words like that. I get obsessed with some things, e.g., the 1/6 coup attempt, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These matters seem to me to be significant to the next direction of the Anthropocene. (At least that’s the way I rationalize various fixations to myself).
My objective here is to be adequate to the job of participating while observing this era to discover what I’m discovering by writing and otherwise symbolizing it.
If my stuff engages some people I get along with, so much the better.