In 1999, at a conference in Mexico City on the Holocene – the epoch of Earth history that we at present officially inhabit, beginning around 11,700 years ago – the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen was struck by the inaccuracy of the Holocene designation. ‘I suddenly thought this was wrong,’ he later recalled. ‘The world has changed too much. So I said, “No, we are in the Anthropocene.” I just made the word up on the spur of the moment. But it seems to have stuck.’
Really? It just made up?
