The anthropocene's global environmental constitutional moment

Abstract

Considering that the Earth is approximately an unfathomable five billion years old, scientists usefully divide this vast expanse of geological time into geochronological units of descending order of length termed 'eons,' 'eras,' 'periods,' and 'epochs.'1 The division's chronological function seeks to present the Earth's history 'as an ordered sequence of events, each placed in its correct relative position and allocated its proper time span,'2 thus providing a framework for deciphering the history of the Earth.3 As far as the current formally recorded division is concerned, we live in the Phanerozoic eon, the Cenozoic era, the Quarternary period, and the Holocene epoch. Formally, the Holocene epoch or 'Recent Whole' is the latest of many Quaternary interglacial phases, and it denotes the relatively stable period of the past 10,000-12,000 years, which has...