The history of our planet is divided into geological eras, and the one we are currently living in is the Holocene, which began more than 11,700 years ago.
However, in 2000, two internationally renowned academics - Stoermer and Crutzen - proposed a new geological Era, whose start date is still debated, called the Anthropocene.
This term, derived from the conjunction of the Greek terms anthropos and kainos, meaning human being and recent respectively, is used to indicate the fact that human activity has succeeded in modifying geological processes and climate regulation. Human beings are therefore the main driver, the main cause of changes on our planet. And this is rarely seen in a positive light.
We are changing the rules of the game; we have reached a level of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that has only been touched once before in the entire history of Earth: in the Pliocene, 3 million years ago, when the planet was inhabited not by Homo but by Australopithecus. We are the first of our kind to have reached the level of 420 ppm (parts per million) of CO2 in the atmosphere, and what's worse is that we have reached it in less than 150 years.
This has devastating consequences for the climate, leading to and will lead to consequences that we cannot even imagine - but from what we know, they will not be positive consequences.
However, there is still hope.
Just as we are changing things for the worse, we can use our knowledge and skills to reverse course and have a positive impact on our planet.
We just need to reinvent ourselves, see the problems we have created as opportunities to start from, and embrace a global vision, so that we don't make the same mistakes again.
