Holocene
laelaps | June 16, 2010A golden-mantled ground squirrel (Spermophilus lateralis), photographed in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. Though abundant at the Samwell Cave Popcorn Dome, California site during the Late Pleistocene, its numbers in the area decline at the beginning of the present Holocene epoch."One of the penalties of an ecological education", the naturalist Aldo Leopold once wrote, "is that one lives alone in a world of wounds." Few knew this better than he did. Despite becoming a celebrated advocate of wilderness for its own sake during the early twentieth century, Leopold began his career by hunting…
greengabbro | February 1, 2008Let's get one thing out of the way right now: The question of whether or not a new geologic epoch has "really started" is precisely as stupid as the question of whether or not Pluto is "really" a planet. The definitions of geologic eons, eras, and epochs are not objective truths about the history of the planet that are simply waiting for us in the rock. The geologic time scale is made up by geologists, for geologists as a matter of convenience. So Greg Laden is making a category error when he dismisses both the Anthropocene and the Holocene as scientifically invalid - the worst thing you can…