Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

For the past two decades, stratigraphers have been debating a fraught question: Have humans so fundamentally altered the earth at we’ve pushed it into a new geological epoch? (“No shit,” you may be thinking, but the earth’s timekeepers seem to move a bit more slowly.) This proprosed epoch—the anthropocene—is also the name of a sweeping, multidisciplinary new documentary by Nicholas de Pencier, Edward Burtynsky, and Jennifer Baichwal that roves from the lithium evaporation ponds in the Atacama desert to terrestial machines in Germany, examining the impact of human greed. While documentary work focusing on climate concerns are (thankfully) becoming much more common, this one carefully focuses its lens on a semiotic definition that can change the world. It probably already has. —