Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2016
Perhaps the most obvious point about the Anthropocene debate is the one that gets lost most frequently, precisely because it is the most obvious. Paul Crutzen's now famous outburst in 2000 (see Crutzen & Stoermer 2000) stating that we do not live in the Holocene anymore was made in part because he was grappling with the question of the enormity of the anthropogenic transformations of the Earth system. It matters that he formulated the term to indicate the scale of transformation in geological language.