The Anthropocene: Our Epoch
Sermon, Rabbi Sam Cohon, Shabbat No’ach 5785
It has finally cooled down here in the Sonoran Desert, which is certainly welcome. We set a record this year for days over 100 degrees, 112 days in 2024; that’s not a record we welcome or take pride in. While it’s hotter in Phoenix—5 to 7 degrees hotter—and it also doesn’t cool down as much at night, and it’s hotter in Yuma than in Phoenix, and it’s probably hotter in hell than either place, 112 days over 100 degrees is still pretty darned unpleasant, even for us long-term desert dwellers. Which makes it clear that perhaps we human beings aren’t doing things quite the way we ought to be.
As we all know by now, things are getting hotter on our planet. Besides the obvious discomfort this implies for those of us living in warm places like Tucson, this has also led to extreme weather conditions becoming, well, more extreme than ever before in recorded history. Floods that used to occur once a century are now happening every ten years—or sometimes, every year; there was a terrible one in Florida and the Carolinas last month; there is a disastrous one in Spain right now. Forest fires have become more intense and destructive. Tsunamis and tidal waves occur more frequently. As sea levels rise, island nations are losing their fresh water supplies, and some are simply disappearing. Coastal areas, including places in Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, are losing the battle against encroaching oceans.
We have long been used to natural disasters occurring naturally—or perhaps, at God’s behest. As our Torah portion of No’ach makes it clear, floods have washed away human civilizations as far back as our species can remember. But what’s happening now is qualitatively different for a unique reason.
There’s a complicated idea that has been circulating over recent decades that says that the geologic epoch we are in should be called the Anthropocene, which means the human-impacted epoch. While the origins of this notion go back to the 1930s, and “Anthropocene” was a phrase used by Soviet Union scientists even in the 1960s, the term was first popularized in the west by American biologist Eugene Stoermer in the late 1980s, and became much more prominent after the work of the Dutch chemist and Nobel Prize Winner Paul Crutzen brought it to our attention in the early 2000s. Unlike the Jurassic or the Cretaceous epoch or any of the other Geologic divisions of time, this one, the unofficial Anthropocene, is the first period in our earth’s 5 billion years or so when a living species has permanently changed the state of the planet. That species, of course, is homo sapiens sapiens, us.
Geologists haven’t officially named our current period the Anthropocene because they can’t agree on whether it started at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, or perhaps when the atomic age began with the detonations of the 1940s, or with the later ubiquitous circulation of microplastics, or perhaps with the extreme speed of the extinction of many animal and plant species in recent decades and centuries. They don’t agree when the Anthropocen started; but there is a general understanding in the scientific world that our earth has been so impacted by human civilization in recent decades that this is a unique time in our planet’s life. And the understanding is that something profound is happening to the world, and it’s not pleasant or positive. Or rather, a number of important and destructive things are happening to the earth that are all pretty bad, and we are the reason.
The evidence of human-created changes that are cited by scientists include the dramatic rise in greenhouse gases and the general warming trend in climate and ocean temperatures all over the earth, climate change, global warming, leading to the dramatic increase in the number and severity of major storms and natural disasters; the industrial production of a tremendous number of products that do not biodegrade, and consequently transform the land and sea with their waste, such as the great Pacific Ocean garbage patch and the great North Atlantic garbage patch, and microplastics more generally—microplastics have invaded our own biology at an alarming pace; they have discovered microplastics in human breast milk at a very high rate in America, Europe, and around the world, for example—as well as the presence in our environment of destructive forever chemicals that never go away; the extinction of a large number of species of animals and plants at a faster rate than almost any that has ever been observed before; massive deforestation and rainforest destruction; and the presence of nuclear fallout from hydrogen bomb tests in the actual rocks formed in sediment in lake beds, and elsewhere.
The impact of humans on the world is pretty undeniable. We have done this to the earth. The question of how we best seek to restore some balance between our own species and the only planet we can live on is a crucial one.
I am somewhat baffled by the fact that this issue has barely surfaced in the current election season: while deluded people still believe that we will somehow revive the massively polluting coal industry and should further expand the use of greenhouse gasses, others simply ignore the fact that we are losing an important race to stabilize our earth. This planet, according to the Jewish understanding, is a gift from God. It is our duty to serve as stewards of our world, to protect it from destruction and to help it flourish. It is, according to Jewish belief, a sin to destroy nature—bal tashchit is a foundational Jewish ethic.
The past year has been one in which we Jews have been focusing on the Iranian, Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist war against Israel, on fighting antisemitism here and abroad, and on security and safety for synagogues and Jews everywhere. The truth is that there remains a larger issue here: if we do not find a way to protect our planet from the destruction we are allowing to take place every day, we won’t have much left to protect.
The record of our Anthropocene epoch cannot simply be about how we have squandered the magnificent world we have been gifted by the Creator. It must reflect our understanding of our responsibility to preserve and protect the natural world. And it is something we all need to act on, in order to repair the damage we have already permitted to occur.
At the conclusion of the flood narrative in our weekly portion of No’ach, humanity is given a second chance. Just as Adam and Eve were put on the earth to tend and to till, to be good stewards of the garden, now No’ach is given a berit, a covenantal opportunity to start life anew on fresh ground. The world he knew is destroyed, but God promises, using the symbol of the rainbow to affirm it, that never again will God destroy civilization and humanity by flood. It is a powerful promise, a pledge of non-destruction.
Ah, but God never says that we human beings won’t someday have the capacity to destroy civilization, or even the planet, by our own actions. We are reaching that point, not only through the overwhelming power of the weapons we have made, but because of the cavalier and callous way we have treated our own environment. Only if we can manage to respect the incredible creation of nature that God has given us, only if we can restrain our destructive actions and institutions, will we be able to live long on the land that the Lord our God has promised to us.
May we come to show respect and reverence for the land, water and air we have inherited from our Creator. And may we demonstrate by our own choices that we can be good stewards of the earth, and deserve to leave a good legacy for our own descendants.