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The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a “proto-Eurasiatic” language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people.

In all, “proto-Eurasiatic” gave birth to seven language families. Several of the world’s important language families, however, fall outside that lineage, such as the one that includes Chinese and Tibetan; several African language families, and those of American Indians and Australian aborigines.

Officially, the Holocene is still running today. You have lived your entire life in the Holocene, and the Holocene has constituted the geological “present” for as long as there have been geologists.But if we now live in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, then the ICS will have to chop the Holocene somewhere. It will have to choose when the Holocene ended, and it will move some amount of time out of the purview of the Holocene working group and into that of the Anthropocene working group.

This is politically difficult. And right now, the Anthropocene working group seems intent on not carving too deep into the Holocene. In a paper published earlier this year in Earth-Science Reviews, the Anthropocene working group’s members strongly imply that they will propose starting the new epoch in the mid-20th century.

Some geologists argue that the Anthropocene started even earlier: perhaps 4,000 or 6,000 years ago, as farmers began to remake the land surface.“Most of the world’s forests that were going to be converted to cropland and agriculture were already cleared well before 1950,” says Bill Ruddiman, a geology professor at the University of Virginia and an advocate of this extremely early Anthropocene.

“Most of the world’s prairies and steppes that were going to be cleared for crops were already gone, by then. How can you argue the Anthropocene started in 1950 when all of the major things that affect Earth’s surface were already over?”Van der Pluijm agreed that the Anthropocene working group was picking 1950 for “not very good reasons.”“Agriculture was the revolution that allowed society to develop,” he said. “That was really when people started to force the land to work for them. That massive land movement—it’s like a landslide, except it’s a humanslide. And it is not, of course, as dramatic as today’s motion of land, but it starts the clock.”

This muddle had to stop. The Holocene comes up constantly in discussions of modern global warming. Geologists and climate scientists did not make their jobs any easier by slicing it in different ways and telling contradictory stories about it.

This process started almost 10 years ago. For this reason, Zalasiewicz, the chair of the Anthropocene working group, said he wasn’t blindsided by the new subdivisions at all. In fact, he voted to adopt them as a member of the Quaternary working group.“Whether the Anthropocene works with a unified Holocene or one that’s in three parts makes for very little difference,” he told me.In fact, it had made the Anthropocene group’s work easier. “It has been useful to compare the scale of the two climate events that mark the new boundaries [within the Holocene] with the kind of changes that we’re assessing in the Anthropocene. It has been quite useful to have the compare and contrast,” he said. “Our view is that some of the changes in the Anthropocene are rather bigger.”

Zalasiewicz said that he and his colleagues were going as fast as they could. When the working group group began its work in 2009, it was “really starting from scratch,” he told me.While other working groups have a large body of stratigraphic research to consider, the Anthropocene working group had nothing. “We had to spend a fair bit of time deciding whether the Anthropocene was geology at all,” he said. Then they had to decide where its signal could show up. Now, they’re looking for evidence that shows it.

This cycle of “glacials” and “interglacials” has played out about 50 times over the last several million years. When the Holocene began, it was only another interglacial—albeit the one we live in. Until recently, glaciers were still on schedule to descend in another 30,000 years or so.Yet geologists still call the Holocene an epoch, even though they do not bestow this term on any of the previous 49 interglacials. It get special treatment because we live in it.

Much of this science is now moot. Humanity’s vast emissions of greenhouse gas have now so warmed the climate that they have offset the next glaciation. They may even knock us out of the ongoing cycle of Ice Ages, sending the Earth hurtling back toward a “greenhouse” climate after the more amenable “icehouse” climate during which humans evolved.For this reason, van der Pluijm wants the Anthropocene to supplant the Holocene entirely. Humans made their first great change to the environment at the close of the last glaciation, when they seem to have hunted the world’s largest mammals—the wooly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger—to extinction. Why not start the Anthropocene then?He would even rename the pre-1800 period “the Holocene Age” as a consolation prize:

Zalasiewicz said he would not start the Anthropocene too early in time, as it would be too work-intensive for the field to rename such a vast swath of time. “The early-Anthropocene idea would crosscut against the Holocene as it’s seen by Holocene workers,” he said. If other academics didn’t like this, they could create their own timescales and start the Anthropocene Epoch where they choose. “We have no jurisdiction over the word Anthropocene,” he said.

Ruddiman, the University of Virginia professor who first argued for a very early Anthropocene, now makes an even broader case. He’s not sure it makes sense to formally define the Anthropocene at all. In a paper published this week, he objects to designating the Anthropocene as starting in the 1950s—and then he objects to delineating the Anthropocene, or indeed any new geological epoch, by name. “Keep the use of the term informal,” he told me. “Don’t make it rigid. Keep it informal so people can say the early-agricultural Anthropocene, or the industrial-era Anthropocene.”

“This is the age of geochemical dating,” he said. Geologists have stopped looking to the ICS to place each rock sample into the rock sequence. Instead, field geologists use laboratory techniques to get a precise year or century of origin for each rock sample. “The community just doesn’t care about these definitions,” he said.

That’s exactly what the geographer Patrick Nunn and the historian Margaret Cook at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia have proposed in a recent paper.

In their work, the pair describe colorful legends from northern Europe and Australia that depict rising waters, peninsulas becoming islands, and receding coastlines during that period of deglaciation thousands of years ago. Some of these stories, the researchers say, capture historical sea-level rise that actually happened—often several thousand years ago. For scholars of oral history, that makes them geomyths.

“The first time I read an Aboriginal story from Australia that seemed to recall the rise of sea levels after the last ice age, I thought, No, I don’t think this is correct,” Nunn says. “But then I read another story that recalled the same thing.

For Jo Brendryen, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Bergen in Norway who has studied the effects of deglaciation in Europe following the end of the last ice age, the idea that traditional oral histories preserve real accounts of sea-level rise is perfectly plausible.

During the last ice age, he says, the sudden melting of ice sheets induced catastrophic events known as meltwater pulses, which caused sudden and extreme sea-level rise. Along some coastlines in Europe, the ocean may have risen as much as 10 meters in just 200 years. At such a pace, it would have been noticeable to people across just a few human generations.

“These are stories based in trauma, based in catastrophe.”

That, he suggests, is why it may have made sense for successive generations to pass on tales of geological upheaval. Ancient societies may have sought to broadcast their warning: Beware, these things can happen!

the old stories still have things to teach us. As Nunn says, “The fact that our ancestors have survived those periods gives us hope that we can survive this.”

What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries.

he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a “time stamp on [their] political view” that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form “a united front,” he told me. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions.”

he does want leftists – and everyone else – to take the climate emergency more seriously. He thinks every big decision, every technological option, every political opportunity, warrants climate-oriented scientific scrutiny. Global justice demands nothing less.

He wants to legitimize geoengineering, even in forms as radical as blasting limestone dust into the atmosphere for a few years to temporarily dim the heat of the sun

Robinson believes that once progressives internalize the insight that the economy is a social construct just like anything else, they can determine – based on the contemporary balance of political forces, ecological needs, and available tools – the most efficient methods for bringing carbon and capital into closer alignment.

We live in a world where capitalist states and giant companies largely control science.

Yes, we need to consider technologies with an open mind. That includes a frank assessment of how the interests of the powerful will shape how technologies develop

Robinson’s imagined future suggests a short-term solution that fits his dreams of a democratic, scientific politics: planning, of both the economy and planet.

it’s borrowed from Robinson’s reading of ecological economics. That field’s premise is that the economy is embedded in nature – that its fundamental rules aren’t supply and demand, but the laws of physics, chemistry, biology.

The upshot of Robinson’s science fiction is understanding that grand ecologies and human economies are always interdependent.

Robinson seems to be urging all of us to treat every possible technological intervention – from expanding nuclear energy, to pumping meltwater out from under glaciers, to dumping iron filings in the ocean – from a strictly scientific perspective: reject dogma, evaluate the evidence, ignore the profit motive.

Robinson’s elegant solution, as rendered in Ministry, is carbon quantitative easing. The idea is that central banks invent a new currency; to earn the carbon coins, institutions must show that they’re sucking excess carbon down from the sky. In his novel, this happens thanks to a series of meetings between United Nations technocrats and central bankers. But the technocrats only win the arguments because there’s enough rage, protest and organizing in the streets to force the bankers’ hand.

Seen from Mars, then, the problem of 21st-century climate economics is to sync public and private systems of capital with the ecological system of carbon.

Success will snowball; we’ll democratically plan more and more of the eco-economy.

Robinson thus gets that climate politics are fundamentally the politics of investment – extremely big investments. As he put it to me, carbon quantitative easing isn’t the “silver bullet solution,” just one of several green investment mechanisms we need to experiment with.

Robinson shares the great anarchist dream. “Everybody on the planet has an equal amount of power, and comfort, and wealth,” he said. “It’s an obvious goal” but there’s no shortcut.

In his political economy, like his imagined settling of Mars, Robinson tries to think like a bench scientist – an experimentalist, wary of unifying theories, eager for many groups to try many things.

there’s something liberating about Robinson’s commitment to the scientific method: reasonable people can shed their prejudices, consider all the options and act strategically.

The years ahead will be brutal. In Ministry, tens of millions of people die in disasters – and that’s in a scenario that Robinson portrays as relatively optimistic

when things get that bad, people take up arms. In Ministry’s imagined future, the rise of weaponized drones allows shadowy environmentalists to attack and kill fossil capitalists. Many – including myself – have used the phrase “eco-terrorism” to describe that violence. Robinson pushed back when we talked. “What if you call that resistance to capitalism realism?” he asked. “What if you call that, well, ‘Freedom fighters’?”

Robinson insists that he doesn’t condone the violence depicted in his book; he simply can’t imagine a realistic account of 21st century climate politics in which it doesn’t occur.

Malm writes that it’s shocking how little political violence there has been around climate change so far, given how brutally the harms will be felt in communities of color, especially in the global south, who bear no responsibility for the cataclysm, and where political violence has been historically effective in anticolonial struggles.

In Ministry, there’s a lot of violence, but mostly off-stage. We see enough to appreciate Robinson’s consistent vision of most people as basically thoughtful: the armed struggle is vicious, but its leaders are reasonable, strategic.

the implications are straightforward: there will be escalating violence, escalating state repression and increasing political instability. We must plan for that too.

maybe that’s the tension that is Ministry’s greatest lesson for climate politics today. No document that could win consensus at a UN climate summit will be anywhere near enough to prevent catastrophic warming. We can only keep up with history, and clearly see what needs to be done, by tearing our minds out of the present and imagining more radical future vantage points

If millions of people around the world can do that, in an increasingly violent era of climate disasters, those people could generate enough good projects to add up to something like a rational plan – and buy us enough time to stabilize the climate, while wresting power from the 1%.

Robinson’s optimistic view is that human nature is fundamentally thoughtful, and that it will save us – that the social process of arguing and politicking, with minds as open as we can manage, is a project older than capitalism, and one that will eventually outlive it

It’s a perspective worth thinking about – so long as we’re also organizing.

Daniel Aldana Cohen is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative. He is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal