Is Fixing the Climate Incompatible with American Ideals?

elcome to the Anthropocene. This greeting is belated, of course. We have all been here the whole 
of our lives, without knowing it for most of our days. The Anthropocene is a span of geological and evolutionary time (technically, an epoch) during which humans have had an outsized role in transforming the natural world, most of that time without knowledge and awareness of the consequences of their actions. Those who use the term argue about when the epoch begins. Does it start with the Industrial Revolution, late in the 18th century, hastening around 1850? Or does it make sense to push the date back in time to the first appearances of agriculture in scattered populations, as much as 10,000 years before the present, or even earlier? It matters more to scientists and scholars than it does to you, whenever you step out into your dooryard (a patch of the outdoors where the business of human work and play, in and out of doors, transacts with the natural). You’re in the Anthropocene. Choices made by many generations of people just like yourself, just like me, influence what you come across there. You’ll find the influences in small things, mostly. You’ll find them in things that are very easy to overlook—a lilac blooming a week earlier than it did a couple of decades ago, for instance. But look a little further afield and you’ll find them in far