With climate change, concrete deserts and agriculture, human beings have fundamentally altered the face of the Earth. But have we really ushered in a new geological era, the so-called Anthropocene?

Paul Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, finds it hard to believe. “It’s incredible to see what a single word changes,” he says. Crutzen coined the word “Anthropocene,” Greek for the “recent age of man,” 12 years ago at a scientific conference in Mexico. He used the term as a way of describing radical change in nature, saying that man’s influence on the environment was now so overwhelming that a new epoch — the “Anthropocene” — had begun.

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