Published on Monday, June 15, 2009 by Project Syndicate Can We Survive the ‘Anthropocene’ Period? by Paul J Crutzen For the past three centuries, humans’ effects on the global environment have escalated. Most importantly, our emissions of carbon dioxide may cause global climate patterns to depart significantly from their natural course for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to assign the term “Anthropocene” to the current, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch, s