How would Mother Earth act if you were poking her with a sharp stick?

In 1950 I was born. It’s also the year that most scientists believe a new Geological era, the Anthropocene era, began:

From the Guardian:

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.

The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.

The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene.

“The significance of the Anthropocene is that it sets a different trajectory for the Earth system, of which we of course are part,” said Prof Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester and chair of the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), which started work in 2009.

“If our recommendation is accepted, the Anthropocene will have started just a little before I was born,” he said. “We have lived most of our lives in something called the Anthropocene and are just realising the scale and permanence of the change.”

Prof Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and WGA secretary, said: “Being able to pinpoint an interval of time is saying something about how we have had an incredible impact on the environment of our planet. The concept of the Anthropocene manages to pull all these ideas of environmental change together.”

So there it is. We have very little time left to save our planet…at least in a form that will comfortably support life I.e., people don’t spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week trying to just survive. I understand it’s hard to wake up every morning and realize in the course of our everyday lives that the changes taking place in our environment are grave. After all, there’s jobs to go to, TV to watch, politics to argue over and social media to put it all down on. It’s important that the governments of our world begin to cooperate immediately to save life on Earth as we know it.

I write my Congressman and two Senators on a bi-weekly basis about this. I’m getting ready to become much more seriously involved in getting information out there…to us, to you, about this situation.

If someone were trying to burn down your home, how would you react? The Earth is the home of all life that we are aware of in the Universe, and it’s being “burned down”. If we don’t pay attention now, our children and grandchildren will be right to condemn us for our inaction.