The Fafocene. You may not know it, but you are living in it.
The last 12 thousand or so years, since the end of the last ice age, have been not too cold, not too warm, and we ended up with agriculture, industry and all the nice things. This period has been dubbed the Holocene.
(Check out interview with David Pope here)
More recently, various types of scientists have pointed out that our agriculture, industry and all the nice things have gotten so big that human activity has started to actually shape (and shake) the entire planet – which is pretty wild, when you think about it. This period has been dubbed the Anthropocene.
The term is controversial, because peoples on the pointy end of the agriculture, industry etc are keen to point out that the responsibility for the damage done in/by the Anthropocene is #NotAllHumans, and they propose alternatives like Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Chthulucene (I am not making this up). As the Australian band the Hoodoo Gurus used to sing “What’s my cene?”
Well, recently (April 2025, it seems) somebody came up with Fafocene, which I think mostly closes down the debate.
More specifically, this
FAFO, for those of you who have been living on Mars (don’t tell Elon, it will spoil his whole day), stands for Fuck Around and Find Out – meaning first there are actions, and then there are consequences (Check out Jim Croce’s song Leroy Brown).
So you get diagrams like this
Now, of course, climate change is represented by the Keeling Curve
Also, check out my tattoo!,
or rather, the carbon dioxide build-up part is represented by the Keeling Curve. Methane is another story. And more broadly, the Anthropocene is (much) more than “merely” boiling ourselves alive – check out all those graphs in The Great Acceleration.
But for now, Fafocene does the job (although we should always remember that other animals we ‘share’ this planet with have been living (and then not living) in the Fafocene for a long time, and that it is indeed #NotAllHumans….