If We Can Start an Epoch, We Can Start a Farming Revolution

Members of Smallholder Farmer Alliance in Haiti with first harvest of regenerative cotton. Credit: Thomas Norielle/SFAOpinion by Hugh Locke (new york)Friday, October 02, 2026Inter Press Service NEW YORK, October 2 (IPS) - In November 1952, the United States detonated the world’s first thermonuclear device at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The test, code-named Ivy Mike, erased the island of Elugelab and scattered a signature of plutonium across the planet that remains in lake beds, ice sheets and ocean sediments today. This month, scientists writing in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment proposed this moment as the start of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch shaped by human activity. Co-author Victor Galaz of the Stockholm Resilience Centre called the date “a tragic reminder of the highly unjust impacts of planetary change.”I take that proposal seriously, because it carries hope as well as warning, and it connects to the argument of my new book, Whole Earth Farming.Hugh LockeA few years ago I proposed the word epoch to describe the period we are living through. It has two meanings. A historical epoch is a period set off by significant change, such as the Renaissance. A...