Many readers may be familiar with the term Anthropocene. It denotes an epoch of geological time during which human influence on the environment has become pronounced. Geologists, who apparently like to work as slowly as the processes they study, have, after laborious deliberation, largely rejected the use of Anthropocene as a formal organizing principle. Still, the fact that people have wrought changes to the sky, water, and land seems unassailable. Political questions aside, things like coal-burning factories, atomic bomb tests, umpteen million cans of hair spray, methylmercury effluvium, strip mining, forest clearing, and the damming of major waterways do change the physical equations on this planet. So maybe Anthropocene is a good way to think about our world.

Or maybe not. Above I wrote, “Political questions aside.” But when has that ever happened? Isn’t Anthropocene a reflection not of a scientific trend but of a human failing, namely the proclivity to make ourselves into the axis of whatever system we think we are looking at?

In billions of years of geologic time, all sorts of stuff occurred that had nothing to do with us. Hot gases accreted. Stars flickered on. Spinning boulders glued together into planets. Water vapor condensed into oceans. Volcanoes blasted chemicals into the atmosphere. Sediments collected and hardened. Earthquakes ripped shorelines apart. Glaciers came and went, inundating deserts and drying out estuaries in turn. Meteorites hit, depositing rare elements in layers in the earth’s crust. You can find records of all that in rocks and outer space if you go looking.

But human beings never just “go looking.” We always have something up our sleeves. Even when we were cavemen and had no sleeves, we were scheming and plotting. Eventually the cavemen built microscopes and telescopes, learned to parse chemical formulae, figured out which rocks signified which geological phenomenon, began to get a sense of how things stood, epoch- and cosmos-wise, in our little realm. And what did those now-shaven and be-necktied cavemen conclude? That there would be a new age declared — ours. We would name time after ourselves. “It’s the Anthropocene!” we latter-day troglodytes gloated. “We have met the world-swayer, the unmoved mover, and he is us.”

Pretty heady words from a bunch who used to go around barefoot with clubs and spears. Are we gussied-up Stone Age folk really talking about the world around us, or just about how indispensable we are to it?

The Anthropocene idea may, at first blush, appear scientific. Surely it is rooted in sound observation. I exhale carbon dioxide. My car produces it, too. Methane bubbles out of landfills. Freon seeps from cooling systems. That all goes into the air and traps some radiation from escaping back into space. Things warm up a bit. So far, so good (or not good). This is the general physics of the process. And who is making the materials going into the air? Why, that would be us, among other entities. So maybe the Anthropocene really is a good way to look at things.

But see how we have twisted the thing. There is too much Anthropocene, some Anthropocene-ists begin to say. And so, the Anthropocene-ists argue that many, if not most, of the humans must be eliminated. So argue a lot of environmentalists. Are they thinking more about saving the planet, or advancing a sinister political ideology? Hard to tell, but either way, listen to them and a lot of us die.

In casual conversation, too, some deploy terms like Anthropocene to indicate that they know more about science-y stuff than their interlocutors. “Your political party wouldn’t know global warming if it dropped a hurricane on your heads.” Aha. Touche. And then when the weather does change, when people really do get blown away in the Anthropocene (wherein people, ironically, value one another even less than before), lo: “See, I told you so! You denied science” — read: you denied me — “and now you’re paying the price. As well you should, you ignorant lout.”

So much science I could just scream. See how these Anthropoceners love one another!

But, no. Not science. Politics. That’s what the Anthropocene really connotes. It’s not about the Permian and the Quaternary and the Holocene. It’s about sticking it to my enemies. It’s about me grandstanding, making myself the center of empirical data. Give us Homo sapiens an inch and we’ll take a mile. We might have started off talking about the Anthropocene as an objective framework, but now, as with just about everything else of our making, it’s become a tool (shades of Homo habilis here) for beating one another about the head.

To get an idea of what happens when humans are epistemologically central, and not God, take a look at some specimens from the younger generations. In Japan and South Korea, boy bands whose members don’t look like boys are all the rage. They’re everywhere. They’re on the TV constantly. They’re in commercials. And what do they sell? They strut about showing their belly buttons and hawking face cream and eye shadow. They’re about as manly as a Stevie Nicks solo. And the other young people love it. The kids in Asia are copying the Japanese and Korean boy bands like gangbusters. Young men out here are, no kidding, getting facials, wearing rouge, doing up their hair, and slathering on SPF 50+ sunscreen so their delicate cheeks don’t get a shade darker in the sun. Masculinity is as popular as the plague. “Catamite in culottes” is the fashion watchword it would seem. If you want to see some girly-boys in flowing robes and very expensive makeup, all you need to do is walk around some of the tonier districts of Seoul or Tokyo. Yikes.

This, much more than any geologic layer, is what the Anthropocene is all about. Human beings are not physical creatures only. We don’t live by bread alone. We are souls. We are called to something higher than mere belonging to this little planet, whirling about in this rinky-dink solar system, which is lodged in the throat of this two-bit galaxy, which in turn is a statistical cipher in this garishly huge and empty universe. Without some reference to God’s order, to the natural law, men — as I see here almost daily — lose sight of their identity and try to become women. Even more pathetic is the women who, for the same reasons, try to become men. Lose sight of our destiny as God’s children, encourage rank materialism with advertising and televised lewd dancing, and you will see the sexes melt into one another. If the human being is at the center, then the center stops holding, and everything falls apart. Mere androgyny is loosed upon the world.

Call it the Androgycene if you must also call it the Anthropocene. It’s not that we humans are materially affecting the environment. It’s that we think we’re the end-all, be-all of it. This is why so many Anthropoceners want to kill off 90 percent of the population, isn’t it? So the little god around whom the universe revolves can have the whole thing for himself. Maybe the last Anthropocener in the Androgycene will fade out dancing to a South Korean boy band, alone in the dark, skin beautifully moisturized and toned. Boy or girl, it doesn’t matter. In the Androgycene, we’re all just one generic material lump waiting for geologic time to swallow us like the trilobites of old.

But that’s not who you are, dear reader. You are neither Anthropocener nor Androgycener. You are made in the image and likeness of God. Go out and look at a mountain. Go dig down deep in the dirt. Go out at midnight and get dizzy under the pinprick infinity of stars. We humans are out of place here. We ought not to pretend that this is our final home. If we do, then we get all out of whack. We get androgynous. We get Anthropocene-y. We forget that we are scaled to a homeland so utterly unlike the material cosmos we see down here below.