A. Wood Technozoic Era A play on words, credited to Thomas Berry, which describes our growing dominance of the planet in terms of Geologic Time. Earlier eras include the Paleozoic Age, a period of roughly 300 million years during which life evolved from the cellular level to forms we recognize in today’s world, the Mesozoic Era, a period of roughly 180 millions years known as the Age of Dinosaurs, and the Cenozoic Era, reaching from today back 65 million years known as the Age of Mammals. This proposed future would take one of two forms, the more negative of which being the Technozoic Era. This era extends our unsustainable industrial culture into a permanent way of life, advances in technology serving to insulate us from the consequences of choking the global ecosystem to death, though this is only a temporary fix according to most models, which describe this “Era” as a short-lived dead-end for human civilization. It is more intelligible to liken the Technozoic Era to analogous mass-extinctions in the fossil record rather than the far-spanning Eras for the Geologic Time Scale; in other words, the meteor that killed the dinosaurs rather than a lasting Age of Man. The more positive, sustainable alternative to this, however, is described as the Ecozoic Era.