post-: For Eric Hobsbawm, “When people face what nothing in their past has prepared them for, they grope for words to name the unknown, even when they can neither define nor understand it. Sometime in the third quarter of the twentieth century, we can see this process at work among the intellectuals of the West. The keyword was the small preposition “after,” generally used in its latinate form “post” as a prefix to any of the numerous terms which had, for some generations, been used to mark out the mental territory of twentieth-century life.” The post-combination now indicated a void: “I can’t find words for what is going on.”
-cene: cognate with Latin recens. As a word-forming element in geology, it was introduced by Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), from a Latinized form of the Greek kainos "new." In respects to form, -cene means recently made, fresh, recent, unused, unworn; in respects to substance, it means of a new kind; unprecedented, novel, uncommon, unheard of..The recent proliferation of compound expressions using the -cene suffix is an effort to name “something new under the sun”, (to borrow a title from J.R. McNeill.)
The Neologismcene: Some other ‘cenes from the book Break Up the Anthropocene, by Steve Mentz: Agnotocene, Anglocene, Anthrobscene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Econocene, Homogenocene, Jolyonocene, Manthropocene, Misanthropocene, Naufragocene, Necrocene, Phagocene, Phronocene, Plantationocene, Planthropocene, Polemocene, Sustainocene, Symbiocene, Thalassocene, Thanatocene, Technocene, Thermocene, Trumpocene.
Large-scale forest fires in North America have given rise to another -cene: the pyrocene — a term coined by fire historian Stephen Pyne. In addition to burning large swaths of forest, the fires of the pyrocene emit large plumes of toxic smoke — airborne toxic events. (to use Don DeLillio’s phrase from from White Noise)
E.O. Wilson suggests another name, the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness. The Eremocene is basically the age of people, our domesticated plants and animals, and our croplands all around the world as far as the eye can see.