This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1484203
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1484203
There’s a philosophical question for our age - where are the aliens?
It misses humanity entirely that those aliens might have followed a similar course in development as ourselves, and have just…not survived the nuclear age. Or whatever equivalent.
Arguing about naming this or any era is moot when we haven’t, in the 165 years since the discovery, asked - how evolved are we?
We have all the tools and all the understanding to be the first species on this planet and to our knowledge in the history of the universe, to successfully mitigate its own evolution.
We will not. We will be talking about stuff that will one day be very sadly meaningless and watching sports. Good job.
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We wrote a set of stories to assure ourselves that the animals and resources of the world were put there for our benefit, to justify our desires to satisfy our appetites.
A dumb, and, quite likely, fatal error.
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our duty is, or hould I say was to use our brains to care for the Earth that we evolved to inhabit. Not the same as get out there and pillage the whole damn thing.
The lizards are waiting for their turn again…
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I had not followed the proposals and deliberations of this committee but had read a lot of discussion about the concept of the anthropocene and when the proposal was rejected (and I dug into what it was precisely) I fully agreed with its rejection, as does the author of this piece.
The proposal for the anthropocene to start in 1952, just because the Ivy Mike test created a world-wide fallout signature that year, was indeed wrongly conceived. We have epochs defined in sedimentary records not just because they are detectable, but because they mark a major change in the the global environment that differentiates what came before from what came after. Nuclear test fallout is detectable but has literally nothing to do with how humans are changing the environment, a phenomenon that predates the 20th Century by a few millenia at least.
One marker that really did mark a persistent global climate event that I have seen proposed in 1610, when the atmospheric CO2 level hit its lowest level after starting a sharp drop 50 years before. The cause is known - the regrowth of forest across North America after the De Soto expedition of 1539-1541 set off multiple pandemics that disrupted indigenous land exploitation that had shaped North America for over a thousand years.
But the fact that the De Soto pandemics could do this shows that humans were shaping global climate through land management practices long before that time, though clear markers are much harder to define.
If 1610 does not serve (or the onset of the sharp part of the drop about 30 years earlier) perhaps future work could find a good candidate marker from earlier agricultural practices. One thought I have is that sedimentation created by land clearance for farming might be an early practical marker, though necessarily localized.
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It could be argued that the anthropocene epoch and the holocene epochs are the same epoch. It looks more and more like human beings changed the earth by adopting agriculture and hunting large mammals to extinction at the end of the last ice age, traditionally the beginning of the holocene epoch about 11,700 years ago. Before that change the earth had been subject to a series of long ice ages and short warming perods and the large mega fauna had expanded and shrunk in numbers as the mammoth steppes had expanded and shrunk. The human population had remained relatively insignificant on the landscape. The only thing that changed 11,700 years ago was the human population. When the modern human population first dramatically increased between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago the world began to change first by the extinction of large mega fauna and then later by increasing extinctions as human agriculture completely changed habitats for millions of species.
All of the talk about the Anthropocene epoch beginning in 1952 AD or 1610 AD is over 10,000 years too late. By the time of Christ humans had exploited nearly every environment on the planet. There were numerous cities with over a million inhabitants and there had been large cities for thousands of years.
If human beings were to go extinct today, evolution would eventually replace the wooley mammoths,giant sloths, dodo birds, saber tooth cats, etc with animals to fill those niches. That would take a long time but to quote the Jeff Goldblum line “life finds a way.”
The best we humans can hope for is to be good stewards of the world we have created. We first need to acknowledge that we have created the world we live in and owe it to the remaining survivors to keep them alive.
I am not sure the 11,700 year ago date is the right date, but in the history of life on earth whether it is 9,000 BCE or 30,000 BCE when man began to change the earth permanently is of little importance.
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I wish these discussions would include some intelligent estimate of the increase population of livestock–cows, sheep, esp. There has been a four-fold increase in human population in the past 100 years-- what are the guestimates for kept animals?
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Although the Anthropocene may well be substantial chunk of the Holocene, and the most notable feature of the Holocene has been the proliferation of humans during it, equating them is definitely incorrect.
The start of the Holocene is marked by a sharp temperature increase which led to the rapid melting of glaciers:
Humans did not cause this, but they proliferated immediately after in the greatly improved conditions which led to agriculture. When, after the start of the Holocene are human activities substantial enough to start driving climate conditions directly?
Even if it started soon after (say, within 1000 years) it does not make the Holocene and Anthropocene the same, it just makes the Anthropocene by far the major part of the Holocene.
That is the problem - developing a useful and defensible definition and marker. Picking 1952 is definitely way too late. 1610 may also be way too late (probably, it should likely define a sub-part of the Anthropocene).
The Holocene has already been given other subdivisions based on climatic events:
But the topic of how the Anthropocene fits into this is definitely in play. 1952 is too late, but we need more work on when the earliest evidence of humans influencing climate by human action. The concept of the Anthropocene needs more development.
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Good stewardship starts with an ability to think in terms of natural systems. The forest is a system, the tree is an expression of that system. The tortoise is an expression of the desert. The Anthropocene begins when we gain the ability to degrade natural systems and adopt extractive concepts like harvest and output. It ends when we gain the ability to preserve natural systems.
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We wrote a set of mythologies…
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Don’t confuse a normal fluctuation in temperature over the past few million years as the changing of one epoch to the next. There have been at least 4 similar fluctuations in the last 400,000 years. An epochal change is marked some sort of significant change (often geological) that creates massive extinctions opening up signficant ecological niches. There is no reason to believe that the warming that happened 11,000-12,000 years ago was anything new. What was different is modern humans became ascendant.
By the way the current CO2 level is off the chart for the past 400,000 years and rising every year. We are responsible for the changes that rise will bring.
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22 billion chickens.
1.5 billion cattle.
1 billion each pigs, sheep and goats.
.5 billion turkeys.
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Neat reference to Crawford Lake!
Any estimates of the human population of North America before and after De Soto? Must have been a pretty substantial drop.
I am citing the actual definition of the start of the Holocene not confusing anything with anything else - which is why I posted the paper that provides the official criterion defining it.
The earlier temperature jumps define other epochs in the Quaternary. The previous one at 126,000 years in the chart you post marks the start of the Tarantian sub-epoch of the Pleistocene epoch (“Late Pleistocene”) of the Quaternary period.
The dominance of humans during the Holocene was initiated by the temperature jump - humans didn’t cause it and they don’t define it. The first evidence of agriculture occurs with a century or two at one location (the Levant) after the enabling climatic event but it took thousands of years to develop there and started later at other locations, not until about 3000 years later in China. Humans only came to dominate the Earth over the course of several thousand years after the Holocene began.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2304407120
Additonally, recent papers like this one:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18478-6
show that a lot more study of the intra-Holocene climate patterns, and how they relate to human activity, are going to be needed to use climate data to define the Anthropocene at a date earlier than ~1580. Which is why I suggested an alternate type of data (sediment deposits from erosion) might provide a more useful definition and marker.
And those are domesticated turkeys. Yesterday we saw dozens of turkeys wandering around on the outskirts of Vacaville! That was new.
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The Anthropocene May Not Be An ‘Epoch,’ But The Age Of Humans Is Most Definitely Underway
Call it whatever you want, it wont las long, a mere blip in Geological Ages map.
I know you are having a hard time with my point. Let me lay it out clearly. The “holocene epoch” wouldn’t be an epoch at all if it wasn’t for the rise and dominance of modern human beings. The temperature jump was just one of at least 5 in the last 400,000 years. It looks like a natural pattern that would probably have continued if modern humans had remained as relatively insignificant as the previous humans. Nothing else had changed on the Earth since Central America blocked the flow of water between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the equator.
The whole Holocene idea was weak when I learned about it in high school over 60 years ago. It has become ever weaker over the past decades as more and more research has been done. The only really important thing is the rise of human beings on the landscape and the fundamental changes we have made to the Earth starting with the extinction of the mega fauna.
To some degree the question of epoch boundaries is a tempest in a tea pot, confounded by matters of scale and precision. While the difference between day and night might seem absolutely clear when comparing noon and midnight, the difference can be more than a little fuzzy and arbitrary at the margins of day into night and night into day - twilight. Twilight, however is not one homogeneous period but generally divided into three, civil, nautical and astronomical.
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Wow. Thanks!
The 5 B turkeys is more than I would’ve guessed; the others sound right.
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