Myths about the Anthropocene

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/what-myths-about-the-anthropocene-get-wrong-180984181/

by lehi • 2 years ago

69 59 2 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

eimrine4• 2 years ago

Can I have an answer to the quession in the heading according to the article? This English is too complicated for me.

mikestew• 2 years ago

Scroll halfway down to find a numbered list, with headings. Personally, I couldn't simplify it anymore than that.

germinator• 2 years ago

You're basically walking into the middle of a niche debate about semantics. There is a faction that dislikes the use of the word "anthropocene" to refer to the current geological era - and specifically, the past 100 years or so. Their main argument is that it's an imperceptible blip on the radar compared to the scale of other geological eras we study.

This article is a response that can be summed up as "no, we're changing the environment faster than anything before, so it counts". It's framed not as a genuine debate, but as an attempt to dispel "myths".

"Why this matters" is left as an exercise for the reader...

lainga3• 2 years ago

Geologists reject declaration of Anthropocene epoch

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/22/geologists-r...

Clamchop• 2 years ago

This makes it sound like the designation is latent, even if rejected by committee right now. They acknowledge an anthropogenic "event" is under way but aren't admitting the anthropocene because of its recency and unclear boundaries.

But the boundaries of other epochs are also only estimated and didn't unfold completely overnight, not even for the K-Pg impactor, probably the most sudden change in the geological record. It still took thousands of years for the consequences to shake out into a steadier state.

If we were studying the current transition hundreds of thousands or millions of years from now starting with zero knowledge, the disappearance of megafauna (ongoing and has been for tens of thousands of years), the large scale transformation of forests to grassland, the invasion of species to every corner of the earth, the mass extinction most severely in the tropics and oceans, the appearance of so much carbon, plastic, and other pollution in the geologic record, and the disappearance of glaciers (tens of thousands of years to go there, even in worst case scenarios) would appear virtually instantaneous. There'd be error bounds on it but eventually no disagreement that the Earth took a corner.

So the argument starts to sound a bit like denial. But that's OK. We've been through lots of denial around whether extinction happens, if mass extinction happens, if the K-Pg impact happened, if it caused a mass extinction, or whether continents move around. All settled now.

lainga3• 2 years ago

They acknowledge an anthropogenic "event" is under way but aren't admitting the anthropocene because of its recency and unclear boundaries.

You mean aren't admitting the anthropocene as an epoch? That's not what the article says. The reason it's not admissible as an epoch is because we might blow ourselves up tomorrow and wipe out industrial civilisation. And the whole layer of steel and concrete we laid down would be very thin in the record, like the K-Pg impact. The banded iron formations are kind of on the boundary, they're associated with the Great Oxygenation Event but you could also maybe call it the Jatulian period. That was a couple hundred million years.

There'd be error bounds on it but eventually no disagreement that the Earth took a corner.

Those are classified as events, not epochs. The K-Pg impact was an event.

Ed. I guess you could also say why can't we have a new Anthropocene period caused by an Anthropocene event, but I don't know what to tell you, it's just confusing to do that. That's why the K-Pg impact is followed by the Danian age, not the The-Start-Of-This-Period-Has-A-Lot-Of-Iridium age. I don't get why the proposal didn't want to call it the Crawfordian if that's where the canonical marker is found

specialist2• 2 years ago

The Great War, World War, Forever War.

Industrial, organic, traditional farming.

Toast vs merely warmed bread.

I'm fine with everyone landing on their own names. Provided each has some kind of preamble (context, assumptions, scope) and acknowledging everyone else has the same right(s) to add to the confusion.

arduanika3• 2 years ago

Huh. That looks like really important context. I wonder why the Smithsonian article neglected to mention it. Do they just not want to admit that there's any dissent?

lainga3• 2 years ago

I think the proposing team ran out of options on the formal track so now they're going the ad-hominem track against the IUGS (they're uncomfortable with the Anthropocene, they're climate-change deniers, etc.)

astine• 2 years ago

They did mention it. The Smithsonian piece is a response to it. They even link to the same IUGS press release that the Guardian uses as a source.

defrost• 2 years ago

The Smithsonian article specifically mentioned it right after the leading paragraphs that outlined what the distinguishing features were and that it had been put forward:

    The proposal was rejected by the international hierarchy of stratigraphy— of which the International Commission on Stratigraphy is a part— without citing substantive reasons, but most public criticisms of the Anthropocene stem from a range of sources: from within the heart of geology, to well outside it, among the social sciences and humanities.

It then goes on to address 10 points of dissent made and why these reasons are weak, misconstrued, not sufficient, etc.

neonate• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240418201615/https://www.smith...

Nevermark4• 2 years ago

It does seem pointless to avoid naming a new era for dramatic irreversible changes that would have defined a new era if they happened millions of years ago.

How many common assumptions about the Holocene are already broken?

With much less at stake, I think it was out of touch and impractical to choose scientific terminology at odds with existing common language, when "dwarf planet" was defined as not a subcategory of "planet".

It defies common usage, and also common language forms. Prefixed nouns usually refer to subcategories, not excluded categories.

What science fiction story is going to carefully distinguish "dwarf planets" as being a completely separate category from "planets" because one didn't completely clear its orbit of debris?

A better (equivalent, and just as useful) nomenclature would have left the common definition of "planet" alone: i.e. a body circling a star, too small to be a star or brown dwarf (no continuous or aborted fusion), but large enough to form a near sphere based on its own gravitational field.

THEN, subdivide "planets" into "major planets" and "minor planets". We have 8 major planets, and it turns out, many many dwarf planets.

Pluto is a "planet", specifically a "dwarf planet". Earth and Jupiter are "planets", specifically "major planets".

"Rogue planets" are "planets" that left their systems. Some were originally major, some dwarf. "Protoplanets" are new "planets" actively accumulating mass by clearing their orbital field. They may stabilize as "major" or "dwarf" planets.

The new exlusionary definition of "planet" also opens the doors to inevitable conundrums:

Some day a huge planetary type body will be discovered in the outreaches of a solar system where it has not cleared its area of debris. So not a "planet"?

Some day a small planetary body with a cleared orbital field will be found between the orbits of larger planetary bodies that haven't cleared their fields. So it is a planet, but the larger bodies surrounding it are not?

runeofdoom• 2 years ago

We already had 'minor planets' (asteroids). Planets are a continuum, from small rocky or icy ones the size of large moons, to "terrestrial" ones, to ice giants and gas giants.

Nevermark4• 2 years ago

Yes, that is how I think "planets" should be used. A root category over any number of subcategories defined over continuums and combinations of other features.

As it is used in common langauge.

arduanika3• 2 years ago

"Planet" derives from the Greek word for "wanderer", so it's totally on brand if the category keeps moving around.

FrustratedMonky4• 2 years ago

Yes. The entire Pluto thing seemed like a pedantic waste of time. Or, at least grandfather it in. Now everyone still thinks of it as a planet, but we have to qualify it when talking : "Oh hey I read an interesting story about the 9th planet Pluto, ooops, sorry, I mean 'dwarf', don't crucify me".

masklinn3• 2 years ago

The only waste of time is from emotionally charged reactions like yours. The IAU vote happened 18 years ago, yet you can’t let it go.

The grandfathering idea makes a negative amount of sense. These are technical classifications on objective criteria.

kadoban3• 2 years ago

That doesn't really fix anything, because no matter what you call Pluto, it has to get demoted from the list of planet-like-things-whatever-we-call-them that school children learn.

The issue is that there's hundreds of objects at least as planet-y as Pluto is, and nobody is going to remember all of those. So either we demote Pluto somehow, or we have to have some reason that it's more important than the rest.

So, Pluto is just historically interesting but inherently just one of many rocks. And science tries not to categorize things based on "oh that one somebody noticed first".

Nevermark4• 2 years ago

I agree, distinguishing between the importance of things is helpful.

But changing “planet” to not include Pluto just created unending inconsistency.

There is nothing that screamed “not planet” about Pluto until some scientists preconceptions and emotional investment about the numbers of planets got challenged.

People now have to learn by rote that Pluto is not a planet. Because “scientists say so”, not because they are actually becoming sensitive to debris fields.

The link between orbital debris and planetary size isn’t even going to hold with future discoveries. So the new restrictive regular language-unfriendly definition isn’t even going to be stable.

Ridiculous.

derbOac• 2 years ago

I guess I never understood the problem with saying we have hundreds of planets, and then to classify them.

FrustratedMonky4• 2 years ago

This seems like a reverse logic article. Here are 'myths', but really 'Not'.

It isn't against naming this the Anthropocene, all of the myths are followed by reasons why they aren't myths and this is probably the Anthropocene. "From a certain point of view".

BirAdam• 2 years ago

From an exceedingly anthropocentric point of view.

People assume that humans are the only or first animal of the Holocene to have left lasting global impacts. The mastodons essentially great swaths of steppe. Ants and worms have essentially altered the grounds. Bacteria generate the bulk of the oxygen. Beavers change the course of rivers and create lakes. The number of critters that alter the Earth is quite numerous. Humans also alter the Earth, and in increasingly large ways, but naming an epoch after humanity seems… egotistical when other critters do stuff equally impressive when scale is factored in.

tgv• 2 years ago

The use of the word "myth" implies that people who don't accept it are conspiracy nut jobs. But in reality it is only a semantic debate. It doesn't change reality, nor does it allow better understanding. We clearly have an impact on the planet, but it is up to whoever in the very far future to decide if it really was the start of an epoch, assuming they would still express themselves in such primitive concepts.

beloch• 2 years ago

Honestly, it is hubris to start the anthropocene in just the last human lifetime. Our species has been making an impact that will be evident in the geological record for longer than that.

e.g. Geologists of some far-off future are going to notice that species that were isolated to one continent suddenly started popping up everywhere in the fossil record a few hundred years ago. Sea travel has united the continents in way they haven't been united since Pangea.

A few hundred years will be indistinguishable from a single human lifetime to those future geologists. To us however, it's an important distinction.

willis936• 2 years ago

Zooming in to the right of the graph: there's noise then there's signal.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

userulluipeste• 2 years ago

"A few hundred years will be indistinguishable from a single human lifetime to those future geologists."

On what do you base this claim? Before humans, not much happened around and the sediment layers were thin. The amount of energy moving things around was limited to weather (due to sun radiation, mostly), volcanic/tectonic activity, and to (a lesser degree, due to direct effect of) tidal forces. Humans activity however, both directly and indirectly, caused effects that also involved energy stored in the span of millions of years. That should be anything but indistinguishable.

Also, from the article: "The amount of sediment settled behind the world’s thousands of big dams would cover all of California to a depth of five meters, and such sediments are full of distinctive markers, like pesticide residues, metals, microplastics and the fossils of invasive species. To define a time period formally, geologists must identify distinctive signals in sediments or rocks that can be correlated around the globe, and the presence of such markers is ubiquitous. The geology is real."

parineum• 2 years ago

like pesticide residues, metals, microplastics and the fossils of invasive species.

How much of that stuff is going to survive on geological timescales amd the concept of "invasive species" isn't really applicable to anything but conservationists that want to maintain a static environment.

AdamN• 2 years ago

Agreed. Spain's old growth forests were denuded to build the Spanish Armada (or thereabouts) and you can go further back to catastrophic, anthropogenic, environmental shifts a few thousand years back in India, China and elsewhere in the world. Geology isn't focused on single year boundaries so maybe it's best to say that we entered the Anthropocene 6k-2k years ago (a 4k year range).

southernplaces7• 2 years ago

Spains (and much of Europe's) old growth forests were also almost completely denuded much earlier than that to build most of the Roman Empire, and its vast mining operations, naval flotillas and so forth. Yet they grew back to again disappear roughly around the Renaissance over 1000 years later.

The interesting thing is that many modern popular social discussions (and even some pop sci arguments) speak of old growth forests as irreplaceable things that, if cut down, pretty much disappear when history clearly shows that this isn't true.

I don't defend cutting them down just because, but I think it's good to be honest about their ability to come back.

tim333• 2 years ago

We seem to have wiped out most of the 'charismatic megafauna' from about 10,000 years ago. Mammoths, dodos etc.

mig39• 2 years ago

The argument is a lot like calling that 1914-1918 global conflict "The Great War."

Yeah, let's not be hasty here. Let's just call it a war, because something worse can come along...

Let's not call this the Anthropocene yet, we don't know what's coming.

eimrine4• 2 years ago

Your metaphor is great but lacks an answer how exactly should we call this non-Anthropocene.

b33j0r2• 2 years ago

Would anthropoch be better? Manflection point? Gympulse?

If the problem being identified is that science is bad at PR, I agree. Science communication, I love you; please stop being a self-fulfilling prophesy.

If the message is that human industrialization besides carbon emissions directly have obscured the discussion. Yes.

But this article kinda… does not tell you the thesis, it gives you the evidence for us to come to our own (proven and correct) conclusions. At… length.

I like it, but we should probably try to get new people who don’t already agree… maybe

eimrine4• 2 years ago

I would like to have a word like Antropocrisis or Anthropoverflow which would be a collecting point for child-free arguments, because nowadays a declining of population is still considered as a negative event everywhere.

Vecr2• 2 years ago

It is a negative event. I see the sign of the exponential, and it's the wrong one.

heresie-dabord• 2 years ago

anthropoch be better? Manflection point? Gympulse?

How about the Idiocracene. ^_^

b33j0r2• 2 years ago

We don’t _have_ to succumb to idiocracy. Just a reminder.

Our (royal we) actions to dumb down our UIs was probably immoral in the middle-game; if we wanted anyone to not just smash money buttons, based on feelings.

I was here. I get it

specialist2• 2 years ago

IMHO anthropocalypse is most accurate. Though I use "oops" for brevity.

kazinator• 2 years ago

Let's celebrate the new Anthropocene era by extracting some anthracene from anthracite and lighting it on fire.

Anotheroneagain• 2 years ago

It would have to be defined to begin much earlier, perhaps 26ky ago, when the mass extinctions and geological changes began to happen.

noduerme2• 2 years ago

Suppose you want to graph negative responses to a survey over time. Let's say the business had been getting increasingly worse on all metrics over time.

Grouped by day you might just see a couple huge spikes on days where there were a few negative responses.

Grouped by year you'd notice that the volume of negative feedbacks was increasing.

Grouped by milllenia it would be hard to notice that something had changed radically in the last few years.

The question is what timeframe matters to your particular case. Unless you can answer that, you can't form a specific idea of how bad something actually is or whether it's begun improving or is still deteriorating.

The worst atmospheric polluting parts of the industrial revolution will have been over for most countries for a century before we really feel the environmental consequences of rising sea levels and increased greenhouse effects. No one alive today was burning coal in 1895. So it's not crazy to think about how we adapt, while still considering how to stop adding to the damage.

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

you will be detecting micro plastic with every single fossil for millennia to come.

noduerme2• 2 years ago

Yeah, but a few thousand years is nothing.

hoc• 2 years ago

Making fire and the wheel considered dangerous, choosing farty animals for our cultivation endeavors stinks while getting down from trees into concrete caves was a bad move. Scaling that up to "everyone"... priceless.

What we once considered pivotal points in our development seems now the source for our declared demise. At least we discovered that via satellites shot into orbit by rockets.

Now, if we accept that as the natural overshooting in a evolutionary jump, we just need to adjust. The undershooting will be painful, the discussion in the next few oscillations annyoing, still, it's the way to go. After all, denial is just a common step in change.

Myths about the Anthropocene

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