Why do some leading geologists reject the term "Anthropocene"?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/the-epic-row-over-a-new-epoch

by Hooke • 2 years ago

51 27 2 years ago

MrVandemar• 2 years ago

As much as precision is important, I think bickering about what we're scientifically calling the current man-made catastrophe is like arguing whether an aeroplane that's had its wings sheared off is still technically an aeroplane while it's plummeting to the ground.

GrumpySloth• 2 years ago

Except the plane is going to survive. Only the passengers aren’t going to. On the other hand, there are going to be new passengers. Assuming we don’t blow up the plane with nukes.

basil-rash• 2 years ago

And if we do blow up the plane with nukes, there will still be new passengers. They’ll just be red-hardened. Maybe even rad-metabolizing. Evolution loves well-adapted organisms!

concordDance• 2 years ago

The idea that we're headed towards extinction due to our impacts on the environment is not supported by any scientific institution I am aware of.

Why do you believe this?

lazide• 2 years ago

Have you met taxonomists?

That’s like complaining that lawyers argue, or engineers build things.

j9461701• 2 years ago

I find myself in an odd position - I am pro-Anthropocene but I find this reasoning suspect:

But the Anthropocene’s future as an informal time period is assured. It’s too apt—and too important—a term to be abandoned. As Paul Crutzen pointed out in 2002, barring a “meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic,” humans “will remain a major environmental force for many millennia.” Science recently summed up the situation this way: “the anthropocene is dead. long live the anthropocene.”

If this was all the justification I would be against the anthropocene being accepted. As the anti-anthro crowd says, geology is not the study of "maybes" or "if this trend continues".

Instead I am pro-anthropocene because even if humanity died today, there would still be an extremely weird layer of rock that would need to be explained and the existing human impacts on the enviroment would still take millions of years to dissipate. Further, '1952' is in the past. It's very recent, but it is in the past. Stratigraphy is the study of layers, and humanity has undeniably created a clear and very odd layer in the rock. Therefore, a new age is justified to me.

bjornsing• 2 years ago

Makes sense to me. What’s the counter argument?

defrost• 2 years ago

There's some long hashing out of pro's and cons in the Smithsonian link and thread comments here

Myths about the Anthropocene ( 67 points, 2 days ago, 58 comments ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014

mordymoop• 2 years ago

Also, geology isn’t just sedimentation. Erosion, from various causes, removes layers of rock, sometimes sweeping away thousands of feet of sediment. Our mining industry has removed rock on the scale of a significant meteor bombardment. Future geologists might ask “why is there a massive stratigraphic absence here?” as often as they ask “why is there a weird sedimentary layer here?”

Grimblewald• 2 years ago

Also movement of large amounts of rocks from one area to another. Our concrete momuments to arrogance and excess, even when theyre rubble, will be hard to explain without the human element.

graemep• 2 years ago

Instead I am pro-anthropocene because even if humanity died today, there would still be an extremely weird layer of rock that would need to be explained and

Would there be enough to make it an epoch rather than just an event though? Most opinions on the "silurian hypothesis" thought experiment seem to suggest not. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industri...

Our current impacts are significantly different from what they were four hundred years ago. They will probably be even more different in another few centuries. Assuming we do not wipe ourselves out, our eventual impact will be very different from our current impact. Maybe we will even reverse many things, and a millennium is just a blip in geological time.

In any case, the Holocene is defined by human impacts on the environment, so really Anthropocene is more of an alternative name for the Holocene than a separate epoch: https://www.britannica.com/science/Holocene-Epoch

gabaix• 2 years ago

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am an Anthropocene partisan.

It would have helped if the author had mentioned this at the beginning of the article. Or they had let someone neutral write the article entirely.

klodolph2• 2 years ago

I don’t think journalistic neutrality is either possible or desirable, the more I think about it.

mongol• 2 years ago

I definitely think an article like this can be written from a neutral mindset. The ideal neutral journalist is one who is not emotionally invested in an outcome. In domestic politics almost everyone has an opinion but a piece about a scientific dispute is not something most have an opinion about.

devb• 2 years ago

Have you read Elizabeth Kolbert before? Or anything in the New Yorker?

seydor• 2 years ago

This obviously has considerable political implications since it will inevitably be intertwined with climate change. So it's not merely a scientific discussion.

Will be kind of fun if the term becomes institutionalized, then some new groups propose the "Romanocene", the "Coloniocene", the "Industriocene", the "Americanocene" etc etc.

bradley13• 2 years ago

The political implications may be the strongest argument against it. Science should strive for neutrality, to present facts without getting tangled up in politics.

Mordisquitos• 2 years ago

On the other hand, now that the previous commenter mentioned that, I can see an objective reason to be against the term 'Anthropocene' regardless of whether the epoch itself is accepted.

'Anthropocene' implies that it is humanity that is the driving force of the purported geological changes, but humanity's ability to cause such an impact is itself a blip in the biological history of our species. I do see that some proposals as to when the epoch started go as far back as the Neolithic revolution, but I very much doubt that a hypothetical world in which humanity had never progressed past subsistence farming and husbandry could have an effect on the geological scale. Plus, humanity still has more history before the Neolithic than after it.

So, taking the more mainstream arguments stating that a new geological epoch started in modern times, be it with the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Era, or the 1960s, the fact that this epoch is Anthropic is not necessary and sufficient to describe it.

Instead, I would argue that the defining characteristic of this epoch would be Industrialisation, hence 'Industrocene' or, forgive my Greek, 'Viomechanocene' would be much more descriptive and more objective names.

optimalsolver• 2 years ago

Science has always been political, even back in the time of Galileo.

kevin_b_er• 2 years ago

And when the politics of greed and the science of truth come to odds?

Therein lies the rub.

ozymandias1337• 2 years ago

& according to Urban Dictionary we are living in the "Assholocene"

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Assholocene

_nalply• 2 years ago

It seems some geologists don't want stratigraphy speculating about the future.

I can imagine they say, we don't play clairvoyant. That's what I can agree with.

However I think that the concept of the Anthropocene is too important to throw it away. I propose a branch in geology which does research about current effects on stratigraphy. In that branch the Anthropocene would be indispensable.

Disclaimer: I am not a geologist.

Why do some leading geologists reject the term "Anthropocene"?

Related Stories