A few weeks back I featured New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert talking about the human-caused Sixth Extinction, which we're in the middle of. I had a chance to read an excerpt from her forthcoming book on that subject called The Lost World — Annals Of Extinction, Part II.
Geologists and paleontologists are arguing about whether to formally accept Paul Crutzen's term "the Anthropocene", which is meant to capture the idea that humans are now the main agent of change on the geological time scale. I thought you might find the debate amusing.
Mark Williams, a stratigrapher who teaches at the University of Leicester and is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, told me that the response to formalizing the Anthropocene had "generally been very positive." (Just in the past few months, three new academic journals focusing on the Anthropocene have been launched.) But, as to be expected from a group that can sustain a decade-long disagreement about the status of the Quaternary, there's still plenty of dissent. Some critics argue that humans have been altering the planet for thousands of years already, so why get all worked up about it now?
"We can see that human interactions with the landscape are increasing," Philip Gibbard, a stratigrapher at Cambridge, told me. "No one disputes that. We build buildings. We build towns. We build roads. We drop plastic bags in the ocean. All that's absolutely true. But from a geological perspective—and I have to speak as a geologist, not as a generally interested person—I think what's happening now is just a logical continuation of something that began as human populations started to increase at the beginning of the Holocene.
"It is quite exciting to pursue this new idea," he added. "But I'm suspicious of it."
Other critics are skeptical of the idea for opposite reasons. They point out that human impacts on the planet are likely to become even more pronounced, and hence more stratigraphically significant, as time goes on. Thus, what's sometimes referred to in geological circles as the "event horizon" has not yet been reached.
For his part, Jan Zalasiewicz, a stratigrapher and long-time Geological Society member, is sympathetic to both lines of argument. Humans have been altering the planet for quite a while, though probably the impacts of the past were orders of magnitude more modest than they are today.
And a few centuries from now the impacts of human activity may be orders of magnitude greater again. By the time people are through, Zalasiewicz told me, he wouldn't be surprised if the earth were rendered more or less unrecognizable.
"One can not exclude a P-T-type outcome," he observed, referring to the worst of the so-called Big Five, the end-Permian, or Permo-Triassic, extinction. In the meantime, he said "we have to work with what we've got."
In the meantime, we have to work with what we've got.
Beautiful. The DOTE philosophy in a nutshell. I couldn't have put it better myself
I'm sure this debate is very important. What clearly isn't being debated is that humans are having an impact on their habitat. That's a given. Also a given is that this process is accelerating.
I'd say the earth is already more or less unrecognizable today compared to when humans started.
Posted by: Andy | 01/21/2014 at 02:21 PM