[Rantman] Anthropocene - classic Economist article summarize

[Richard Pauli]

It looks like we have a newly coined word:  Anthropocene - or the 
geological age where humans significantly mark the ecosystem.   It 
follows the Holocene geological era.   Just figure the stratified stone 
layers of the Grand Canyon are topped with an asphalt and concrete 
highway.   Cars as fossils, maybe.
A May 26th 2011  article in the Economist says it well: 
http://www.economist.com/node/18741749


A man-made world


  Science is recognising humans as a geological force to be reckoned with


-snips-

    ...The advent of the Anthropocene promises more, though, than a
    scientific nicety or a new way of grabbing the eco-jaded public's
    attention. The term "paradigm shift" is bandied around with
    promiscuous ease. But for the natural sciences to make human
    activity central to its conception of the world, rather than a
    distraction, would mark such a shift for real.

      ...embracing the Anthropocene as an idea means ... means treating
    humans not as insignificant observers of the natural world but as
    central to its workings, elemental in their force.

    ...The most common way of distinguishing periods of geological time
    is by means of the fossils they contain. On this basis picking out
    the Anthropocene in the rocks of days to come will be pretty easy.
    Cities will make particularly distinctive fossils. A city on a
    fast-sinking river delta (and fast-sinking deltas, undermined by the
    pumping of groundwater and starved of sediment by dams upstream, are
    common Anthropocene environments) could spend millions of years
    buried and still, when eventually uncovered, reveal through its
    crushed structures and weird mixtures of materials that it is unlike
    anything else in the geological record.

    ...The clearest evidence for the system working differently in the
    Anthropocene comes from the recycling systems on which life depends
    for various crucial elements. In the past couple of centuries people
    have released quantities of fossil carbon that the planet took
    hundreds of millions of years to store away. This has given them a
    commanding role in the planet's carbon cycle.

    ...The Earth's history shows that the planet can indeed tip from one
    state to another, amplifying the sometimes modest changes which
    trigger the transition. The nightmare would be a flip to some
    permanently altered state much further from the Holocene than things
    are today: a hotter world with much less productive oceans, for
    example. Such things cannot be ruled out. On the other hand, the
    invocation of poorly defined tipping points is a well worn
    rhetorical trick for stirring the fears of people unperturbed by
    current, relatively modest, changes.

    ...In general, the goal of staying at or returning close to Holocene
    conditions seems judicious. It remains to be seen if it is
    practical. The Holocene never supported a civilisation of 10 billion
    reasonably rich people, as the Anthropocene must seek to do, and
    there is no proof that such a population can fit into a planetary
    pot so circumscribed. So it may be that a "good Anthropocene",
    stable and productive for humans and other species they rely on, is
    one in which some aspects of the Earth system's behaviour are
    lastingly changed. For example, the Holocene would, without human
    intervention, have eventually come to an end in a new ice age.
    Keeping the Anthropocene free of ice ages will probably strike most
    people as a good idea.

    ...Such a choice is possible because of the most fundamental change
    in Earth history that the Anthropocene marks: the emergence of a
    form of intelligence that allows new ways of being to be imagined
    and, through co-operation and innovation, to be achieved. The
    lessons of science, from Copernicus to Darwin, encourage people to
    dismiss such special pleading. So do all manner of cultural
    warnings, from the hubris around which Greek tragedies are built to
    the lamentation of King David's preacher: "Vanity of vanities, all
    is vanity...the Earth abideth for ever...and there is no new thing
    under the sun." But the lamentation of vanity can be false modesty.
    On a planetary scale, intelligence is something genuinely new and
    powerful. Through the domestication of plants and animals
    intelligence has remade the living environment. Through industry it
    has disrupted the key biogeochemical cycles. For good or ill, it
    will do yet more.

    ...It may seem nonsense to think of the (probably sceptical)
    intelligence with which you interpret these words as something on a
    par with plate tectonics or photosynthesis. But dam by dam, mine by
    mine, farm by farm and city by city it is remaking the Earth before
    your eyes.


<http://www.economist.com/node/18741749>
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