Scene: The Anthropocene

"Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring, global catastrophe, but one caused solely by a single species: Us. [Our] innate social predisposition to greed [has precipitated the catastrophe]."
"I'm not trying to editorialize and say this is right or this is wrong. Either extreme is too simplistic. We are compelled to progress. We have extracted from the land from the moment we stood on two feet."
"We are working to supply the kinds of materials that are necessary for the lives we've built for ourselves."
Jan Zalasiewicz, geologist, University of Leicester, Anthropocene Working Group

"With its huge population size and distinctive biology, genetics and bone geochemistry, the broiler chicken may be viewed as a key species indicator of the proposed Anthropocene Epoch."
Paper promoting Anthropocene Working Group

"The drive to officially recognize the Anthropocene may, in fact, be political rather than scientific."
"To be useful, the samples measured would have to come from a single stratigraphic section [of the Earth]. The chicken paper] looks like a good anthropology/human history topic and not a geologic topic."
"Why are they doing this work, rather than putting together what is needed for a formal proposal, unless there is nothing to put together for a formal proposal?"
Stanley C. Finney, geologist, California State University, Secretary General, International  Union of Geologial Sciences

"Nor can we ever hope to control the enormous terraforming processes, the Earth's plate tectonics driven by internal heat and resulting in slow but constant creation of new ocean floor, forming, reshaping, and elevating land masses whose distributions and altitudes are key determinants of climate variability and habitability."
"Let us wait before we determine that our mark on the planet is anything more than a modest microlayer in the geologic record."
Vaclav Smil, emeritus professor, University of Manitoba

"[The Anthropocene movement] constructs the future to interpret the present -- a future in which humanity either takes responsibility for the Earth system or is responsible for its collapse."
Mark Sagoff, retired professor, George Mason University

"[The debate over the Anthropocene is] worse than misleading. [It is a proposal that has created] a redundant, manufactured debate that displaces more important scientific research and genuine discussion on climate and environmental change."
"It is a fad, a bandwagon, a way of marketing research as cutting-edge and relevant."
James Scource, professor of physical geography, University of Exeter

A geologist works on a sedimentary rock record.  Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis / Getty

A science crusade led by a group of 37 geologists calling themselves the Anthropocene Working Group whose lead protagonist is Jan Zalasiewicz who has produced numerous journal articles promoting recognition of the Anthropocene as a new unit of the Geologic Time Scale has among its membership climate activists. Among the AWG proposals is the determination to recognize the year 1950 as the turning point of the interglacial twelve-thousand-year Holocene period where humankind emerged while the last Ice Age glaciers retreated.

The world's nuclear superpowers detonated multiple devices depositing measurable radioactive fallout now embedded in sediments across the planet, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, following the Second World War in a race to obtain super-weaponry during the Cold War of the West versus the Iron Curtain of the U.S.S.R. The presence of this nuclear sediment represents evidence of a new epoch, a "bomb spike" registering as proof, according to AWG geologists that humans are to the present what dinosaur-killing meteorites were to ancient history wiping out life on Earth.

As the Anthropocene Project would have it, humankind is heading toward disaster, one manufactured by ourselves that will destroy us all. Proponents of the Anthropocene argument claim it has followed the Holocene era where now forests are being decimated, oceans are in peril, animals are becoming extinct, and all as a result of human-driven habitat loss from poaching, pollution and climate change. In promoting the Anthropocene a recent paper lays claim to the broiler chicken "vividly symbolize[ing] the transformation of the biosphere to fit evolving human consumption patterns, and show[s] clear potential to be a biostratigraphic marker species for the Anthropocene."

This has been accomplished by breeding and developing broiler chickens to feed humanity, the result of which they are so prominent globally as a now-distinct species of bird they have become a symbol of avian transformation for the sole purpose of steaming on our kitchen tables for people to devour. In 2016 the population of broiler chickens was an estimated 22.7 billion, a number vastly greater than that of any other bird species on Earth. Almost 66 billion chickens were bred and consumed in that year, a consumption rate that keeps accelerating representing in part "The Great Acceleration".

Breeding technology and farming practices developed post-1950 has produced the modern broiler chicken, to a particular purpose in skeletal size and shape. The paper that was produced by Jan Zalasiewicz in service to the Anthropocene Working Group's agenda and published by the journal The Royal Society Open Science, has not impressed others in the field, not part of the Anthropocene Working Group. Stanley Finney, chair of the International Union of Geological Sciences states his opposition to a new "Anthro" or "cene" on the Geologic Time Scale.

Other geologists point out that even if the Anthropocene has begun, it has been scarcely 75 years in existence, insufficient time to justify its place in geological space in respect of a four-billion-year-old planet that has managed to survive all manner of evolutionary, climatic, atmospheric and interspace catastrophes as it transforms itself in a gradual process in which there is no discernible completion. And, as Professor Smil points out, while humans may be causing changes on Earth, scant reason exists to conclude humans represent a force as great or greater than nature.

Solar activity, the planet's shape, rotation and tilt, the eccentricity of the orbital path and the circulation of its atmosphere -- all are beyond the reach of human interference. Nature remains firmly in control, and there is no reason to expect that powerful existential force will ever lose its control of the Earth's destiny and ours, emphasizes Professor Smil. "And are we so certain of what future millennia will bring?" asks California State's Stanley Finney.

Still, writes Will Steffen, a chemical engineer and leading member of the Anthropocene Working Group: The world needs a "deep transformation based on a fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behaviour, institutions, economies, and technologies." Envisaging controls on population, economic development and other "deliberate, integral, and adaptive steps to reduce dangerous impacts on the Earth System".

"How this can be done technically, ethically, equitably, and economically" is uncertain and "highly challenging", particularly as such controls might include "monitoring and changing behaviour".

Credit: University of Leicester