Welcome to the Anthropocene

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174949/mike_davis_welcome_to_the_next_epoch

It goes on in that vein.

This century is going to be full of mischief and hilarity.

 

Well, I don't know about global warming, and I don't know much about the acidification of the ocean, but mankind has been changing the landscape for hundreds of years. Didn't a large portion of either northern Italy or southern France used to be marshes until the Romans drained them?

 

For thousands of years humans have cut down trees, this has lead to the creation of many of the arid and inhospitable places in the world now. I do not what your exact point is NOG but I am going to assume the worst. Just because man have destroyed (or changed but most of the changes tend to lead to negative consequences in the long run) our environment for millenia it doesn't mean we should continue to do so. It is about time we break the age old human tradition of wrecking our habitat.

 

Not the point. The point is that the Geological Society of London unanimously thinks we've entered an epoch in which human activity is the defining geological force.

 

Thanks for clarifying as I couldn't quite get what they were talking about.

When we can stop volcanos from erupting, hurricanes, earthquakes, and only make it rain at night from 2am to 5am then I'm willing to believe we are defining geological forces.

 

Levelling mountains is pretty heavy defining geological force.

A few billion human beings in cities are a defining geological force.

The ability to irradiate the whole damn planet few times over is a pretty damn strong geological force.

 

1.) LEVELING I think is still a bit out of our practical abilities, though we can certainly re-shape them.

2.) When you look at the environmental impacts, yes, but not the geological ones. This generally doesn't re-shape the surface of the earth any more than moving around some small hills. Earchquakes can easily do more than that.

3.) Again, not really a geological force, but also not one that's actually happened yet. Let's stick to what we've done.

All in all, my point is that, even on the environmental level, we're really only becoming one of the major forces, but on a geological level we're barely more than overactive ants. Mind you, I'll agree the direction of our force needs to change. We need to move from 'doing whatever to make ourselves comfortable' to actively being responsable stuarts of the environment.

 

What did the biosphere look like a few hundred years ago? What does it look like now? If there was a dramatic shift (and, y'know, there was), what caused it?

To put this another way, what did North America look like in 1492; what does it look like now; what prompted the change?

Human activity. Or, as one of the passages from the paper reads,

We have radically altered the trajectory of evolution, on a global scale. Our activities have had and continue to have vastly more impact than the volcanoes, hurricanes, and weather Snook points to.

That's a big deal. Especially since--and I don't expect anyone to disagree on this point--our impact has been, mmm, almost entirely negative.

 

Ah, but 'extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures' aren't geological issues. They are ecosystem issues. Geological issues would be present when turning swamps into plains, when builing or destroying islands, when raising or leveling mountains, but not even wiping out a whole species counts as a geological issue (as I understand the term).

 

from the article

BTA, in the short term, perhaps. But, well, like the wiki says:

Which isn't good for anyone. At all. And that's just one topic; it isn't as though we're lacking areas in which the long term environmental effects of present human activities are, um, not so good. For us, not Tony the Tiger.

 

The problem in this case is that we may pass the point of no return before enough people consider things bad enough. Ideologues have driven the masses to act in their worst interest many times in the past and, while I mostly share your optimism, vigilance is still necessary. If enough newly industrialized nations decide not to adhere to reasonable pollution standards in the name of "progress", they can ruin it for the rest of us for quite some time.

 

AMaster, I stand corrected. Those events are indeed geological issues. I'm still not sure we're that big of a deal, but we're certainly in the running.

 

Sorry, I wasn't clear; I specifically had in mind the shift that came with industrialization. In the short term, air conditioning is sweet. In the long term, the ozone layer is sweeter (yeah, we solved that issue, but you get the point).

No, that's not the assumption. Think of Smith's invisible hand; the market (that is, human activity relating the environment) will pretty much self-correct. It's just, y'know, sometimes the process of crash-correct is really painful. The purpose of governmental intervention in the market (that is, efforts to curb our environmental impact) is to make crash-correct cycle less painful.

'Painful' in this context is more than a slight understatement.