
Should we be suspicious of the idea of the Anthropocene? - Thevet
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/should-we-be-suspicious-of-the-anthropocene/
======
meric
EDIT: Apologies for the rant, it isn't too relevant to the topic. Downvote
deserved.

Our food is made of non-renewable resource.

Every year, we use:

* 105m tons per year of nitrogen-based (natural gas) fertilisers[1]

* 22m tons per year of phosphate-based (mineral based) fertilisers[2]

* 3m tons per year of organic (poo and pee) fertilisers[2]

Nitrogen-based fertilisers are made from natural gas, and phosphate-based
fertilisers from rock. Use of fertilisers grow by 10% every couple of years.

Even if there was no further population growth from _now_ , there's not enough
resources on Earth for everyone to have a car, not enough space in cities for
every couple to have a house. There's not enough food made from renewable
resources.

 _Are you going to give up your car?_

 _Are you going to give up having a nuclear-family home?_

 _Are you going to give up eating meat?_

 _Can you convince everyone on Earth to do the same?_

The goal of every politician is to boost GDP, aka spending, aka consumption.
How do you convince politicians they are facing the wrong direction?

Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet. It's only because we've
discovered a very large cache of oil and natural gas, allowing the population
to continue to expand, for now.

The world is fucked.

QED.

[1]
[http://www.fertilizerseurope.com/fileadmin/user_upload/publi...](http://www.fertilizerseurope.com/fileadmin/user_upload/publications/statistics_publications/Stat_website.pdf)

[2]
[http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/pdfs/phosphorus_and_food_p...](http://www.unep.org/yearbook/2011/pdfs/phosphorus_and_food_productioin.pdf)

~~~
brc
>Thomas Robert Malthus has not been proven wrong yet.

Ah, yes he has, and so has Ehrlich and every other 'the world is ending'
doomsayer that ever walked.

Does the human race have problems? Well, obviously. deep seated religion and
superstitious unreason remains a key problem.

Has there never, ever been a better time to be alive as a human? Self
evidently, yes. It's the best time to be alive right now.

~~~
meric
I agree. _Right now_ , yes. But look at the numbers. In 50 years time it's
going to be a bleak time to be alive.

~~~
happyscrappy
Said every doomsday prophet ever. No one ever comes back and says sorry we
were wrong they just change to some other claptrap. Life is too short to
listen to these people.

~~~
meric
In fact, I've already said brc might be right and decided to change to some
other claptrap.[1]

No one ever comes back and says they're glad they convinced someone - they
just switch targets and find new people to call doomsday prophets and
bloviating windbags.

Thank you for your prejudice and have a nice day.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9300899)

~~~
brc
For the record I appreciated your comment but can't reply there. It shows a
willingness to consider a position. I'm guessing you're probably young, and
young people have a torrent of "the end of the world is nigh" thrown at them
these days. It's tough to see above this and think optimistically. But the key
to a calm mind is to think optimistically, tempered with rational 'what if'
thinking, so if bad events do come to pass, it's not earth shattering.

~~~
gress
How do you account for the failure of past civilizations? What is different
this time?

I'm all for optimism, but optimism and ignoring problems are very different
things.

------
brc
Of course the very idea of it is ridiculous. Elevating humans to the scale of
geological forces is vanity in the extreme.

------
phkahler
Either the interglacial period is not over yet, or we are actively preventing
the next glaciation. Either way, it seems premature to claim human
intervention AND say it's a bad thing.

~~~
Gravityloss
[https://skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-
age...](https://skepticalscience.com/heading-into-new-little-ice-age.htm)

This is a common enough thought, it's listed as number #14 on the skeptical
science site.

Unfortunately current anthropogenic warming and glaciations operate on vastly
different timescales.

"Worry about global warming impacts in the next 100 years, not an ice age in
over 10,000 years."

------
zevkirsh
it's funny how all the people are focussed neo malthusianism.

malthunianism isn't about the biophysics of some sustainability paradigm
hatched out of a theoretical model that places massive amount of assumptions
about bio blablaba.

the real malthusianism is wrapped up in the nature of the relationship between
population growth relative to the political-economic societies interacting
with the realities of hierarchal governance.

all socieites are based on hierarchchal pyramids of one version of cheap labor
or another dominating the bottom, with dominant 1% at the top. call it
capitalism, communism , or any other ism to describe every society that has
almost ever existed, but the few at the top are always contending with the
demographics of the many at the bottom.

in our present circumstance we have a fairly intricate global dollar/euro/yen
based credit system.

the economics of the western aging population don't add up to increasing
amounts of cheap labor going forward.

even in china this is a problem.

so the solution of outsourcing everything and importing streams of young
immigrants (dilution of middle class) is clearly not going to work as a
strategy for keeping up the stability of the banking systems and governments
layered on top of the western system.

malthusianism is not so much that everything will 'collapse', but that the
structure of governments and societies elite power institutions cannot remain
remotely stable going into, and especially out of, population explosions.

social structure is highly dynamic in response to the bubblenomics of long
term human population explosions.

world wars, failed states and many more things are deeply guaranteed by the
underlying demographic realities.

bizarrely enough , it's not because there are too many people. it's because
there aren't enough slaves to replenish the pen of tax producers and the pen
of 'demand' for usurous credit offered by banks. when decades of pricing
mortgaged assets at near zero interest rates, the banks are having a harder
and harder time finding people to burden with 30 year mortgages , or as bill
clinton liked to emphasize , the american dream of home foreclosureship.

eventually the price and tax reset comes (like in post soviet russia) and the
clearing of the pricing and taxing system once again allows for growth in
spite of the dynamic balance of debt and demographics.

then again there's always tons of high birth rates in the developing world. so
long as that is the case, there's no real problems

------
DowChem47
One should, perhaps, always be suspicious of opinion pieces.

The author is a remarkable man, but one whose advocacy comes with being
enmeshed in Corporate USA culture (and DC). Stints at the _New America
Foundation_ , background in Law & property rights rather than science, early
ties to _The American Prospect_ and so on: definitely a wunderkind of the
political class.

What's _actually_ being said in the piece is a lot different to the title.

Tangential link (or not really, work it out).

 _In January 2011, The Nature Conservancy and The Dow Chemical Company
announced a breakthrough collaboration—one that will help Dow and the business
community recognize, value and incorporate nature into global business goals,
decisions and strategies._

 _Over the course of six years, scientists from The Nature Conservancy and Dow
will work together at three pilot sites to implement and refine models that
support corporate decision-making related to the value and resources nature
provides. Together, we are choosing sites that will be distributed around the
world—and at each site, we will be looking for opportunities to take what
we’ve learned there and transfer knowledge globally. These sites will serve as
a “living laboratories”— places where we will validate and test our methods
and models so they can be used to inform more sustainable business decisions
at Dow and hopefully influence the decision-making and business practices of
other companies._

[http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-
companies/compan...](http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-
companies/companies-we-work-with/dow/)

Their revenue streams are simply amazing, btw:

[http://www.nature.org/about-us/tax-
form-990-2013.pdf](http://www.nature.org/about-us/tax-form-990-2013.pdf)
[warning: PDF]

In short - the Anthropocene definitely exists, and there's no doubt about it.
If you doubt it, compare and contrast forest cover circa ~12k BC and now. (And
know the difference between mono-crop plantations and actual forest ecosystems
- a good case study is Germany, where reforestation after the total losses
8th-18th C which ironically destroyed large amounts of soil quality due to
conifers being a net parasite due to their lack of symbiotic fungi evolution.
[http://www.bfn.de/fileadmin/MDB/documents/service/Skript_311...](http://www.bfn.de/fileadmin/MDB/documents/service/Skript_311.pdf)
[warning: PDF] - that's a case study Germany / China)

[http://www.bgs.ac.uk/anthropocene/EarliestEvidence.html](http://www.bgs.ac.uk/anthropocene/EarliestEvidence.html)
[http://envarch.net/environmental-archaeology/a-new-
geologica...](http://envarch.net/environmental-archaeology/a-new-geological-
period-defining-the-anthropocene-and-environmental-archaeology/)

So. Policy wonks vrs Science. I know who I choose.

------
rationalbeaver
We should be suspicious of all ideas.

