The Anthropocene

The Annual Review is a pretty good magazine for review articles. The Concept of the Anthropocene (Malhi, 2017) is written by a proponent of the concept of the anthropocene.

At its core, the Anthropocene is an encapsulation of the concept that modern human activity is large relative to the basic processes of planetary functioning, and therefore that human social, economic, and political decisions have become entangled in a web of planetary feedbacks.

Or, "Actually, the earth is small, and the ocean is not an infinite garbage dump."

How it started

The modern use of the term Anthropocene began in 2000 with Crutzen & Stoermer's paper in the Global Change Newsletter, simply entitled “The Anthropocene.” This was followed in 2002 by Crutzen's high-profile piece in Nature (“Geology of Mankind”), which gained much wider circulation and attention.

Crutzen is a 1995 Nobel Laureate for research on the ozone hole.

A pivotal event in terms of gaining wider scientific acceptance and adoption was the publication of a thematic issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2011. This issue covered a range of perspectives, including conceptual and historical antecedents (6), biosphere transformation (10), sediment fluxes (11), and the geological case (12).

That issue is 13 March 2011, Volume 369, Issue 1938. It's a very fun issue, plenty to read!

Big Chicken and the Anthropocene.

Broiler chickens, in particular. The broiler chicken is the most popular breed of chicken produced by modern humans. If you go to a supermarket in any modern country, and see a chicken (dead, though living chickens are a thing too), it's probably broiler chicken.

Humans make lots of broiler chickens. 23 billion are alive at any instant, and each lives about 40 days (they grow extremely fast).

From ScienceDaily:

These chickens are an artificially evolved new 'morphospecies', the kind of thing palaeontologists recognise, that reflect a biosphere unrecognisable from its pre-human state and now dominated by human consumption and resource use.

"Since domestication there have been many strange and beautiful chicken breeds, but the broiler is perhaps the most extreme form of all. The body shape, bone chemistry and genetics of the modern meat chicken is unrecognisable from wild ancestors and anything we see in the archaeological record." 

It usually takes millions of years for evolution to occur, but here it has taken just decades to produce a new form of animal that has the potential to become a marker species of the Anthropocene -- and the enormous numbers of these chicken bones discarded worldwide means that we are producing a new kind of fossil for the future geological record.