Scientists vote down idea popularized by Burtynsky photos — and the Oppenheimer film
The theory that Planet Earth is on a destructive trajectory brought on by unnatural human existence has been rattling around the environmentalist boot camp for more than half a century. They call it the Anthropocene, a term popularized by Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky and ritually used and abused by activists, art galleries, academics, UN bureaucrats and politicians — including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
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In October of 2018, Trudeau staged a media event before a group of high school students at the National Gallery in Ottawa. Against a backdrop of a Burtynsky photo of the Cathedral Grove forest on Vancouver Island, Trudeau delivered a simplistic message — to the students and all Canadians — that his initial $20 carbon tax would lead the way in curbing the ongoing ruination of the Earth as portrayed in Burtynsky’s Anthropocenic images of industrial devastation.
The headline on my 2019 commentary on the episode raised a question — Is Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene proof of ecological disaster — or power politics? That question can now be answered. In a vote first reported this week by The New York Times, members of the official Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (part of the International Union of Geological Sciences) voted down (12 against, four in favour and two abstentions) a proposal that the development of nuclear weapons in the 1950s officially launched the Anthropocene.
As a Washington Post headline described the vote: “Are we living in an ‘Age of Humans’? Geologists say no.” The issue is not that categorical. But the vote could begin to curb the hysterical portrayals of human life on Earth as the equivalent of the giant meteorites from outer space that caused mass extinctions in the past — a comparison promoted by Mark Carney, UN climate envoy and speculated successor to Trudeau as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
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Speaking in Montreal in 2022 at a United Nations’ biodiversity conference, Carney warned that while the fourth mass extinction 200 million years ago “was an act of God, today’s sixth mass extinction is the act of humanity. We’ve created a new era — the Anthropocene — in which our actions are changing our Earth’s climate and destroying its biodiversity.”
The reference to millions of years hits on the core problem with identifying a new epoch in the geological history of the planet. On a billion-year scale the human impact on the planet is statistically non-existent, which meant that a group of activist geologists — the Anthropocene Working Group — spent almost two decades trying to come up with a start date for the non-God created Anthropocene (see chart below story or click here). The group finally settled on the development of nuclear weapons in the 1950s.
The scientific basis for linking the start of the Anthropocene with nuclear weapons was identified last July by the AWG activist scientists as Crawford Lake, Ont., a deep, muddy but small body of water 70 kilometres west of Toronto. Research showed that sediments contained evidence of nuclear fallout, making Crawford Lake the prime piece of evidence of a new planetary epoch, the “golden spike” and “ground zero” of the Anthropocene.
But when AWG activist material was sent to the higher subcommission geologists for review, the proposal to declare the Anthropocene on the basis of Crawford Lake was voted down. The reasons are not clear. Was it simply unsupportable to claim that the marker for man-made Anthropocenic destruction was “radioactive fallout from hydrogen bomb tests”? Some are now challenging the decision, claiming “irregularities” in the process. Oh oh. Did the oil industry rig the decision?
Erie Ellis, a professor of geography at the University of Maryland who was once part of the AWG, said the nuclear development is simply too recent to justify a formal declaration. In Ellis’s view, “it is very unlikely that there will be an official Anthropocene Epoch declaration anytime soon.”
Even so, talk about the Anthropocene Epoch will continue, in part because the idea is too “useful” to activists and others who share the cataclysmic believe that man is capable of doing what God could not.
Which takes us to the nuclear connection between the Anthropocene and Oppenheimer, the Oscar-nominated film about the creation of the atomic bomb. It is surely no coincidence that the film’s July 2023 release coincided with the AWG’s news release proclaiming Crawford Lake ground zero. One academic, at Bates College in Maine, even managed to connect Oppenheimer and Barbie, another Oscar-nominated film, to the scenes of environmental disasters from the Anthropocene theory. Both films, he wrote, “offer a window into the creation of the Anthropocene … in which human beings have become the most significant influence on the natural environment at a planetary scale.”
In another commentary, Cynthia Scharf, senior strategy director at the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, wrote that “In the age of the Anthropocene, which began shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped, we have increased the extinction of species, altered ecosystems, and changed the climate for millennia to come.” Scharf also saw a connection between the Anthropocene and artificial intelligence, a link Christopher Nolan, director of Oppenheimer, has also proposed.
At the Oscars Sunday night, therefore, will the winner of the most unreal fictionalized version of our world go to Oppenheimer, Barbie, or the Anthropocene Working Group?
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