Here is a story about how there is supposedly a new bio-geological age now replacing the so called Holocene. But if ‘Anthropocene‘ means a period when human activity has drastically altered nature, it began 50,000 years ago, when the first humans arrived in Australia, and shortly afterwards the large marsupial mammals – the equivalents of lions and tigers and bears and all that – went extinct. It spread to North America less than 40,000 years later; when humans arrived in North America there was a great extinction of large mammals. So I think we have some nerve saying that radical human alteration of the environment is some recent thing.
Miscellaneous
More Posts
Down With the Macron!
A difficult feature of the current – and most popular method – of romanizing Japanese makes it difficult to pronounce properly or understand some words. Would you prefer a Nô play, a Noh play, a Nou play, or a Noo […]
The Median Center of Population and Why It Matters
The ‘mean center of population’ gets a lot of publicity. But it is misleading, and it even misled me for 70 years. There is a less publicized ‘median center of population’ that is more useful for some purposes, like where […]
The Political Mistake I Think I Made
I don’t have any problem with legislating morality. Would that all our laws were moral instead of about advantages for privileged and powerful groups! But rereading C. S. Lewis, I was reminded that the problem isn’t legislating morality. It’s legislating […]