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Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now we have better technology and more people

Or human beings have been busy changing the environment to suit our own purposes for thousands of years, it's just now we have better technology and more people. We're not the only life forms that do this. Ants and beavers modify their local environments to give two examples. And cyanobacteria bacteria a couple billions years produced enough oxygen as a waste product to eventually poison much of the environment for anaerobic bacteria, leading to a mass extinction.

8ytecoder 5y ago
We’re now very efficient at destroying things (as were efficient at creating things as well)
genericone 5y ago
Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period before cellulose could be digested. An organism then evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed that type of environmental possibility for all time, into earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological devastation than we'll ever accomplish. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fanta...
- Retric 5y ago
  That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest cellulose isn’t necessary to explain vast coal deposits which formed far more recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
simonsarris 5y ago
minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more accurate. Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. ...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed. From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
- goatlover 5y ago
  Yeah, I was being conservative. There's some archeological evidence that civilization is a lot older than generally thought. And humans seem to have some of the characteristics of domestication. As in our hominid ancestors self-domesticated.

8ytecoder 5y ago

We’re now very efficient at destroying things (as were efficient at creating things as well)

genericone 5y ago

Yes, and most of our coal dates back to a time period before cellulose could be digested. An organism then evolved the capability to digest cellulose, and destroyed that type of environmental possibility for all time, into earthly perpetuity. I'd say that's a bigger ecological devastation than we'll ever accomplish. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-fanta...

Retric 5y ago
That theory is heavily debated, the initial sequestration of carbon that allowed for an oxygen atmosphere is predates cellulose. Which suggests an inability to digest cellulose isn’t necessary to explain vast coal deposits which formed far more recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

simonsarris 5y ago

minor nit but hundreds of thousands of years is more accurate. Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. ...The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed. From Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)

goatlover 5y ago
Yeah, I was being conservative. There's some archeological evidence that civilization is a lot older than generally thought. And humans seem to have some of the characteristics of domestication. As in our hominid ancestors self-domesticated.