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........

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