The problem with scientists is that they take their words too seriously. If they say such and such is the start of something, then it must be so, until someone comes along with some real evidence to show that something else happened first. People can't even agree on what the Anthropocene looks like nor what constitutes change. To use 1950 as a starting point is a very conservative move, probably was designed to make everyone happy because at that point it could said that something was happening.
Lots of groups are trying to find something that clearly shows the start of the Anthropocene. They are all right because they are all looking at the roots of a very big tree. The tree body is here to be plainly seen, but the root growth and tree rings are hidden and must be examined one at a time. Enter the 10,000 clueless (formerly blind but that's an insult)) men (men is still okay, wink, wink, nod, nod) who each have one piece of the puzzle.
Graphing the conversion of forested land to agriculturally converted land is just one way of seeing what happened. According to some,
the world has lost one-third of its forest land in the past 10,000 years and half of that happened in the last 100 years. They are looking at the amount of trees that survived after being run down by glaciers in the last ice age and how much of that forest land is now farmland. Seems like they are forgetting that the glaciers mowed down a considerable number of trees, and while we certainly didn't cause the last ice age, that did reduce the number of trees just the same. Are we counting the trees mowed down by the glaciers as a start of the Anthropocene, well some folks aren't. Since we didn't do it, that doesn't count. As for myself I subscribe to the once upon a time idea that there once were 6 trillion trees and now there are only 3 trillion trees and the number is still shrinking. All that shade has to count for something. A house with half a roof is no good to anyone. The replanted forest lands, claimed to be signs of reforestation, of a single kind of tree that will be cut down at some point in the near future, counts as new forest land for some but not by others. I figure the trees need to left standing 100 years to be counted as new forest land. And for others, if there are no wolves preying on other animals amongst a host of other kinds of animals living in a forest with hundreds of different kinds of plants, then it never will be a forest.
You try to find out how much land has been converted to inhabitable real estate and that becomes an accounting nightmare. Just a fraction of a percentage of land is taken up by roads, while cities and homes take up only another two percent. The things is, the land the homes are on are dead as far as biodiversity goes. A green lawn, or even a stand of trees does not count as biodiversified land. So that 2 percent value is a lot higher in some people's eyes while still perfectly accurate in other people's eyes. Instead of looking at the layers underneath the soil, perhaps what is making those layers on the surface are just as important.
The roarway cutting fields (roads) are not the simple less than a fraction of a percentage of the land that they seem to be. That value is the static no load value. Put traffic on those roads and that magnifies the impact a million times. Put a busy road between a pond with turtles in it, and a elevated hillside of dry, sandy, pebbly dirt facing the morning sun and the turtles will vanish over time as they try to lay their eggs where they always did. Adult turtles get hit going both ways, the young get hit in their first moments of life, with another crush of the apple on their repeat trips to the ancestral egg laying territory.
So what did happen in the 1950"s? The Earth started plowing into gigantic plastic asteroids.
Plastic of one one sort or another had been around for 100 years but in the 1950's it saw exponential production growth. All the plastic ever made always seeks to fall apart into smaller and smaller pieces as time goes on. Its made in yearly batches and released all around the world. If it was a real plastic asteroid, there would be fine layers of plastic under the surface, like the iridium rich layers of clay found underground that was deposited by huge asteroids striking the Earth. But the plastic is distributed throughout the dirt beneath our feet because it is so light weight, it achieves anti gravity status as it breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces, and then just floats around and around. At home in the air or in the dirt. The thing is, getting hit by huge plastic asteroids sounds more dramatic than just cruising through a plastic wonderland.
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