One should, perhaps, always be suspicious of opinion pieces.

The author is a remarkable man, but one whose advocacy comes with being enmeshed in Corporate USA culture (and DC). Stints at the New America Foundation, background in Law & property rights rather than science, early ties to The American Prospect and so on: definitely a wunderkind of the political class.

What's actually being said in the piece is a lot different to the title.

Tangential link (or not really, work it out).

In January 2011, The Nature Conservancy and The Dow Chemical Company announced a breakthrough collaboration—one that will help Dow and the business community recognize, value and incorporate nature into global business goals, decisions and strategies.

Over the course of six years, scientists from The Nature Conservancy and Dow will work together at three pilot sites to implement and refine models that support corporate decision-making related to the value and resources nature provides. Together, we are choosing sites that will be distributed around the world—and at each site, we will be looking for opportunities to take what we’ve learned there and transfer knowledge globally. These sites will serve as a “living laboratories”— places where we will validate and test our methods and models so they can be used to inform more sustainable business decisions at Dow and hopefully influence the decision-making and business practices of other companies.

http://www.nature.org/about-us/working-with-companies/compan...

Their revenue streams are simply amazing, btw:

http://www.nature.org/about-us/tax-form-990-2013.pdf [warning: PDF]

In short - the Anthropocene definitely exists, and there's no doubt about it. If you doubt it, compare and contrast forest cover circa ~12k BC and now. (And know the difference between mono-crop plantations and actual forest ecosystems - a good case study is Germany, where reforestation after the total losses 8th-18th C which ironically destroyed large amounts of soil quality due to conifers being a net parasite due to their lack of symbiotic fungi evolution. http://www.bfn.de/fileadmin/MDB/documents/service/Skript_311... [warning: PDF] - that's a case study Germany / China)

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/anthropocene/EarliestEvidence.html http://envarch.net/environmental-archaeology/a-new-geologica...

So. Policy wonks vrs Science. I know who I choose.