Ethics in the Anthropocene

Last week in Stockholm, humanity was put on trial.
Almost 20 Nobel laureates showed up for jury duty at the third Nobel Laureate
Symposium. There they heard about "how [humanity's] vast imprint on the
planet's environment has shifted the Earth into a new geological period labeled
the 'Anthropocene'--the Age of Man."

After deliberation, the Nobelists rendered a verdict
as part of the Stockholm Memorandum (pdf), reporting that humans have become the most significant driver of
global change. While schoolchildren are taught that we are still in the
Holocene--the epoch that began after the last ice age, roughly 12,000 years
ago--the symposium's scientists argue that we have transgressed the planetary
boundaries that have kept civilizations safe for this long.

There's no question that humans have become "capable of
leaving a durable imprint in the geological record." But is this
necessarily a bad thing?