The New (Ab)Normal: Outliers, Everyday Exceptionality, and the Politics of Data Management in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene affects how we manage the environment in many ways, perhaps most importantly by undermining how past conditions act as baselines for future expectations. In a period when historical analogues become less meaningful, we need to forge new practices and methods of environmental monitoring and management, including how to categorize, manage, and analyze the deluge of environmental data. In particular, we need practices to detect emerging hazards, changing baselines, and amplified risk. Some current data practices, however, especially the designation and dismissal of outliers, might mislead efforts to better adapt to new environmental conditions. In this article we ask these questions: What are the politics of determining what counts as “abnormal” and is worthy of exclusion in an era of the ever-changing “normal”? What do data exclusions, often in the form of outliers, do to our ability to understand and regulate in the Anthropocene? We identify a recursive process of distortion at play where constructing categories of abnormal–normal allows for the exclusion of “outliers” from data sets, which ultimately produces a false rarity and hides environmental changes. To illustrate this, we draw on a handful of examples in regulatory science and management, including the Exceptional Event Rule of the Clean Air Act, beach erosion models for nourishment projects, and the undetected ozone hole. We conclude with a call for attention to the construction of “normal” and “abnormal” events, systems, data, and natures in the Anthropocene.