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Thoughts on the Anthropocene…

The impact of glaciers, rivers, volcanoes, winds and the slow decay of time have altered and weathered the earth throughout the ages. Now, the species homo sapiens is seen as the main impetus for change in the environment, change that is happening faster and with more force than a slow moving glacier. Scientists are wondering if we are not entering a new, formal geologic epoch: the Anthropocene, or the age of man. In other words, will changes we’ve imposed upon the earth be preserved and observable millions of years in the future? If so, the Anthropocene may be the shortest geologic epoch evident even in deep time. I am in agreement with scientists who say that, yes, we have initiated a new age and that the term Anthropocene should serve as a warning.

Though this term does indeed serve as a warning i if we continue to allow our consumption of resources to outpace their regeneration and let be the definition of human experience on earth, what I’m interested in is how creation, death, and the cyclical nature of time are all bound up in the concept of the Anthropocene. Look under a microscope at the gold on a man’s tooth or the coffee in his console. These items have traveled innumerable miles using innumerable fossil fuels since their original extraction. These simple actions have long histories that go deep into the roots of the earth and they become acts of creation. But this kind of creation is making a world we can’t live in, or at least one less conducive to the life forms we know now. This line of thought has the bitter taste of mortality, the finality of irreversible damage. Simply put, it invokes “the end,” as every old story goes. An end to myth, an end to reefs, an end to abundance, an end to life as we can imagine it now.

But 17th century geologist James Hutton would twist this conjecture another way. In perhaps one of the most romantic, yet purely scientific statements ever uttered, Hutton described the earth as “succession of worlds” with “no vestige of a beginning- no prospect of an end.” Every life form is stretching out and up and down and in and every force of nature that rocks the earth or chips at rock or stirs a blade of grass began in ancient times. Even before that beginning there was another beginning and another until we lose sight of the spiral. I think of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” in which he calls grass “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Humans die and the grass still grows. Separation is said to be illusion. And this has all been said before and will be said again.

The author of Ecclesiastes said it when he wrote that there is nothing new under the sun. The Anthropocene is a new name, representing a new designation, but has been in evolution since the beginning of time (if there is a true beginning). Its implications are challenging, but perhaps foreseeable. What’s surprising is how humans have accelerated the natural process of change, death and rebirth. And how our role as creators has been warped.

Even Tolkien said it. The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s novel about the deep mythology of Middle Earth and what he considered his greatest literary achievement, describes a “succession of worlds” beginning with the Creation song and culminating in its own Anthropocene. Although the Middle Earth’s recorded saga ends with the Return of the King, we know that the Age of Man that begins after Frodo destroys the Ring is in part defined by the departure of the Elves, the race of men’s sylvan counterparts. With their passing, the connection to the old myths of creation fades. Tolkien writes here that man was destined from to struggle to comprehend their place in creation, and their worth alongside created things.

“And though the things of thy realm have worth in themselves, and would have worth if no Children were to come, yet Eru will give them dominion, and they shall use all that they find in Arda: though not, by the purpose of Eru, without respect or without gratitude.”

Coal or gas or fossils buried in the earth have some deeper value than humans can give it or relate to, or at least I believe so. I believe this value comes from their nature as created entities, which is another discussion.

A Google image search under the tag “anthropocene” yields a series of pictures depicting urban sprawl, maps lit up with thousands of tiny pinpoints of light, and stark high rises. But what caught my eye was the image of an underwater sculpture of a person curled up on a car’s windshield, with the arm shielding its face. Part of a series of submerged statues in Cancún, this piece is titled “Anthropocene,” I learned after enlarging the image. The person appears to be in the fetal position, suggesting a rebirth perhaps connected to technology. But the fear that the sculpture evokes strikes that taste of mortality into the experience of viewing it, that imminent death.