A Field Guide to the Anthropocene

4/22/21

I’ll use this inaugural letter to note the passing of Barry Lopez, an extraordinary writer and by all accounts an even more extraordinary human being. He died on Christmas day, 2020, leaving an unsurpassed legacy as a writer at the intersection of natural history, scientific inquiry, environmental justice, and indigenous values. Lopez devoted himself to traveling the natural world and studying ways of living that predate our pop-up civilization, and he did so with a deep respect for both scientific and traditional ways of understanding. His teachers were researchers, traditional elders and storytellers, wolves, ravens, landscapes, and more. He modeled his values in his prose and his actions, and without preaching made it clear how critical those values were to sustaining life on an increasingly impoverished Earth. His gifts as a person were also his gifts to us: a sense of wonder and a lifelong, disciplined desire to articulate his understanding.

Lopez was a writer of grace and precision. His short essay, Apologia, which I taught many times to bewildered students, concisely described the litany of roadkill he encountered on a drive from Oregon to Indiana. Lopez interrupted that journey frequently, pulling over to move off the road the remains of those lives interrupted by our thoughtless passage. He chronicled his struggle, carcass after carcass, to address each animal with sufficient respect, in intensely descriptive language meant to stand in for our failure to ritualize or even acknowledge the carnage.

Of a young sage sparrow he hit in Idaho, he writes: “I hold the walloped bird in my left hand, my right thumb pressed to its chest. I feel for the wail of the heart. Its eyes glisten like rain on crystal. Nothing but warmth. I shut the tiny eyelids and lay it beside a clump of bunchgrass… The road curves away to the south. I nod before I go, a ridiculous gesture, out of simple grief.” Thus his apologia, a formal accounting of one’s actions.

It was Lopez who first taught me, in his book Arctic Dreams, that nonfiction writing was capable of singing while carrying a heavy load. That is, it can be lyrical while also conveying a depth of information, whether biological or philosophical. No nonfiction writer I’ve encountered since manages to do both so well. With elegant literary craft, a deeply felt response to place, and a heartfelt devotion to the truth and intent of science, Lopez composed his informed travelogues upon a lattice of poetry. And, he seemed to say, there’s no greater foundation for writing. Density, (en)lightened with grace, can sing. It’s worth quoting him at length – here on the passage of time in the Arctic – to hear his gift:

Time here, like light, is a passing animal. Time hovers above the tundra like the rough-legged hawk, or collapses altogether like a bird keeled over with a heart attack, leaving the stillness we call death. In the thin film of moisture that coats a bit of moss on a tundra stone, you can find, with a strong magnifying glass, a world of movement buried within the larger suspended world: ageless pinpoints of life called water bears migrate over the wet plains and canyons of jade-green vegetation. But even here time is on the verge of collapse. The moisture freezes in winter. Or a summer wind may carry the water bear off and drop it among bare stones. Deprived of moisture, it shrivels slowly into a desiccated granule. It can endure like this for thirty of forty years. It waits for its time to come again.

Long, unpunctuated hours pass for all creatures in the Arctic. No wild frenzy of feeding distinguishes the short summer. But for the sudden movements of charging wolves and bolting caribou, the gambols of muskox calves, the scamper of an arctic fox, the swoop of a jaeger, the Arctic is a long, unbroken bow of time. Twilight lingers. There are no summer thunderstorms with bolts of lightning. The ice floes, the caribou, the muskoxen, all drift. To lie on your back somewhere on the light-drowned tundra of an Ellesmere Island valley is to feel that the ice ages might have ended but a few days ago. Without the holler of contemporary life, that constant disturbance, it is possible to feel the slope of time, how very far from Mesopotamia we have come…

You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand. The stillness, the pure light, encourage it.

Reading Lopez is an investment in patience and thoughtfulness. Witness my grandmother, Sally, in her late seventies, lying on a very comfortable couch in the historic house where she was born, looking out at a small working harbor on the Maine coast. It was on that couch that she read all 464 pages of Arctic Dreams, about four pages per day. “I just like to read that much and think about it,” she said. Her life spanned the 20th century, from horse-and-buggies to space shuttles, and I’ve often wondered what it felt like for her to witness the constant disturbance of a radically transforming world. Population tripled and entire landscapes disappeared. The ocean floor beyond her harbor was scraped to the bone by more efficient fishing fleets. Hers was perhaps the last generation to arrive thinking that maybe the world wasn’t meant to change that quickly. The rest of us wake to a planet where everything speeds to an uncertain future, and have to wake even further to wonder what such flux means – decline, progress, chaos? – and what we should do about it. 

That’s one anecdote I know for sure I would have liked to tell Barry. And I’d like to think that we could have harmonized a bit in talking about Antarctica. We both loved the place, despite (or maybe because of) its spectacular indifference to our presence. There’s something like unrequited love that happens when you return year after year to hear your footsteps crunch across the silence of an ice cap two miles deep and six times larger than the Mediterranean.

I had a chance to meet him during one of my first seasons in Antarctica, in the mid-1990s, when I saw him at a table in the McMurdo dining hall sharing a meal with a science group he had joined for the season. I was a young guy just out of grad school with a MA in poetry, writing strange small lyric poems while living on what felt like the Moon. I didn’t know what to say for myself, much less what I could say that was worth interrupting his meal. So I didn’t. I had another opportunity when he was scheduled to join a gathering of the Antarctican Society here in Maine in the summer of 2018. He canceled, we were told, because of his health. It’s a long trip from Oregon for an ill man, even one who had doggedly traversed the planet and cheerfully camped in East Antarctica.

Lopez’s final book, Horizon, released in 2019 but in the works for a few decades, speaks of his years of relentless travel to see and understand and describe the distorted world we have each inherited. It feels to me like his own field guide to the Anthropocene, this new epoch in Earth history begun when human societies initiated permanent changes to the geologic record. (I’ll introduce the Anthropocene concept at length in my next two posts.) Earth’s wonders and beauty and mysteries, alongside much hard-earned human wisdom, are in the pages of Horizon. As is the ongoing, increasingly desperate loss of that wonder, light, and wisdom, though always framed by Lopez’s insistence that a better path is available to us.

If the Anthropocene is the result of the human impulse to reimagine the Earth for our purposes, then the only rational path forward will come from doing the hard work of reimagining civilization. Lopez’s legacy is to point us in that direction.

For anyone new to Barry Lopez, a fine introduction is the memorial page Orion magazine has set up on their site. It offers a couple dozen beautiful notes by poets, writers, composers, etc., all with stories and insights far more valuable than what I’ve said here. I’ll provide a link below.

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My father, Vaughn Anthony, died on Christmas day, 2018, exactly two years before Barry.

Dad had a brilliant career in the National Marine Fisheries Service as one of the top guys crunching data to determine how many fish were in the sea and how many should be caught, specifically in the Gulf of Maine and the North Atlantic. The analysis always seemed like magic to me. How do you move mathematically from scant raw catch data to oceanic population assessments to smart multinational policy? And yet they did, every year, the result of thousands of hours of hard math in smoky meeting rooms. I never really understood it, to be honest. But something Dad talked about when I was a kid that sticks with me now as I think about the Anthropocene – and this was well before the term had been coined – was that we need to manage the species we impact. We can’t take without thinking carefully about the taking. Even in my childhood there were far too many of us to properly feed (population has more than doubled since then, with increases in poverty and hunger), even though new technologies had made fishing ruthlessly efficient.

It was my first lesson in what science does behind the scenes while civilization lurches onward.

Dad was only talking about those species we harvest, but before long it became clear to me that the story was bigger than that. Now that we know that every living community on Earth is impacted by human activity through transformations of land, sea, and atmosphere, everything has to be managed. Anything less is privileging our right to decimate the array of life on Earth and undermine our own survival in the process. Under the Anthropocene aegis of “you broke it, you bought it,” the planet’s worth of species we impact are being “managed,” whether we’re paying attention or not. So we can either do the science and make policy to manage all of it as best we can, as Dad said, or we can pretend otherwise and suffer the consequences.

I’d like to think that once we embrace management, we take responsibility. When we take responsibility, we necessitate respect. Respect, because the established value is, for example, a healthy population of fish. We need to define what management means and what responsibility looks like in each ecosystem, but to be clear it’s not the cod and haddock (or grizzlies or monarchs or grasslands) that need to be managed. It’s us.

Managing resources is really about learning restraint. Protecting ecosystems is about protecting them from us. Lopez addresses this in Arctic Dreams:

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent… Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.

Dad never thought of himself as an environmentalist. In fact, he often half-joked about how activists got emotional about protecting baby fur seals but didn’t give a shit about the ugly codfish that were far more essential to North Atlantic ecosystems, but as a responsible hunter and fisherman he was always conscious of the deference due to the lives we took. Management might not be love, but it can be care. Even at the end of his life he still had a child’s awe of wildlife and wildness and a deep joy in being connected to them. He was never as happy as when he was thigh-deep in a river with a salmon tugging at a homemade fly.

I’d like to think that Dad is fishing somewhere on a fast, clear river in the sky rather than lying cold in a coffin, but that’s the same delusional thinking – a more delicate term is “optimism bias” – that makes nearly all of us think that the Anthropocene will somehow turn out okay.

That’s very, very unlikely. Or impossible, really, so long as you define “okay” as maintaining some semblance of Earth’s current biodiversity and a climate stable enough to prevent millennia of chaos.

This was made clear, as it so often is these days, by a new scientific article. This one, by several of the world’s top ecologists, was published in Frontiers in Conservation Science on January 13th and is entitled “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.” This report deserves serious attention, so I’ll respond to it again in the weeks to come. For now, though, I’ll just give you a taste of the article’s Introduction, minus its citations:

Humanity is causing a rapid loss of biodiversity and, with it, Earth's ability to support complex life. But the mainstream is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization. While suggested solutions abound, the current scale of their implementation does not match the relentless progression of biodiversity loss and other existential threats tied to the continuous expansion of the human enterprise… We summarize the state of the natural world in stark form here to help clarify the gravity of the human predicament. We also outline likely future trends… to demonstrate the near certainty that these problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come.

There are two things I want to note about what they describe as “the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization.” First, that the fabric they’re referring to is not social and urban structures; it’s the web of life. As ecologists, they know that what seems separate from us is not. Second, that the language of a scientific paper should be this dramatic speaks to both the immediacy of the problems they describe and the authors’ belief that scientists should now be speaking much more boldly. Why? Because too few of us know what scientists have documented, and the consequences of our ignorance are, to borrow an adjective, ghastly.

A brief cluster of examples: We’ve altered more than 70% of the planet’s terrestrial surface, cut in half the global biomass of vegetation, and decimated the populations of wild terrestrial vertebrates so intensively that humans and our livestock now make up 95% of vertebrate life on the continents. To be clear, that means that only 5% of land animals are wild.

Much of this has occurred in the last hundred years, an evolutionary eyeblink. No surprise, then, that much of the scientific and media discussion about the fate of the Earth is focused on the next century. As the “Ghastly” report describes, the worst impacts are accelerating and the best solutions are scarcely being implemented.

You don’t have to go anywhere to see the Anthropocene in action. Observations can be made wherever you stand on Earth. A field guide to the Anthropocene is a field guide to the planet. It reminds me of a joke by the comedian Stephen Wright about a map of the world he had at home. “It’s actual size,” he deadpanned. “The legend says one mile equals one mile.” Wright’s joke has a history, being a riff on a one-paragraph story, “On Exactitude in Science,” by Jorge Luis Borges, which in turn was a riff on an idea in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded by Lewis Carroll. In each case, the joke satirizes our impulse to create simulations of reality rather than simply inhabiting it. You can read more about this on the internet…

The ecologist and writer Carl Safina writes in a Yale360 article about the “Ghastly” report that the results of the Earth’s rapid transformation “are stark to anyone who has known and loved a place over several decades.” And this brings me to my final question for the day, one I’m sure I’ll return to in the months ahead: What does it mean to love a place, or the Earth as a whole, in the Anthropocene?

It means, I’m afraid, that we will suffer as Barry Lopez did in his final months. In September of 2020, a fast-moving fire sent him and his wife fleeing as it raged through the old-growth forest around his Oregon home – a forest he purchased to protect some fifty years earlier – charring his house and destroying part of his literary archive. There is a tidy Anthropocene narrative behind the fire: Transmission lines bisecting the landscape were surging with the by-product of combusted fossil fuels and dammed rivers until they sparked the tinder of a normally rain-soaked forest that had been parched by a long hard unnatural drought.

That Barry Lopez should spend his final months as a climate refugee suggests a tragic irony. The forest he spent a lifetime revering and protecting? Burned to the ground. The evidence of his good work? Much of it turned to ash.

Some of his literary materials had previously been moved to an archive in Texas, thankfully, and the best of his work, I assume, is lodged in his books. And so maybe the fire is less a story of irony than one of symbolism. Lopez spent countless hours every year traveling for truth, writing to record his truths, and teaching numerous writers, readers, and students to help them continue the work. The fire, then, is less an ironic surprise than another sacrifice in Barry Lopez’s life to remind us of what to value and how quickly it can disappear. In the Anthropocene, much of what we love will burn up or become some human wasteland or settle under rising seas or otherwise irrevocably change.

It’s been happening for a while. It’s happening right now. The change is everywhere.

Perhaps we will not all suffer in the Anthropocene with the same tragic irony or symbolism as Lopez, but odds are many of us will. Maybe that industry your community welcomed into town in order to sustain its families increased the number of cancers in your family? Maybe the family farm no longer hosts a family or a farm? Perhaps your city’s water supply poisons as well as sustains? Surely the plastics you consider a convenience will end up as a thousand-year nightmare. Perhaps your children’s totem animals will be well on the road to extinction by the time the kids are your age? Maybe yours already are?

My father’s career had its management successes, but from start to finish he watched as the short-term thinking of politicians and harvesters often compromised the science to maximize the catch. At home, he spent his final two years fighting alongside us in a losing battle against an aggressive “environmentalist” nonprofit that turned twenty four acres of vernal pool habitat next to our house into parking lots.

The Anthropocene means that many things we fiercely love will be even more fiercely taken from us.

Which is why Barry Lopez taught us to sing a bit in order to help lighten the load. As he did, right to the end. His remarkable final words – “It’s a wonderful morning. How is everyone?” – addressed his loving family, yet seem somehow meant for the rest of us as well.

As I understand it, Lopez’s lifelong message was this: Revere all of life, and tell stories to share and pass on that reverence. The more we do so, the more likely it is that some of us will act accordingly, and the more likely it is that some of what we love will survive.

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Today is Earth Day, April 22nd, 2021. In the fifty one years since the first Earth Day, population has increased from 3.7 billion to 7.86 billion, atmospheric CO2 levels have skyrocketed from 325 parts per million to 417 ppm (for the first time in three million years), wildlife populations dropped 60%, and microplastics spread everywhere on Earth. Natural communities on land and sea around the globe are living under an extraordinary array of stresses. So maybe it’s time we scaled up the celebration/activism to an Earth Month, just to better hint at the size of the effort needed?

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Welcome to Field Guide to the Anthropocene. Comments are welcome from everyone. I look forward to the conversation.

Take care,

Jason

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Links:

Barry Lopez Orion memorial page: https://orionmagazine.org/article/writers-artists-on-the-influence-of-barry-lopez

Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/

Barry Lopez homepage: https://www.barrylopez.com/

“Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future”: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full

A good New Yorker article providing a personal context for Jorge Luis Borges’ story “On Exactitude in Science”: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-allure-of-the-map

Carl Safina’s article in Yale360: https://e360.yale.edu/features/avoiding-a-ghastly-future-hard-truths-on-the-state-of-the-planet

The Antarctican Society: https://www.antarctican.org

Earth Day site: https://www.earthday.org/

Mashable article (2019) on CO2 acceleration since first Earth Day: https://mashable.com/article/earth-day-2019-climate-change-carbon-dioxide/

Real time global atmospheric CO2 levels: https://www.co2.earth/

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In other Earth-shattering news:

This is a big one from the UN Environment Program called Making Peace with Nature, setting goals to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. More on this another day: https://www.unep.org/resources/making-peace-nature

Here’s one for Dad: One third of freshwater fish species facing extinction, with populations of migratory fish down 74% and mega-fish down by 94%: https://wwfint.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/world_s_forgotten_fishes__report_final__1.pdf

Due to climate change, Atlantic Ocean currents (including the Gulf Stream) are moving slower than they have in 1600 years: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-change-atlantic-ocean-gulf-stream-system-amoc-weakest-1600-years/

A better report on the slowdown of Atlantic Ocean currents (but behind the New York Times paywall) summarizing, illustrating, and explaining evidence and implications: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/02/climate/atlantic-ocean-climate-change.html

Why the global push for planting trees is often misguided: https://e360.yale.edu/features/are-huge-tree-planting-projects-more-hype-than-solution

Thousands of tons of microplastics haunt the Earth’s atmosphere, traveling across continents and falling like rain: https://www.livescience.com/atmospheric-microplastics-studied-first-time.html