Behaving Accordingly

4/4/24 – Naming the Anthropocene

a palm plantation erasing rainforest in Borneo / credit: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto, via NPR

Hello everyone:

Remember that recent piece I wrote about the end of winter? Well, winter came back for a visit last night and today, with several inches of wet, heavy snow here on the coast. Upcountry, snow totals are much higher, and across the state over 320,000 electricity customers are without power. That includes nearly 80% of folks in our small county, and over 90% of people in our small town. It will be a while getting power back. You’re seeing this writing because we’re running a noisy fossil-fueled generator, and because somehow the phone lines are still intact.

I hope many of you will be able to see the total solar eclipse on Monday. Heather and I are heading upstate to observe it. I’ve been lucky enough to see a partial solar eclipse in Antarctica, but never a total one. I’m excited to hear how the birds respond as day turns into night and back again, and to see the strange eclipse light filtering through a snow-filled forest.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

I’ve been thinking about names and labels recently. There doesn’t seem to be a clear distinction between the terms – which seems ironic, since they’re both intended to clearly identify something or someone – but I think that in common usage names build relationships while labels categorize and separate. We name a child or pet, but we label migrant children and zoo animals. We name our stuffed animals but years later label the boxes (Stuffed Animals) we put into storage.

When Heather leads nature walks and someone asks about a particular plant, she prefers not to name the species – white pine, sphagnum moss, ghost pipe, for example – until she has had the participants touch, smell, and look closely at the plant. Then she describes some details of how the plant lives or who it lives in relationship with. Names, in our fading relationship with the living world, can be invitations to know more or mere boxes to check off. Heather has learned to personalize the invitation.

Folks often post pictures of “things” they see outdoors with little more context than their beauty or charisma. Those are important features, but the photo and caption can’t contain the pine warbler nesting 40 feet high in the white pine, the long history of using sphagnum to dress wounds, or the non-photosynthesizing ghost pipe’s parasitism of Russula fungi.

So names can be little more than labels, and labels – if we take time to build understanding, which is a kind of relationship – can become names, doorways to a deeper connection. When we sit down next to a clump of ghost pipe or the child of migrants, and learn more about how they got here and who they’re connected to, the label blossoms.

All of which suggests that there is formidable power in naming. And like all forms of power, it can be used badly or well. I think what determines the difference is our intent. What’s the purpose of naming, or of using a name? Do we name to offer acknowledgement and respect, or to exert claim and control? Do we learn the names of other species in the spirit of kinship, as Robin Wall Kimmerer so often discusses (as does Katharine Winship in

Matters of Kinship

)? Do we learn those names to deepen our connections with the less conspicuous plants and animals that run the world, as

Bryan Pfeiffer

teaches us to do, turning names and labels into stories and relationships?

We should be, but we aren’t. Not enough of us, anyway. As Kimmerer explains,

It’s a sign of respect and connection to learn the name of someone else, a sign of disrespect to ignore it. Yet the average American can name over 100 corporate logos and 10 plants. Is it a surprise that we have accepted a political system that grants personhood to corporations and no status at all for wild rice and redwoods?

The shift from respect to disrespect, from relationship to claim, from we belong to the Earth to the Earth belongs to us, has occurred as humans evolved from tool-making apes into systematic thinkers slouching in office chairs. Our most common systems of thought have, in recent centuries, moved from understanding environments to utilizing them for selfish purposes. Our names for the threads of the living world woven through us have become labels for things that can serve us.

It’s not that there aren’t billions of good people wanting to live in right relationship with the real world; it’s that we’re trapped by a modern culture and language that support putting all of life into the industrial blender we optimistically call civilization.

Those are hefty matters, and at this point in my inquiry, I could sidetrack into dissertations on colonialism, slavery, corporate power, private land ownership – which are different symptoms of the same disease – or into philosophies on the intersection of language and meaning, but as usual I’ll narrow my focus to how we’re relating to, and shaping, the living world. Specifically, I’m thinking (again) about how to name this new era of Earth history.

geological time scale / credit: National Park Service

My writing here has a name, of course, and it’s invested in a label invented recently to describe both scientifically and culturally our utter transformation of the planet: the Anthropocene, i.e. the New Age of Humans. The Oxford Dictionary online defines the Anthropocene as the “current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.”

Here’s how the brilliant writer Robert Macfarlane described some features of the signature we’re leaving in the Earth’s sedimentary stone:

What a signature it will be. We have bored 50 [million] kilometres of holes in our search for oil. We remove mountain tops to get at the coal they contain. The oceans dance with billions of tiny plastic beads. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of rainforests for monoculture production sends out killing smog-palls that settle into the sediment across entire countries. We have become titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come.

There’s a lot I could add to Macfarlane’s litany – and for three years that’s what I’ve been doing here – but the gist is simply this: life on Earth has been irreversibly altered by humans. When I say “altered”, I mean dangerously diminished. An odd, top-heavy primate, we’ve imagined into existence technologies which improve and extend our lives, but which have allowed us to breed like bacteria (we’re still adding a billion souls every 11 or 12 years) and become so ravenous for resources that we’ve transformed broad swathes of the continents, scoured the oceans, and catastrophically destabilized the atmosphere upon which all life relies. Animal populations across the globe dropped by 70% in the last fifty years. 85% of wetlands are gone. Over two thirds of ocean ecosystems are compromised by human activity. The planet is on a path toward its sixth mass extinction, and we are the cause. How we respond now, this year and for the next generation or three, will define how livable and lush the next millennia of life on Earth will be.

That’s a lot for one name to contain.

And yet, as many of you likely know, a geological committee has, for now, voted down the proposal to name a new Anthropocene epoch on the geological time scale. To be clear, they do not oppose the idea of the Anthropocene. The planet-shaping reality of our impacts isn’t in question. What a majority of committee members opposed, for technical reasons, was the dating of the Anthropocene to the mid-20^th-century. Humans, after all, have been modifying the planet at scale for far longer than that.

So, the scientific discussion continues, even as the terrible transformation intensifies. A tremendous amount of good work is being done, on energy systems especially, but the trend is clear. We’re handing our children and grandchildren a hotter, less biologically diverse, and less stable future, because our ecological Ponzi scheme has borrowed addictively against their green home.

Meanwhile, among the stratigraphers (the geologists who specialize in delineating the geological time scale), there’s a very slow and academic debate about what constitutes the starting line for this new era. That debate has taken many years already and apparently has more to come. But not right away. The Times reports that the committee which turned down the proposed framework for the Anthropocene have turned back to their decade-long debate over the starting point of the Pleistocene. They remind me, in their epic deliberations, of the slowness of Ents, the tree-guardians of Tolkien’s world, working on a timeframe foreign to the rest of us.

rainforest trees reaching the sawmills of Lagos, Nigeria / credit: Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto, via NPR

Certainly, we can use all the tree-guardians we can get, as Edward Burtynsky’s photographs here demonstrate. Deforestation continues at a ruinous rate across the globe, with 123,000 square miles (nearly 32 million hectares) of primary forest taken between 2010 and 2015. This, I’m sad to say, is an improvement.

The impacts of human activity, if not curtailed and at least partly reversed, may mean that the Anthropocene (a new epoch) will become the Anthropogene (a new period) or Anthropozoic (a new era). That’s a difference in long-term impact between thousands of years and tens of millions of years. When a large asteroid crashed into Earth and rebooted the planet sixty-six million years ago, killing off the dinosaurs, it initiated the Cenozoic Era, which we are still in today. Our ongoing acceleration of the extinction rate of plant and animal species, if left unchecked, will be comparable to the asteroid’s long-term effect.

I’d prefer that the committee of stratigraphers had approved the name change, especially because it means that the term won’t make it into as many textbooks as it should. But really it’s such an obscure process that being upset about it is a little like complaining about tweaks to the Dewey Decimal system. The Anthropocene name is still so little-known that its status among geologists does not matter to nearly all of humanity. To test this, ask yourself how important it has been to you to know that we’re in the Holocene epoch of the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era of the Phanerozoic eon.

As I wrote three years ago in the second Field Guide essay, it’s worth noting that the entire concept of the geological time scale, like much of science, is a function of the Anthropocene. It is neither an accident nor an irony that the same species which measures geologic time by periodic catastrophes has created its own planetary-scale catastrophe to mark geologic time. These are two symptoms of a skill set unique to humans: the willingness and capacity to reimagine the Earth for our purposes.

I’m deeply grateful that new readers arrive here every day, and that each of you sticks around to connect with my writing for another week, but I’ve often thought that the name of this project – Field Guide to the Anthropocene – has filtered out many readers who aren’t familiar with the term. They may have been drawn in if it were called, say, The Field Guide to a New Planet. I invested in the name because, like any good name, it has a story to tell, and that’s the story I care about: the Why and the How of the disrupted Earth and what happens next.

To the extent that the Anthropocene has become a popular term, it’s one that resonates culturally. I think this is because many of us recognize that we need language which helps move us forward with empathy and respect for the living world. We need a name, not a label. “Earth” should be enough, or simply “home,” amid the lightless and lifeless eternal expanse of space, but they’re not. “Anthropocene” is awkward and unfamiliar, but so is the world we’re making.

I may be alone in this, but I think the name helps us admit our mistakes – the New Age of Humans, right? – and acknowledge the evolutionary cliff that awaits our current path, and thus helps us get on with the multi-generational work that needs doing. I think it strikes a balance between hard science and soft culture, between geological logic and we-broke-it-we-have-to-fix-it marketing rationale.

“We are in the Anthropocene, irrespective of a line on the time scale,” one scientist told the Times. “And behaving accordingly is our only path forward.”

So let’s behave accordingly. Let’s recognize that the biodiversity and climate crises are two sides of the dice we’re rolling to determine the fate of the Earth. Let’s teach the next generations to develop a more meaningful relationship with the real world, where white pine, sphagnum moss, and ghost pipe live. Let’s turn names and labels into stories and relationships. Let’s act with a clearer, more empathetic intent. Let’s recognize that we are ancestors with a shallow sense of time, but all of our descendants live downstream in the deep time of the Anthropocene.

For more on the notion of the Anthropocene, you can read the three-part series I wrote three years ago at the beginning of the Field Guide. Better yet, be sure to investigate the astonishing Anthropocene Project, which includes Edward Burtynsky’s photos, a film, a book, educational material, virtual and augmented reality work, “gigapixel essays,” and more.

sphagnum moss in a bog / author photo

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From PBS, “A Brief History of the Future,” an optimistic look forward through an examination of the many good things being done to turn a disrupted Earth into a good Anthropocene. NPR has a short article about the series, which introduces us to the term “protopia.” Protopias are attainable positive futures, as opposed to the wreckage of dystopias and the impossibility of utopias.

From the Economist, an excellent explainer on why Antarctica has been ignored for far too long in the daily discussion of how a hotter climate will impact the rest of the world. Long thought to be immune from the near-term effects of climate chaos, it looks instead like the globe’s refrigerator is defrosting and the consequences for planetary-scale sea level rise, ocean circulation, and ocean carbon sequestration will be profound.

From the Guardian, an atmosphere richer in CO2 is reducing the nutrient value of vegetables, particularly iron, zinc, and Vitamin A. Unchecked, this shift will increase global malnutrition. A massive effort is underway to replace fortification (nutrients added through industrial food processing) with biofortification, which seeks to increase nutrient levels through plant breeding, soil amendments, or genetic modification. But there is a bias in this work for industrial agriculture over small-scale farming, for monoculture over traditional plant variety, and for colonial-style solutions. As one expert put it,

Powerful nations dictated the shape of food systems in other countries, left them in the position of more malnutrition, and now because those countries don’t have enough power to form their policies on a global market, the same powerful nations can now go back and intervene in their dietary systems.

From Orion, a short, fun, and fascinating compilation of facts on breathing in the living world, from reindeer noses that can heat up incoming air as much as 80 degrees in less than a second to belugas blowing four types of bubbles for fun. And while I’m talking about Orion, you might be interested in their “environmentally-influenced” book recommendations for this Spring.

From Hakai, “Light at the End of the Tunnel,” an article by the always-great Ben Goldfarb on the millions of culverts under American roads that cut off fish passage and otherwise disrupt the movements of the natural world. The good news is that there is ongoing work to improve all of them.

From the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a grim report on the fate of wetlands. The latest update to the USFWS “Wetlands Status and Trends” report to Congress covers 2009-2019, and builds on previous reports going back several decades. More than half of the wetlands that existed in the late 1700s are now gone, and 670,000 acres were lost between 2009-2019, largely to development, monoculture forestry, and agriculture. Five billion migratory birds use wetlands during the breeding season, and about half of species listed as Endangered or Threatened are wetland-dependent. We need comprehensive federal policy to protect and restore wetlands, and we need Congress to pass legislation that will defend these habitats from the stark lunacy of the recent Supreme Court decision which gutted wetlands protection.

From Grist, some good news on the coral restoration front. In South Sulawesi, Indonesia, an innovative reef reconstruction project has shown that a coral ecosystem can largely rebound from the physical damage of blast fishing in just four years. It may not help those reefs being repeatedly bleached by a too-hot ocean, but it’s excellent news for the parts of the world where fishing with dynamite has been common.

From NPR, a collection of amazing Anthropocene photographs by Edward Burtynsky. The images are part of his aptly-named Anthropocene Project, and they are mostly large-scale aerial images of devastation that is both haunting and hard to fathom.

From Speaking for the Trees here on Substack,

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

writes persuasively about the problems with the “invasive plant narrative.” It’s a complex reality that threads through the Anthropocene: How do we respond to the changes we’ve made to the community of life, especially where species we’ve introduced to new areas compete with native species? The invasives species narrative is generally hostile and aggressive toward the introduced species, but Kollibri reminds us that, at the very least, we need to remember that it’s not the plants’ fault. They’re merely responding to the changes we’ve made.

It’s been some time since I’ve written about Project Drawdown, but for those of you looking for the best online sources for climate solutions, you cannot do better than their site, especially their Solutions Library page. The depth and breadth of their work is astonishing, but also well-written and rooted in empathy rather than mere technology.

In related news, a recent podcast from Climate One is a good general introduction to climate solutions and an antidote to the anxiety that comes from feeling overwhelmed by the scale of what needs doing. Several people at the forefront of climate solution thinking are interviewed, including the author of Diet for a Small Planet, someone from Project Drawdown, and the head of Rewiring America. Well worth your time if you’re looking for an excellent summary of solutions.

From Carbon Majors, a new report assessing the history of carbon emissions over the past century and a half. There’s too much in it to detail here, but here’s a dark highlight: 80% of global emissions since the 2016 Paris Agreement can be traced to just 57 corporate and state producing entities, and that most of these companies have increased production during over the last several years. If you’re looking for a comprehensive analysis of who to blame for a world gone wrong, this report is a good place to start. Here’s an Axios article on the report.