I read this twice and then took notes as I went through the work a third time. Extraordinary, as usual, and such a solid call to action. I will return to this one often. Thank you for your work. Thank you for the mention.🌱 kbw
Reading Macfarlane's Underland, some time ago, I took several notes. I keep returning to one of them:
(The Anthropocene)… It is, perhaps, best imagined as an epoch of loss – of species, places and people – for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope.
We need new language, we need new stories, we maybe even need new names. We need to change.
“ 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.”
Thank you for your well thought out post.
I too will be enjoying the total eclipse in Vt. I hope to be on a mountain top accessed by backcountry skiing . I will leave you with this little recommendation I read this morning;
( you probably already know this, but I thought it worth mentioning if you did not).
“John Perry, an astrophysics professor at the University of Vermont. “
“Perry suggested that the best viewing location might be looking westward and downward so that you can watch the shadow of the moon traveling toward you as totality approaches. “It’s a fairly dramatic thing to see, to look down for a moment instead of looking up and see that shadow coming at you,”
Assuming that in some distant future, the functional equivalent of geologists look through the stratigraphy of the planet at widely separated locations. They will find evidence of a marked increase in atmospheric carbon around the time of our industrialization. But carbon increase can come from a variety of natural causes and so could not be definitive proof of human activity. To really get a fairly precise start date for the Anthropocene, our future geologists would note a thin layer of plastic microparticles in the strata worldwide, (rather like the Alvarez's iridium, marking the Chicxulub impact.) That layer, very thin, would be the indisputable marker for it is highly improbable for it to be formed by widely distributed natural processes.
I think it was on the podcast Threshold (my favorite podcast, so excellenty produced) that I heard the phrase about the Arctic being the planet's "pit zips" -- the underarm zips in winter coats that you can unzip to release heat while keeping the coat on. It was the best description I've heard of why the ice matters, though I suppose it's only effective if you've experienced the effect of and need for pit zips!
Jason and friends,
I read this twice and then took notes as I went through the work a third time. Extraordinary, as usual, and such a solid call to action. I will return to this one often. Thank you for your work. Thank you for the mention.🌱 kbw
Reading Macfarlane's Underland, some time ago, I took several notes. I keep returning to one of them:
(The Anthropocene)… It is, perhaps, best imagined as an epoch of loss – of species, places and people – for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope.
We need new language, we need new stories, we maybe even need new names. We need to change.
“ 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.”
Thank you for your well thought out post.
I too will be enjoying the total eclipse in Vt. I hope to be on a mountain top accessed by backcountry skiing . I will leave you with this little recommendation I read this morning;
( you probably already know this, but I thought it worth mentioning if you did not).
“John Perry, an astrophysics professor at the University of Vermont. “
“Perry suggested that the best viewing location might be looking westward and downward so that you can watch the shadow of the moon traveling toward you as totality approaches. “It’s a fairly dramatic thing to see, to look down for a moment instead of looking up and see that shadow coming at you,”
Safe travels to your destination.
Thanks for the mention, Jason!
Assuming that in some distant future, the functional equivalent of geologists look through the stratigraphy of the planet at widely separated locations. They will find evidence of a marked increase in atmospheric carbon around the time of our industrialization. But carbon increase can come from a variety of natural causes and so could not be definitive proof of human activity. To really get a fairly precise start date for the Anthropocene, our future geologists would note a thin layer of plastic microparticles in the strata worldwide, (rather like the Alvarez's iridium, marking the Chicxulub impact.) That layer, very thin, would be the indisputable marker for it is highly improbable for it to be formed by widely distributed natural processes.
I think it was on the podcast Threshold (my favorite podcast, so excellenty produced) that I heard the phrase about the Arctic being the planet's "pit zips" -- the underarm zips in winter coats that you can unzip to release heat while keeping the coat on. It was the best description I've heard of why the ice matters, though I suppose it's only effective if you've experienced the effect of and need for pit zips!