David Farrier: Deep time’s uncanny future is full of ghostly human traces // Michael Moore: Planet of the Humans
Deep time represents a certain displacement
of the human and the divine from the story of creation. Yet in the
Anthropocene, we humans have become that sublime force, the agents
of a fearful something that is greater than ourselves. A single mine in
Canada’s tar sands region moves 30 billion tonnes of sediment annually, double
the quantity moved by all the worlds’ rivers. The weight of the fresh
water we have redistributed has slowed the Earth’s rotation. The mass
extinction of plant and animal species is unlikely to recover for 10 million
years...
Late one summer night in 1949, the British archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes went out into her small back garden in north London, and lay down. She sensed the bedrock covered by its thin layer of soil, and felt the hard ground pressing her flesh against her bones. Shimmering through the leaves and out beyond the black lines of her neighbours’ chimney pots were the stars, beacons ‘whose light left them long before there were eyes on this planet to receive it’, as she put it in A Land (1951), her classic book of imaginative nature writing.
Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans Book review: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History // Conservative groups spend up to $1bn a year to fight action on climate change
We are accustomed to
the idea of geology and astronomy speaking the secrets of ‘deep time’,
the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it.
Hawkes’s lyrical meditation mingles the intimate and the eternal, the
biological and the inanimate, the domestic with a sense of deep time that is
very much of its time. The state of the topsoil was a matter
of genuine concern in a country wearied by wartime rationing, while land itself
rises into focus just as Britain is rethinking its place in the world.
But in
lying down in her garden, Hawkes also lies on the far side of a fundamental
boundary. A Land was written at the cusp of the Holocene; we,
on the other hand, read it in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, or
era of the human, denotes how industrial civilisation has changed the Earth in
ways that are comparable with deep-time processes....https://aeon.co/ideas/deep-time-s-uncanny-future-is-full-of-ghostly-human-traces
see also
Scientists
Accidentally Create A Plastic-Eating Enzyme
