The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us

by Diane Ackerman

  These are but a few signs of our presence. Of course, our scat is visible, too. Junkyards and recycling centers edge all the towns, heaped with blocks of compressed metals and the black curls of old tires, swirling with scavenging gulls.

  We’ve created a bounty of new landscapes, and lest the feat be lost on anyone, we even tack on the suffix “scape” to describe them. I’ve come across “cityscape,” “townscape,” “roadscape,” “battlescape,” “lawnscape,” “prisonscape,” “mallscape,” “soundscape,” “cyberscape,” “waterscape,” “windowscape,” “xeriscape,” and many more. And let’s not forget all the “industrial parks.”

  Although our handmade landscapes tend to fade into the background, just a stage set for our high-drama lives, they can be breathtaking. In Japan, tourists bored with volcanic mountains and gardens, and urban sightseers given to kojo moe, “factory infatuation,” are flocking to sold-out tours that specialize in industrial landscapes and public works, which are viewed by bus or boat. Especially popular are the nighttime cruises that feature mammoth chemical factories spewing smoke and aglitter with star-clusters of light, overseen by the moon and more familiar constellations. It’s become a popular date for romantic young couples.

  “Most people are shocked to discover that factories can be such beautiful places,” says Masakatsu Ozawa, an official in Kawasaki’s tourism department. “We want tourists to have an experience for all the senses including that of factory smell.”

  “If you come to Tokyo, don’t bother going to Harajuku,” the city’s shopping district, Ken Ohyama writes in his book Kojo Moe. “Go instead to Kawasaki,” an industrial hub rich in rust, contaminated water, and polluted air. For that’s where the industrial scenery is the most vivid. Some Japanese lawmakers would like a few of their working factories designated as World Heritage Sites, to draw even more tourists.

  For the past twenty-five years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been documenting “manufactured landscapes” all over the world. Many of his most startling photographs were shot inside Chinese factories that ramble for blocks, where workers pass nearly all of their daylight hours surrounded by machines, products, and each other, under artificial light. The size and scale of their surroundings play upon the eyes and mind as a landscape. So does each floor of a large office building in, say, Singapore, divided into dozens of honeycomb cubicles.

  I find Burtynsky’s studio loft on a busy street in downtown Toronto. Large wooden tables flank several small offices, and a row of tall windows offers a portrait gallery of the day’s weather. A tall, slender man with graying hair and neatly trimmed mustache and goatee greets me, and we retreat into his book-lined office. He’s wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt with a small coyote logo howling up at his face. His voice is whisper-quiet, there’s a calm about him almost geological in its repose, and yet his eyes are agile as a leopard’s.

  “You’ve been called a ‘subliminal activist’ . . . ”

  Burtynsky smiles. The moniker fits.

  “Part of the advantage one has as a Canadian,” he explains, “is that you’re born into this country that’s vast and thinly populated. I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn’t changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament. And also, I hope, a poetic narrative of the transfigured landscape and the industrial supply line. We can’t have our cities, we can’t have our cars, we can’t have our jets without creating wastelands. For every act of creation there is an act of destruction. Take the skyscraper—there is an equivalent void in nature: quarries, mines.”

  Quarries as inverted architecture. I picture hollowed-out geometrical shapes, Cubist benches, ragged plummets. You can’t have a skyscraper made out of marble or granite without a corresponding emptiness in nature. I haven’t thought of our buildings in quite this way before, as perpetually shadowed by a parallel absence.

  “And yet these ‘acts of destruction’ are surprisingly beautiful,” I say.

  “We have extracted from the land from the moment we stood on two feet. When we look at these wastelands, we say, ‘Isn’t that a terrible thing.’ . . . But they can also be seen in a different way. These spots aren’t dead, although we leave them for dead. Life does go on, and we should reengage with those places. They’re very real and they’re very much part of who we are.”

  My mind shimmies between two of his photographs: the stepped walls of an open-pit tungsten mine in northwestern Spain and a pyramid of lightbulb filaments, electronics, rocket engine nozzles, X-ray tubes, and the other particulate matter of our civilization. They’re very different from the landscape photographs of the first half of the twentieth century, when Eliot Porter, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston celebrated nature as the embodiment of the sublime, with reverence and respect, in all its wild untrampled glory. Burtynsky’s photographs capture the wild trampled glory of humanity reveling in industry. For ages, nature was the only place we went to feel surrounded by forces larger than ourselves. Now our cities, buildings, and technologies are also playing that role.

  Even calling something “nature” is a big change, Burtynsky suggests, from a time when nature existed all around and within us. Then we separated ourselves by naming it, just as, according to the Bible, Adam named the animals. Once we named them, they seemed ours to do with as we wished. Yet we were never as distant as we thought, and if we are learning anything in the Anthropocene, it is that we are not really separate at all. An important part of the landscape, our built environment is an expression of nature and can be more, or less, sustainable. The choice is ours.

  IN THE HERE and now of an orangutan kid’s life, Budi relinquishes his iPad for a moment. Then Matt lifts a hand, points down with his first finger, and swirls it around as if he were stirring up an invisible brew. On cue, Budi turns around and presses his back to the bars so that Matt can give him a scratch. Matt obliges, and Budi shrugs in pleasure, then presents one shoulder, arm, and back again for more.

  “He just got his big-boy teeth a couple of months ago,” Matt says. “His baby teeth fell out at the beginning of the year . . . he got rid of those giant Chiclets.” Matt places some fresh fruit tidbits into Budi’s mouth.

  “He’s very careful with your fingers.”

  “When he was really little he would bite—Hey, let go,” Matt says, gently removing Budi’s finger from a flap of iPad cover he’s trying to pry off. “But then he had smaller teeth. When I’d squeal, he’d let go. Just like he was testing to see. He’s a little bigger now, and even if he didn’t mean to hurt me, he could.”

  They may be the same weight as humans, but orangutans are about seven times as strong, and may not realize the damage a playful yank or slap could do to a human. Yet they’re also empathic enough to recognize another’s pain, regardless of species, and feel bad about causing it.

  “If he knows how to behave with people, the nicer his life’s going to be—as he gets older he can do things like present body parts so that people can look after him. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be at this zoo forever, so it will be nice to say, This is the language Budi knows. This is what you need to know to communicate with him.”

  Budi’s mom, Puppe, wanders over to see what we’re doing. Elderly by orangutan standards, at thirty-six, she’s the oldest of the zoo’s orangutans, with mature grayish skin (juvenile skin, like Budi’s, is paler), a Buddha belly, and wrinkling around her nose and mouth. Her face looks strikingly humanlike, as does Budi’s. Orangs meet our gaze with familiar faces and expressions across a hazy evolutionary mirage. Small wonder that, in Indonesian, their name means “Orange Forest People.”

  Budi climbs the bars above his mom and dangles onto her head in a handstand, then slides upside down across her shoulders and rolls sideways off her back with a half twist. But she doesn’t seem unduly bothered. Af
ter raising five tykes, she’s used to such antics, and in any case she’s always had a placid personality, a trait she’s passed on to Budi, who tends to be relatively quiet as well. Not that orangs make much noise. The males may groan their long call to tell receptive females that they’re hunks and other males not to mess with them, but the females and young always stay so close together that they only need to make subtle squeaks and grunts. Also, they’re virtuosos of the visual. Most of their mutual knowing flows through an anatomy of signs, in which body language and pantomime offer a shared vocabulary. So Matt’s work with them always includes gestures as well as words. It’s a technique that’s also gaining popularity among human parents with toddlers—teaching them basic sign language to make themselves understood before they can speak.

  “Show me your tummy,” Matt says, turning his attention to her and quietly gesturing come here with both hands.

  “Let me see your tummy, Puppe,” he says, pointing to her hairy orange belly. His tone with her is tender and respectful.

  Puppe presses her big tummy close to Matt, who gives it a gentle rub. When he offers her some fruit she places a few pieces in one hand and delicately eats them one at a time.

  “Where are you going, kiddo?” Matt says, as Budi runs off to a corner.

  Grabbing a crinkly blue tarpaulin, he wraps himself up Caped Crusader style and returns to iPad play, triggering gorilla and rhino calls. Then Budi reaches for a control bar with buttons outside of the cage, and Matt brings the remote closer to him and lets him push the button that lifts a door on the wall dividing his enclosure from the next one. Hauling the tarpaulin overhead, he kicks a large ball through the door and dashes after it, brings it back, and pushes the button to close the door. Open, close, open, close. He’s like any kid getting a rush out of opening and closing drawers and doors.

  Matt believes in giving the orangs as much volition as possible, and lots of mental and sensory stimulation (or privacy if they wish).

  “We make almost all their choices for them, and an intelligent animal should have opportunities to make more choices themselves,” Matt says, “from deciding on the type of food they want that day to what activities they’d like to do.”

  “They didn’t choose to be ambassadors for their ill-fated species,” I think aloud, wondering if future geologists will discover that we allowed orangutans to go extinct in our age, or if we were able to rescue them at the eleventh hour.

  “No.” His face clouds over.

  “The situation in the wild is very bad, I gather.”

  “The last I’ve heard,” he says sadly, “is that the population is segmented, and right now none of the Sumatran orangutan populations are sustainable in the long term, unless we can create corridors and protect those areas. There are so many benefits to orangutan corridors—they handle the storm water, they prevent erosion, they produce oxygen, they provide places for orangutans to live. The owners don’t want orangutans near their palm plantations, but if there were functioning corridors, there would be less animal–human conflict.”

  So there’s an Orangutan Awareness program at the Toronto Zoo, with education, outreach, and fund-raising for global orangutan projects. And there’s the signature Apps for Apes program (at twelve zoos thus far) reminding people how much we have in common with the other great apes. When we see an orangutan at his iPad we naturally think, He could be my son, my brother, myself.

  Budi touches a game on his iPad and the screen becomes an extravaganza of flurrying creatures, alive and finning, bubbling and whirling, in an underwater prehistoric world that Budi will never see. Nor will we, for we only know them at a standstill, as uninhabited bones, relics of a previous age as dramatic as our own.

  A DIALECT OF STONE

  I’m wearing a fossil trilobite pendant around my neck right now. Black with prominent ribs in a silver bevel, it resembles a wood louse, and I wonder if it could rolypoly itself and somersault as wood lice do. Mostly, I wonder what its compound eyes saw so long ago. My trilobite is only an inch long, but I’ve held one nearly two feet wide in a neighbor’s private collection, its ribs a xylophone impressive enough to play a tune upon. Trilobites are uncanny instruments of life.

  Millennia before the Pliocene’s celebration of the spine, when grazing quadrupeds roamed, silver birch leaves flickered like tiny salmon, and grebes first hinted at lunacy, trillions of trilobites prowled the ocean floors and paddled mud banks ajell with bacterial slime. In the evolutionary arms race, they grew armor plates, jointed legs, tough, chitinous jaws—anything to beat extinction’s warrant. When they died, they bedded the muzzy swamplands. Today human bone-tumblers ogle their chalky remains, their exquisite herringbone shells. Trying to understand their habits, we sometimes allude to their cousins, the crab, spider, and millipede, and say “adaptive radiation about a common theme.” As if that explained the papery organs within, or all the crises that fed their opportunity.

  The most successful water animal ever embalmed as fossil, trilobites kept refining and upgrading themselves, over three hundred million years, until around twenty thousand different species freewheeled through deep and shallow seas on what must have seemed a trilobite-smitten planet. Some worked as stealthy ocean predators and scavengers, others as mild-mannered plankton-grazers, and still others fell into cahoots with sulfur-eating bacteria. Some developed protruding antlers and crackerjack spines. They scanned their realm with some of the oldest eyes on record, bug-eyed peepers with many lenses that weren’t organic but mineral, made of six-sided crystal calcium prisms. These radically different eyes didn’t provide crisp images but did offer a very wide field of view and motion. When a mass extinction wiped out trilobites 260 million years ago, their ancient lineage yielded to our world of insects with multifaceted eyes. But in their heyday, trilobites trolled the water world, and when they died their calcium carcasses fell to the bottom, crystal eyes and all, where layer upon layer of sediment enshrined them, gluing and compacting their bones with bits of coral and other calcium-cored creatures. Then time stacked its heavy volumes upon them, squeezing out the excess water and leaving behind limestone laced with skeletal remains. Today we use raw limestone in our roads, and grind it for paints and toothpastes—which means we use ancient trilobites, coral, and other fossils to help scrub our mouths.

  That’s also what it would take to fossilize humans—not as populous as trilobites but the most successful land animal ever. Just as well. I don’t know how I’d feel brushing my teeth with the remains of ancient in-laws, or outlaws.

  DRIVING DOWN THE highway that skirts Lake Cayuga, between glacial chunks of rock, I pass the uncanny work of erosion, a great sculptor of landscapes. Geologic eras are piled one on top of the other like Berber rugs, trilobites and other fossils bear witness to the evolution of life, and a host of creeks and waterfalls fume into the deep, gray-blue lake a thousand feet below. The wide ribbons of gunmetal gray and black shale I pass came from low-oxygen mud. Once this region was a shallow tropical sea that, as it evaporated, left not only mud full of marine-life skeletons that hardened into limestone but salt deposits, some of the deepest in the world. Colliding continents, 250 million years ago, stressed some of the rocks until fractures formed, land lifted, sea levels rose and fell. It’s easy to forget, when you look out over the rolling hills, that you’re seeing what once was the bottom of a sea, not the top of a mountain.

  By the time dinosaurs appeared, 240 million years ago, the seas had retreated, leaving dry land, where dinosaurs stomped their footprints. When the ice age arrived, only 2 million years ago, it spread vast sheets of ice that repeatedly charged forward and dragged back, in the process gouging the deep Finger Lakes while streams cut the gorges of upstate New York. Sometimes large fossils appear from that era, like the mastodon (a hulking relative of the elephant with exceptionally long tusks) that a bemused local farmer found in his field several years ago.

  Most of the life forms that once inhabited the planet have vanished, leaving no trace behind.
Their remains have been polished down by the elements and bulldozed by the slow-motion avalanche of the glaciers. But geologists like Cornell University’s Terry Jordan can read a tale in the rock strata, the Earth’s dialect of stone, including the chevrons that tell of some sea-tossing event, maybe a hurricane like Sandy or Haiyan.

  I like Terry Jordan from the first moment we meet in her office beside one of the sinuous plummeting gorges that are a hallmark of this lake district, a place for the geologically curious, loaded with fossils. It’s her blue argyle socks—the crisscrossing design echoes the angles one sometimes sees in rock creased by spells of turmoil, the shadow of a buckling or churning calamity so long ago that we can only date it to within tens of thousands of years.

  Specializing in sediment, the earth scruff that remains long enough to petrify into pinnacles and mutate into mesas, she’s taught geology for much of a human lifetime. That seems long to me, but in her view of the past it’s only a speck.

  “Does it ever feel strange thinking in such long, slow units of time, when today’s world is all about speed?” I ask.

  Shaking her head with a laugh, she says, “No, I’m amazed by people who don’t think this way. How can they not see it?”

  The “it” is our place in the rocky bones of history. Admiring a chunk of rock on a table by Terry Jordan’s window, I lift it in my hands and peer at the embossed fossils on its surface, where ram’s-horn-shaped ammonites look like they’re butting their way out.

  “This is a wonderful place for fossils,” I say. “Do you think our bones will show in the fossil record in this way, oh, say, ten million years from now?”

  “Only if we’re trapped in sediment!” she says, with a slightly impish smile. Then, seriously: “Maybe people living in coastal areas like New Orleans, Tokyo, or the Netherlands, or island nations—areas that will sink and disappear in mud when the sea level rises.”