The scientific community took the Crutzen-Stoermer proposal seriously enough to submit it to the rigours of the stratigraphers. In 2009 the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy was created. It was charged with delivering two recommendations: firstly, whether the Anthropocene should be formalized as an epoch and if so, secondly, when its ‘stratigraphically optimal’ temporal limit should be located, i.e. when it could be said to have begun. Among the baselines considered by the group have been the first use of fire by hominins around 1.8 million years ago, the start of agriculture around 8,000 years ago, the Industrial Revolution, and the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’ of the mid twentieth century, when the nuclear age dawned, massive increases occurred in terms of resource extraction, population growth, carbon emissions, species invasions and extinctions, and when the production and discard of metals, concrete and plastics boomed.
What signatures our species will leave in the strata! We remove whole mountain tops to plunder the coal they contain. The oceans dance with hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic waste, slowly settling into sea-floor sediments. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of rainforests for monoculture production sends out smog-palls that settle into the soils of nations. A nitrogen spike, indicated in ice-cores and sediments, will be one of the key chemical insignias of the Anthropocene, caused by the mass global use of synthetic nitrogen-rich fertilizers and by fossil-fuel burning. Biodiversity levels are crashing worldwide as we hasten into the sixth great extinction event, while the soaring number of a small number of livestock species ensures the geological posterity in the fossil record of sheep, cows and pigs. We have become titanic world-makers, our legacy legible for epochs to come.
Among the relics of the Anthropocene, therefore, will be the fallout of our atomic age, the crushed foundations of our cities, the spines of millions of intensively farmed ungulates, and the faint outlines of some of the billions of plastic bottles we produce each year – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.
There are many reasons to be suspicious of the idea of the Anthropocene. It generalizes the blame for what is a situation of vastly uneven making and suffering. The rhetorical ‘we’ of Anthropocene discourse smooths over severe inequalities, and universalizes the site-specific consequences of environmental damage. The designation of this epoch as the ‘age of man’ also seems like our crowning act of self-mythologization – and as such only to embed the technocratic narcissism that has produced the current crisis.
But the Anthropocene, for all its faults, also issues a powerful shock and challenge to our self-perception as a species. It exposes both the limits of our control over the long-term processes of the planet, and the magnitude of the consequences of our activities. It lays bare some of the cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other beings now, as well as between humans and more-than-humans still to come. Perhaps above all the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands. What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’
But to think ahead in deep time runs against the mind’s grain. Try it yourself, now. Imagine forwards a year. Now ten. Now a century. Imagination falters, details thin out. Try a thousand years. Mist descends. Beyond a hundred years even generating a basic scenario for individual life or society becomes difficult, let alone extending compassion across much greater reaches of time towards the unborn inhabitants of worlds-to-be. As a species, we have proved to be good historians but poor futurologists. While we have devised abbreviations for marking out deep time in the past – BP for ‘before present’; MYA for ‘million years ago’ – we have no equivalent abbreviations for marking out deep time in the future. No one speaks of AP for ‘after present’, or MYA for ‘million years ahead’.
The Anthropocene requires us to undertake a retrospective reading of the current moment, however – a ‘palaeontology of the present’ in which we ourselves have become sediments, strata and ghosts. It asks that we imagine a single figure: a hypothetical posthuman geologist who – millions of years into the future, long after the extinction of our species – will examine the underland for what it reveals of the epoch of anthropos. This imaginary figure – our archivist, our analyst, our judge – is the contemporary version of the ‘last man’ presence that haunted nineteenth-century extinction narratives, or of Thomas Macaulay’s ‘New Zealander’, sitting by the banks of the Thames in a London that has been overwhelmed by nature, ruminating on ruination.
Down at the chaos of the mine’s production face, I think of the puzzles we are creating for our future geologist. I wonder how, millions of years on, she will interpret the fossil presence of the lizard-like mining machines of Boulby, manufactured in the Anthropocene and embedded in the strata of a 250-million-year-old seabed. How will she distinguish them as machines rather than as organisms? And what of the drift itself – the faint impress that this 600-mile maze will leave in the layers of halite and sylvite?
Geologists and palaeobiologists speak of ‘trace fossils’. A trace fossil is the sign left in the rock record by the impress of life rather than life itself. A dinosaur footprint is a trace fossil. The enigmatic doughnut-shaped flints called ‘paramoudra’ are thought to be the trace fossils of a burrowing worm-like creature that lived vertically in the seabed during the Cretaceous, its breathing organs just above the level of the silt. Boreholes, funnels, pipes, slithers and tracks are all trace fossils – stone memories where the mark-maker has disappeared but the mark remains. A trace fossil is a bracing of space by a vanished body, in which absence serves as sign.
We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.
~
The return from the production face is a madcap rally-drive. Neil works the van even harder. Dust in the mouth, hitting the ramps at speed – whump – stomach in the mouth, then slam down onto the halite floor. We approach a corner. Neil hammers the horn. Paaaaarp! He hammers it again. Silence. Hammer. Silence.
‘I must have shaken a circuit loose,’ Neil says.
‘That’s been evident for a while now,’ I say.
‘Not to worry. We’re coming back out. We’ve got right of way, at least in theory. I’ll slow down a bit.’
He doesn’t slow down at all.
‘Watch out for oncoming headlights on the side walls! If I knock myself out, take over the wheel and head south-west!’
We pass two wrecked Transits in side tunnels, their bonnets crushed from unknown impacts, waiting to be absorbed by the halite. On we pummel through miles of tunnel, back at last to the yellow cage of the upshaft.
Soft whoosh and air-squeeze halfway up as the down-cage passes us. Jolt and slow as we near the surface. The shuffle of men readying themselves for the exit, thinking of shower, home, family, food, drink. Rattle of the door opening. Block-squares of light through steel gate lock-hatches. Smell of the sea, smell of the sun. Into the airlock, counted out one by one. Miners first. Respirator back on the peg. Check. Push the bronze triangle in at the window desk. Check. Clea
r.
Out through the door and into burning white day, blue billowing sky, sun glinting off windscreen and chain-link, tarmac and grass blade, dark matter nowhere and everywhere around me – and surfacing into this blinding light seems like stepping into ignorance.
~
Later I drive west over the moors for hours, winding home. The ling is in bloom and pollen glitters in the air. Marks of mining are everywhere I look, left by thousands of years of human boring into this northern landscape in search of materials: slate, lead, iron, copper, ironstone, silver, coal, fluorspar. Marks of burial too, left by thousands of years of humans interring their dead in the same terrain: medieval church cemeteries, burial mounds from the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age.
Near dusk I am in the ridge-and-fold limestone valleys of the North Pennines. The easterly breeze of the morning has grown in force to a gale. At Rookhope I park and walk the mile or so up onto the moor above the village.
The wind at that height is chilling, though the late sun is still strong. Cottontails of bog-grass thrum in the wind, glowing like gas mantles. Four kestrels, strung in a ragged low line above the moor to my west, hold their positions with grace against the wind. I gorge on the glut of light, the fetch of space. Reaching a jumble of boulders I stand on the highest stone, face east and lean a little into the wind, feeling the push of its hand on my chest – holding me in part-flight, kestrelling me.
Time feels differently reckoned after the mine: further deepened, further folded. My sense of nature feels differently reckoned too: further disturbed, further entangled. Somewhere to my east, men are at work a mile below the moors, half a mile under the sea, cutting tunnels through the salt-ghost of an ocean to harvest its energy for crops as yet ungrown. A Time Projection Chamber is waiting for signals from Cygnus, the Swan, that might tell something of the birth of the universe, 13.8 billion years earlier. A labyrinth of drift is slowly closing up, lizard-machines and Ford Transits are being sealed into their tombs of salt – and through it all is passing a particle wind of WIMPs and neutrinos, to which this world is as mere mist and silk.
‘At night, according to their accustomed watches, the stars traverse a path beneath the earth,’ Bede had written in The Reckoning of Time, 1,300 years earlier, as he calculated the six ages of the Earth, and the seventh age to come. I think of the miners who worked the underland of these Pennine valleys through the nineteenth century, following seams holding metallic ores of silver, magnesium, lead and zinc. Where galena coated the sides of a rift, it could gleam as brightly as a mirror. The same veins held wondrous blossoms of fluorspar, crystals of which shone blue in ultraviolet light. Occasionally the miners hacked their ways into geodes the size of rooms, walled and roofed in crystals and metals. The flames of their lamps glittered off quartz, aragonite, dolomite, fluorspar, iron pyrites and galena – as if they had broken into a buried star-chamber down there in the crust.
A full moon has begun to rise. The sky is darkening to red and black, the moor is sinking to browns and silvers, and the valley is suddenly off-planet.
The first star shows, then others glimmer into view. I step off the boulders, begin the walk down off the ridge, when a skylark shoots up a yard or so from me, shocking my heart, and I put a hand down in the hollow from which it has flown in time to catch the trace warmth of its body before the cold steals it away. The lark rises up into the sky, its cascading song clear and present in the moment.
~
A long night drive on high moors and down over coastal plains, headlights sweeping heather on the corners, coning the sky on the uphills, and home at last after midnight to a house at the foot of a mountain. The sky is salted with stars.
I pad into the room where my youngest son, Will, is sleeping. The moonlight pouring through the thin curtain casts my shadow across the floor.
I stand over Will and he is lying so still that panic sluices coldly through me, my heart thumps in my ears and I reach my hand towards his mouth to feel for his breath, to search for proof of life in the darkness.
Nothing, no breath, no breath – and then there it is, on the exhale, drifting faint and warm on my skin, and I rest the back of my fingers for a few seconds on his cheek, feel the mass of his body.
Still there, my love?
Breathe.
Breathe again.
My heart slowing back down. Starlight silvering the fine down on the edge of his skin. Everything causing a scintillation.
4
The Understorey
(Epping Forest, London)
Occasionally – once or twice in a lifetime if you are lucky – you encounter an idea so powerful in its implications that it unsettles the ground you walk on.
The first time I heard anyone speak of the ‘wood wide web’, more than a decade ago now, I was trying not to cry. A beloved friend was dying too young and too quickly. I had gone to see him for what I took to be the last time. He was tired by pain and drugs. We sat together, talked. My friend was a woodsman. Trees grew through his life and thought. His grandfather’s surname was Wood, he lived in a timber-framed house that he had built himself, and he had planted thousands of trees by hand over the years. ‘I have sap in my veins,’ he wrote once.
That day I read aloud a poem that was important to us both, ‘Birches’ by Robert Frost, in which climbing the snow-white trunks of birches becomes both a readying for death and a declaration of life. Then he told me about new research he had recently read concerning the interrelations of trees: how, when one of their number was sickening or under stress, they could share nutrients by means of an underground system that conjoined their roots beneath the soil, thereby sometimes nursing the sick tree back to health. It was a measure of my friend’s generosity of spirit that – so close to death himself – he could speak unjealously of this phenomenon of healing.
He did not have the strength then to tell me the details of how this below-ground sharing operated – how tree might invisibly reach out to tree within the soil. But I could not forget the image of that mysterious buried network, joining single trees into forest communities. It was planted in my mind, and there took root. Over the years I would encounter other mentions of the same extraordinary idea, and gradually these isolated fragments began to connect together into something like understanding.
~
In the early 1990s a young Canadian forest ecologist called Suzanne Simard, studying the understorey of logged temperate forests in north-west British Columbia, observed a curious correlation. When paper birch saplings were weeded out from clear-cut and reseeded plantations, their disappearance coincided with first the deterioration and then premature deaths of the planted Douglas fir saplings among which they grew.
Foresters had long assumed that such weeding was necessary to prevent the young birches (the ‘weeds’) depriving the young firs (the ‘crop’) of valuable soil resources. But Simard began to wonder whether this simple model of competition was correct. It seemed to her plausible that the paper birches were somehow helping rather than hindering the firs: when they were removed, the health of the firs suffered. If this interspecies aid-giving did exist between trees, though, what was its nature – and how could individual trees extend help to one another across the spaces of the forest?
Simard decided to investigate the puzzle. Her first task was to establish some kind of structural basis for possible connections between the trees. Using microscopic and genetic tools, she and her colleagues peeled back the forest floor and peered below the understorey, into the ‘black box’ of the soil – a notoriously challenging realm of study for biologists. What they saw down there were the pale, super-fine threads known as ‘hyphae’ that fungi send out through the soil. These hyphae interconnected to create a network of astonishing complexity and extent. Every cubic metre of forest soil that Simard examined held dozens of miles of hyphae.
For centuries, fungi had generally been considered harmful to plants: parasites that caused disease and dysfunction. As Simard began her resea
rch, however, it was increasingly thought that certain kinds of common fungi might exist in subtle mutualism with plants. The hyphae of these so-called ‘mycorrhizal’ fungi were understood not only to infiltrate the soil, but also to weave into the tips of plant roots at a cellular level – thereby creating an interface through which molecular transmission might occur. By means of this weaving, too, the roots of individual plants or trees were joined to one another by a magnificently intricate subterranean system.
Simard’s enquiries confirmed that beneath her forest floor there did indeed exist what she called an ‘underground social network’, a ‘bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species’ that linked sapling to sapling. She also discovered that the hyphae made connections between species: joining not only paper birch to paper birch and Douglas fir to Douglas fir, but also fir to birch and far beyond – forming a non-hierarchical network between numerous kinds of plants.
Simard had established a structure of connection between the saplings. But the hyphae provided only the means of mutualism. Its existence did not explain why the fir saplings faltered when the birch saplings were weeded out, or details as to what – if anything – might be transmitted via this collaborative system. So Simard and her team devised an experiment that could let them track possible biochemical movements along this invisible buried lattice. They decided to inject fir trees with radioactive carbon isotopes. Using mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, they were then able to track the flow of carbon isotopes from tree to tree.
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