Anthropocene

I don’t usually write about a book after just reading the review, but David Farrier’s Footprints looks like a delightful read to add to my already unmanageable reading list. Here’s a review from The Economist.

It’s interesting to start thinking of our legacy, of our impact on the planet and whether future civilizations will even be able to know about us. In fact, it’s entirely possible that advanced life evolved on Earth before us and we’d have no trace of it today (fascinating read).

Living in the Netherlands, it’s impossible to ignore humanity’s relationship to the natural world. I live on an island that was created after I was born, which is in a freshwater lake (created in the 20th Century), which was previously a saltwater bay connected to the sea (created by a freakishly strong storm in the 13th Century: St. Lucia’s flood), which was a possibly human created lake via primitive damming before that.

And that’s why I call this whole area fake nature. Everything here has the hand of humanity in it, otherwise this entire region would be peat bogs, marshes, and underwater.

But we’re also shaping the world around us everywhere and beyond just the obvious cases of carbon emissions.

It’s not just the folly of Europeans, either. The “pristine wilderness” that Europeans discovered in the Americas was actually carefully managed by the indigenous people via controlled burns, careful hunting practices, etc. The removal of indigenous people from their ancestral lands, and a sort of Rousseau protection of “nature” (a curiously modern word, even European languages lack this and resort to with calques or the Latin neologism) is one of many causes for the wildfires plaguing the American Southwest.

The idea of the Anthropocene doesn’t have to be inherently negative. I wish more of the discourse on these topics would focus on relationships and managing our interactions with the natural world. Instead you get eco-ascetism (let’s all be vegan!), eco-techno-utopianism (yuppies with solar panels and Teslas), or a throwback to the Romantics (Rousseau style nature-lovers). I don’t see a lot of pragmatism in any of it.

And there’s a big messaging problem. Most regular people don’t care about carbon emissions. It’s too abstract. But even normies can be moved by the extinction of some of the most majestic and wonderful creatures on this planet, their own cities turning toxic (this environmental movement was very successful in Europe and America).