Or at least so goes the headline from my chat with Brian Lehrer on WNYC today, encompassing the Anthropocene (and how to pronounce it) as well as our heated future. Take a listen!
Tag: climate change
The End of the World As We Know It, or I Got an Anthropocene Book Deal
Humanity is now writing a new chapter in Earth’s history. The choices we make now will help set the thermostat of the entire planet for at least tens of thousands of years. If people, plants and animals don’t like the climate of 2100, 2500 or even 25000, they will have us to blame. And if human civilization is to persist to see that climate, we have our work cut out for us.
Which is why I’m writing a book. We are the first life to transform this planet with the possibility of consciousness about it, terraforming terra herself as a result of our actions (albeit mostly unwittingly to date). If we want to ensure that the Anthropocene is more than a blip in the history of the planet, it will take all of our smarts and our technology to begin to master formerly natural systems, such as short-circuiting the millennia it takes to recycle water or the eons nature requires to turn tons of old, dead plants into fossil fuels.
This is not about preserving Nature with a capital N or bringing stasis to what is (and always has been) the dynamic flux of life, chemistry and plate tectonics. This is about managing change, adapting and ensuring the resilience of our civilization, our fellow life and even our planet.
I’ll be chronicling my efforts to craft a narrative history out of that topic here. So set out on this journey of disillusionment with me? Any and all help, insights, pro tips or just words of encouragement truly welcome. Welcome to the Anthropocene.
Welcome to the Anthropocene
I LIVE IN A SUPERFUND site. So do you, no matter where you live. Despite environmental laws older than I am and the migration of U.S. heavy industry overseas, the toxic impacts of modern human life touch every inch of the U.S. And it’s not just the U.S., it’s North America, it’s Asia, it’s Antarctica, every inch of everywhere really — even the organic detoxification spas across California. Welcome to the Anthropocene, or “age of man.”
We move more earth and stone than all the world’s rivers. We are changing the chemistry of the atmosphere all life breathes. We are on pace to eat to death half of the other life currently sharing the planet with us. There is nothing on Earth untouched by man — whether it be the soot from fossil fuels darkening polar snows or the very molecules incorporated into a tree trunk. Humanity has become a global force whose exploits will be written in rock for millennia.
We can think of our Anthropocene… Read the rest over at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The Clean Revolution
I continue to work at a snail’s pace on my book (more literally my book proposal) on the slow-creeping tide of change in our energy supplies. I’m not just talking the current fad for wind farms and solar panels on rooftops, but an incremental but monumental effort to replace fire—mankind’s oldest technology, possibly—with some other way of harnessing energy for our needs. This is the work of decades if not centuries. After all, it took millennia for the harnessing of fire to bear full fruit in the form of the coal-fired power plant or an internal combustion engine.
Anyway, thoughts, suggestions, help welcome. The “green” revolution is dead, long live the clean revolution!
Greenery & Other Fine Things to Look At 