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Reconsidering the Anthropocene
- est31 7y agoI love the last paragraph. It's nicely pessimistic: > Ten million years from now, humans went extinct—give or take a few thousand years—10 million years ago. Huge grazing herbivores and cursorial predators move carbon and nitrogen around the landscape. These unfamiliar creatures evolved from survivor lineages that timidly emerged from some long-forgotten disaster now deep in their evolutionary past. A herd of grazers moves to the next patch of grass. A rainstorm comes and goes. Monsoons wobble about the equator, as the planet does so around the sun. A million more years go by. The waves beat against the shore. Humanity has as little to do with this world as Megalodon does with ours, and nothing remains of us at the surface. Though no one is alive to tell us what epoch it is, these creatures have nevertheless inherited a planet forever diverted by our legacy—as surely, in Faulkner’s words, “as Noah’s grandchildren had inherited the Flood although they had not been there to see the deluge.”
- jkmcf 7y agoLife goes on. It’s beautiful, and mankind needs to acknowledge its minuscule place in the grand scheme of things.