Anthropocene - July 12 2023

 

Anthropocene

July 12 2023

I know the earth is changing.

That the climate will worsen

and scarcity rule.

That desperate men

will claw at each other

like crabs in a bucket

clambering up the sides.

That the strong

will hoard the spoils

and loot the plunder

as our great cities crumble

and billions starve.

I was raised

in an era of prosperity,

an age of abundance

we took for granted

assumed would last.

So why not believe in the future,

expect that life

will keep getting better

for all of time?

After all

no one goes to war

who's fat and satisfied.

But now

the middle of the 20th century

is where they've drawn the line;

our imperceptible decline

from bigger, faster, shinier

to fighting over the crumbs.

I feel guilty about this;

that the beginning of the end

would coincide

with the year of my birth.

That while I was the beneficiary

of industry,

I was also the instrument

of this runaway train,

the calamity

the climate became

as we partied on.

My entire life

lived in a golden age

and no one even noticed;

the less than a century

when civilization peaked

and mankind strode the earth

like some entitled colossus.

When anything, it seemed

was possible.

Yet here I am

gazing out at the lake

on a summer day

that seems like it always has,

a temperate sun

a riffle of breeze

and a world that's lush and green.

Which, I think, is what got us into trouble

in the first place.

How quickly

we move through time,

preoccupied

by the petty concerns

of daily life,

while the earth

moves too slowly to notice.

And now, after it's gone so far

as to become unstoppable

we will tear ourselves apart,

watching our monumental works

crumble and collapse,

fighting like hungry dogs

over the salvaged remains

and foraged scraps.

And in the unlikely event

anyone is left

and cares to look

this will be our legacy,

a single line of strata

in billions of years of rock.

From the front page of today’s Globe and Mail:

Ontario’s Crawford Lake offers clearest marker on Earth of moment humans began to change the planet, scientists say

“The Anthropocene has gained a Canadian starting line. On Tuesday, an international panel of scientists announced that Crawford Lake, a small body of water located 50 kilometres west of Toronto, has emerged from among a dozen candidates around the world as the place that best records the dawn of the human epoch.

That epoch, they say, began during the middle of the 20th century, when our species effectively became the main driver of global change.

Those who study Earth as an inter connected system maintain that this transition marks not only a turning point in history, but the beginning of a new interval in geologic time. And while the Anthropocene is unfolding everywhere around the world, its arrival was preserved with unusual precision at Crawford Lake. . . . “