This week, to my surprise, it was all over the news that we’ve
entered the Anthropocene,
a new geological era marked by the extreme effects that human activity is
having on the planet. I thought we figured this out years ago?
Tearing myself away from the comments (We had a frost last week, how do you explain that then?), and boggling at the thought of a
geological layer composed almost entirely of KFC
fossils, I began to worry.
What if we do survive?
I mean, pretty sad if we don’t. The human race’s great
achievements, art, literature, music and technology (just as we’ve been warned,
in the entire body of twentieth century dystopian sci fi) all gone. But at
least there’d be no one left to shed a tear.
But on the other hand, what if our species lives on, and kids grow up
wanting to be archaeologists? What a stink job. Will
they unearth the bones of their ancestors, and piece together the complicated
rituals of the past? Find beautifully crafted artefacts that hint at the magic
of a long-lost culture? Doubt it. Chicken bones. I don’t think they’ll even
reach the chicken bones, to be fair, they’ll get down a couple of metres and
find a planet-wide layer of melted plastic, marking the point of a great
catastrophe like the Iridium
Anomaly.
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| Detroit agate source |
All our packaging, our clothes, our furnishings, our kids’ toys, every bag you ever brought a frozen chicken home in. All fused together into an impermeable, multi-coloured layer.
Or maybe the relics of our era will just form a layer of dark, uniform ooze, solidifying over the millennia into a super-hard mud-coloured shell. What will they think, our future archaeologists? That we loved plastic above all else? Or that we loved our world with a passion, every tree, every elephant, panda, tiger and kakapo, loved it so much we wrapped it up in plastic to keep it fresh. Good job, humans. Looks nice.
