The Anthropocene

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

Detroit agate     source

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.

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.

Could be highly sought after, like the Detroit Agate. Beautiful, dappled colours. Miners of the future might dig it up and make it into earrings.

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.