I have written a sequence inspired by the abstracts from the conference The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time? held at the Geological Society in May 2011. I’ll post them up here over the next week. There’s a highly recommended introduction to the Anthropocene on the BBC here, with links to a new World Service programme, which I also recommend.
Coal, oil, gas – let’s call these ancient, rather than contemporary, sunshine. Sunshine we sought with our intelligence and drive: genies hidden in the earth. Fossil sunshine, animal and plant long dead. Seeping from the ground. Exposed in cliffs. Not the sort we knew as heat on skin, that gave us night’s black signal to rest, day’s light permit to move and work. That contemporary beacon for our crops – contemporary as in constant, modern, as in still here. Is it possible, a soft landing for civilisation? We were smart. How smart do we now want to be?
written in the rocks 