Epoch

We now live in the Anthropocene era, a geological time period that began maybe with the dawn of agriculture, maybe with the Industrial Revolution, maybe with the atom bomb, but surely as the global average of CO2 in our atmosphere passed 400 parts per million, during which human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment.  

We can see that in melting glaciers, rising seas, dying forests, and massive industrial projects like the Three Gorges Dam in China, the Los Angeles freeway system, or closer to home, Seattle’s very own Harbor Island, built in the Duwamish river (itself channeled and straightened by human enterprise), from, as the Wikipedia tells me, 24 million yd³ (18 million m³) of earth removed in the Jackson and Dearborn Street regrades and dredged from the bed of the very river in which it sits.

So, even as we’re destroying the planet, we’re simultaneously making it, the anthill ever growing as we shape and form the very home which will ultimately be our species’ grave in the end as well.

Cool, huh?  

May as well get on your bike and ride to a front-row seat where you can watch a massive concrete structure pivot on its axis and open up and allow passage to a boat as big as a skyscraper carrying a train’s worth of shipping containers and another boat to boot.

It’s oddly satisfying to witness the inhuman dimension of human activity, especially having arrived there on a much more appropriately-scaled piece of machinery, one that carries you all over the manufactured environment on two wheels while still weighing way less than you do.

It seemed to me, as I snaked through the metropolis earlier in the day, that everyone was in a hurry to get somewhere else, but really, what’s the rush?

We’re not getting out of the planet we’ve made, after all; the anthill’s our home; simultaneously ghastly and beautiful, eminently devastating and embraceable at once.