A Note from the Anthropocene

There is no end to it, not even our own extinction.  That will be a mere beginning.  Its effects will promulgate like rumors.  Is is it too much to ask for a comfortable chair?  Ten thousand years in progress already, and I walked in late and missed the wooly rhinos.  Still, I may have contributed to the plastic in the oceans.  I have seen the shopping bags thick around Chicago trees in wintertime.  A South American with an uncertain political pedigree mistook them for lichens.  This is one of the good parts, I suppose.  I remember seas of wild frogs, streaming through the grass in front of me.  rhinos, tigers, and other key megafauna on their way out, but the taste of Ahi tuna is not even an ancient memory and I have seen wild caught salmon with my own eyes. Already, the foraminifera are plotting their next comeback.  The disaster taxa stare us in the face, masked like raccoons, swarming like houseflies, abundant as Argentine ants, prolific as ragweed, durable as jellies and, like tree of heaven and the Burmese python, many of them impressive creatures in their own right.  What fossils will I leave?  I may possibly hold isotopes, in my body, from nuclear testing.  The trail of evidence depends so strongly on what big-brained beast of the future, descendent of this holocaust, is looking.  I have wondered so many times if some hypercompetent echinoderm from the Ordovician or industrious trepanosaur from the Permian is to blame for the troubles of our age. The paleontologists of the future will not hold it against us, for the simple reason that vast spans of time will have passed and their own evolutionary course would be impossible were it not for our mistakes, our ambitions, our glory and foolishness.  I have come to terms with that Cretaceous asteroid, though it took me longer than most of my kind.