Hello friends!
There's a chapter in Windfall titled The Anthropocene, so I was thrilled last week to learn that a team of scientists chose a "golden spike" in Canada that could identify when the epoch begins. They picked Crawford Lake, outside of Toronto. And the epoch will likely begin in 1950, if an international organizations of geologists signs off on it next year.
If you're not familiar with the Anthropocene, it's the epoch scientists are considering adding to the geologic time scale to designate the global impact of human activity. A team of researchers has been on the lookout for a location where there's evidence of human activity in the sediment.
Crawford Lake has sedimentary deposits that show when humans began having a global impact on the earth's atmosphere, a process that accelerated in 1950. The deposits include datable nuclear fallout from weapons testing, which marks the globalization of war. There's an explanation with elegant video in the Washington Post examining how the sediment settles and what can be gleaned from all the human-produced particles that fall from the sky and drift to the bottom of a lake.
For Windfall, I interviewed Allison Stegner, a researcher at Stanford whose team was looking at another potential golden spike location at a reservoir in California.
One thing we discussed was how 1950 was a pivotal cultural moment, too. It's about the same time that the first oil boom kicked off in North Dakota, as well as the moment when Wild West nostalgia swept America. There's no doubt that the language around oil booms and extractions borrows from the narrative of westward expansion; there's no doubt that fossil fuel use sped up then, too. Plenty of charts quantify this great acceleration.
It's probably no surprise that the Anthropocene as an epoch is not without conflict amongst some geologists and archeologists. (For more on that, see this story in the New York Times. Drama!) Some say our impact is even older, beginning with the rise of coal-burning factories and combustion engines. And some researchers are uncomfortable with labeling a span of planetary time in human years. After all, 73 years is the teeny tiniest fleck of dust on a scale measured in billions of years!
But that's exactly what captivated me about the Anthropocene when I first heard about it. Naming it emphasizes that we as humans, pesky specks of dust that we are on the timeline, have had an outsized impact on Earth's timeline. As Allison told me, naming the Anthropocene underscores the grave threat of human impact on the atmosphere, ocean circulation and the land surface itself.
We now have two options: Do something about it and the Anthropocene proceeds with the changes humans have wrought and, one hopes, that we rectify. Or do nothing and perish, leaving no one to see the record in the rocks of the name we gave our human impact on the earth.
In my chapter on the Anthropocene, I wondered if the gas flares and the hot orange flames I saw in North Dakota might serve as the defining image of the epoch. Is there no greater example of the golden spike of human hubris than the wanton burning of excess natural gas, spewing colorless methane into our atmosphere and heating up the planet?
But I also wrote about how I saw and photographed sunflowers in all seasons in North Dakota, another defining image of the time I spent working on the project. To me, the flowers were (and are) not just evidence of the passage of time on a human scale, but a living demonstration of the patterns of repeating beauty of our lifetimes.
Yours,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links, all the updates…
I took a couple of weeks away from The Windfall Dispatch to enjoy the best of Oregon summer and to put the finishing touches on my film project. And yes, to turn 50. But I’m back in the swing of things now!
Oregon could be oldest site of human occupation in North America. This story is so incredibly cool, not just for the discovery but for the deliberate pace of the careful science undergirding the find. I’d love to read (or write!) a narrative version that walks readers through the discoveries as they happened.
It’s time for buildings to stop using a third of US energy, some states say. For Stateline, I wrote about how a few states are front-runners in approving efficiency rules for new and old buildings. It starts with quantifying the energy use.
Oh, and guess what? Buildings are heating the subsurface of the earth, too. What’s shocking is how this heating goes largely unmeasured, but could be easily fixed with better insulation. (See above link about efficiency.) And how the heat could even be a source of energy itself!
Your car tires are swirling donuts of pollution. Yet another unmeasured impact from burning fossil fuels.
David Sedaris walks 21,000 steps a day. I get it.
Hiking is the most popular outdoor activity in America, and it’s only getting more popular. Sorry to gross you out, but I lost my left pinkie toenail after my recent 30+ mile hike. Don’t worry, it didn’t hurt. (Other than paying a podiatrist $481 to do it.)