The Age of Breathing Underwater

The term Anthropocene came quickly to mind. It translates loosely to “wrought by human hands,” and I’ve used it with some frequency. I’d even stood before an audience at Melbourne’s stylish new bmw Edge amphitheatre right there in the city’s heart the night before and explained what I believed it meant. But reading The Age that morning — that was the first time I’d really felt it

In time, it sent me searching for two other pieces of esoteric but existentially critical science news that emerged in 2008 and quickly vanished in the churning media sea of burst housing bubbles and flailing banks. The first was a concise policy paper released in August and signed by fourteen of the world’s top ocean researchers — Charlie Veron among them — under the title The Honolulu Declaration on Ocean Acidification and Reef Management. Their statement noted the imminent onset of levels of ocean acidity not seen in “tens of millions of years,” which would “compromise the long-term viability of coral reef ecosystems.” The crisis was phrased more bluntly in the accompanying press release: “In July 2008, scientists at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Florida declared acidification as the largest and most significant threat that oceans face today and conveyed that coral reefs will be unable to survive the projected increases in ocean acidification.”

The other crucial science story was a paper published in February 2008 in gsa Today, the Geological Society of America’s house journal. It was entitled Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene? and co-written by twenty-one members of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, England, the body responsible for naming and dating geological time. “Sufficient evidence has emerged,” went the closing argument, “of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene — currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change — as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion.” Which is to say the notion that humanity had permanently and fundamentally altered the planet was no longer a rhetorical flourish (as it had been when the chemist Paul Crutzen proposed the term “Anthropocene” a decade earlier) or a bit of activist hyperbole (as it had sometimes seemed coming from environmentalists a decade before that) but an emerging scientific reality.

I’m trying not to hyperbolize this. I don’t want to traffic in visions of apocalypse. On the other hand, how can the probable demise of the ocean’s most fecund ecosystem and the possible dawn of a new geological epoch be overstated?

Were this a traditional environmental narrative in the Thoreauvian vein, now would be the part of the story where I would shift summarily to lamentation. The tragedy is obvious, its scope impossibly huge, the loss beyond measure. But we have enough laments. More than our share. I wonder, actually, if it isn’t the lamenting itself that led us here, at least in part.

Paul Crutzen traces the birth of the Anthropocene to the invention of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century, and modern environmentalism was born in that kettle as well. Thoreau’s legendary trip to the wilderness of Walden was, after all, a reaction against all that the steam engine had wrought. For 150 years thereafter, an elaborate and often achingly lovely philosophy of the purpose of the human experiment held sway in green-minded circles, predicated on Thoreau’s recommendation “to front only the essential facts of life,” to go to the woods and “live deliberately.” To become in some sense part of the woods, indistinguishable in action and impact from a fish or a frog or a fly. Finding a place of eternal harmony with Nature — ideally one sufficiently pristine to be worthy of Romanticism’s awed capitalization of the word — became the goal of the environmental movement. The earth thrived in an exquisite equilibrium, and the enlightened seeker sought to find a human place within it.

If, however, that equilibrium is permanently altered and transmuting as never before, what do we even mean by “harmony”? What does it mean, moreover, when we know that this new order — whether we choose to call it Anthropocene or simply acknowledge its complete lack of historical precedent — was wrought in large measure by human hands? What is the proper goal of an Anthropocene conservation effort? How do we go about being sensitive to an Anthropocene ecology? What, in short, does it mean to be human in an ecological order of our own design?

I can’t answer any of these questions definitively. These are early days, in turbulent weather. All new regimes are for now provisional by necessity. But I think I know where we should start. We need a new kind of story, a new template for our ecological philosophy — one that acknowledges what we have lost and the emerging limits of what can be saved, but does not lament. To borrow the terminology of the linguist George Lakoff, we must first change the frame.

The weight of a story is not just the sum of its details but also — maybe even primarily — a function of its structure, the way its plot points and archetypes map onto the ur-narratives (classical, Biblical, market triumphalist, what have you) that are deeply etched into our collective consciousness. A lament is by its nature nostalgic, downbeat, defeatist. It is predicated on a loss presumed to be absolute. Adventure stories, on the other hand — heroic narratives of victory against impossible odds in heretofore uncharted realms — these are the tools of transformative myth. This is what we need: a new myth of the frontier.

We are headed somewhere unknown, somewhere surely dangerous but also perhaps blessed with unexpected beauty. The terrain will be at least partially alien, the logic and rules of the place governed by inversions and seeming perversions of the natural order we’ve always known. Some of the tools we’ll need to traverse this new landscape safely may at first appear unfamiliar, unwieldy, inconvenient. We may only comprehend their vital necessity once we’ve taken the plunge into this tumultuous sea. But we will learn to thrive. Feel exhilaration in the place of anxiety and lament. We will all learn to breathe underwater.