
Reconsidering the Anthropocene - Hooke
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/anthropocene-epoch-after-all/599863/
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est31
I love the last paragraph. It's nicely pessimistic:

> Ten million years from now, humans went extinct—give or take a few thousand
> years—10 million years ago. Huge grazing herbivores and cursorial predators
> move carbon and nitrogen around the landscape. These unfamiliar creatures
> evolved from survivor lineages that timidly emerged from some long-forgotten
> disaster now deep in their evolutionary past. A herd of grazers moves to the
> next patch of grass. A rainstorm comes and goes. Monsoons wobble about the
> equator, as the planet does so around the sun. A million more years go by.
> The waves beat against the shore. Humanity has as little to do with this
> world as Megalodon does with ours, and nothing remains of us at the surface.
> Though no one is alive to tell us what epoch it is, these creatures have
> nevertheless inherited a planet forever diverted by our legacy—as surely, in
> Faulkner’s words, “as Noah’s grandchildren had inherited the Flood although
> they had not been there to see the deluge.”

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jkmcf
Life goes on. It’s beautiful, and mankind needs to acknowledge its minuscule
place in the grand scheme of things.

