Wounds of the Anthropocene

A few weeks back, I was talking with one of my coworkers about mass extinction. I think I was the one who steered the conversation in this sort of morbid direction, but I did so without realizing that I had picked one of the best people in my own orbit these days to broach it with.

Before moving to Port Townsend in early 2020, this person was the head honcho for education programming at the Burke Museum for several years. Since natural history is a major focus of that museum, geologic time is the frame for a lot of their education programs. Meaning: she had to make something as unfathomable as prehistory and fossil records accessible and relevant for full-grown halfwits like myself as well as youth.

I guess it’s more of a lamentation than a question because I don’t expect anyone to have an answer for it, but I wondered out loud to her what makes the Sixth Great Extinction — the mass die-off we’re living in now — any different from the previous five we know about. We know that this one coincides with the so-called Anthropocene, the name for this period where homo sapiens have been reshaping the living world with the force of a geologic change in the course of less than three centuries. So does that just mean the beings who are obsessed with recording and quantifying these types of events are here to witness this one? Besides the way humans are accelerating the inevitable, is this fixation on documenting it all the major difference?

I’m daft enough that I haven’t really been reflecting on this too deeply until recently. But it was kind of clear to me that because of what this coworker had been immersed in at her day job for several years, these existential questions are always floating somewhere in the back of her mind. She alluded to this cognitive dissonance she’ll always feel around the knowledge that every previous mass extinction event has ushered in the conditions for a new explosion of life on Earth, the likes of which we all marvel at as youngsters when learning about meteor strikes, the reversals of magnetic poles, or — in the case of Yellowstone gateway kids like myself — the last supereruption of the Yellowstone Caldera.

To be clear, mass extinction wasn’t all this coworker and I talked about. The pretext of the conversation was actually to clear the air after I’d been kind of a jerk (as is my wont) over some miscommunication. Nonetheless, ecocide figured prominently into our chat after the Festivus-style airing of grievances. And I walked away thinking I should get my hands on some reading material on the topic, not yet knowing where to start. Continuing the weird succession of kismet that began with initiating a conversation about mass extinction with somebody who knows a thing or two about it, it turned out the first book I broke into to start 2022 launched right into the very subject by the second chapter.

That book, Four Fifths a Grizzly, is the latest from Doug Chadwick and takes its title from the fact that on the DNA level, most of us Earthlings are more alike than we humans likely realize. And most mammals specifically are far more alike than not. For example, the DNA in each of our cells is 80 to 90 percent identical to that of a grizzly bear’s. In other words, we humans are all at least four-fifths grizzly. Ditto to domesticated critters like dogs, cattle, and cats. That number probably stays high when we compare our DNA to the wildest fauna like — and this makes me swell with pride and reverence to say — wolverines. It approaches 100 percent when compared to primates specifically and decreases a bit when we compare humans to other vertebrates like birds and fish (but still, what an honor to share any DNA with the holy likes of birds of fish). Even with plants, the percentage of DNA we share doesn’t drop to an insignificant percentage; it lingers around 30.

You get the idea. The evidence for how closely related all beings are is staggering and I could trip out on this topic forever. It has all the makings of the mundane but totally mind-bending shit I get off on these days. But reading about it all in the context of mass extinction events drove home something pretty profound for me. That is, I think the appropriate position of a human being in this current mass die-off has to be a dialectic of both accountability and hubris.

I would like to say the accountability dimension gets a lot of airplay in the Anthropocene, but I don’t think that’s true. I think blame gets a lot of airplay. A lot of blame without nuance gets placed on human beings for marshaling this mass die-off at an unprecedented pace. Now, that’s not categorically wrong, but I think it’s an incomplete assessment for at least two reasons. First, I think it discounts the full scope of natural history and the fact that this isn’t our pale blue dot home’s first rodeo with ecological collapse. Second, it erases the symbiosis and mutualism lots of Indigenous humans the world over had established with the rest of the living order long before white Europeans made their way to other continents and set into motion a violent, global cycle of dispossession and extraction.

Accountability, in my view, would operate from some consensus about the precise causes of this accelerated pace of die-off that does characterize the Anthropocene. I’m realizing that blame, by contrast, is often unspecific and usually omits any plan for redress or really any kind of a future. Accountability would have an endgame, and I think that’s sorely lacking in the current discourse around this extinction period we’re living in. I frankly believe part of the problem is branding it as “climate change” because that’s kind of a euphemism IMO. This is a die-off in a long trajectory of die-offs that all life is predicated on. Having said that, I do also feel strongly that just because this may all be part of this planet’s unfathomably long history of death and rebirth doesn’t mean we don’t have a responsibility to reduce harm as its current residents. Accountability would hold us to some kind of standard for that. Blame is useless.

As for the hubris piece of this dialectic, the seeds of that notion also rest in the conversation I had with my coworker, but reading Four Fifths a Grizzly helped me articulate it. It’s related to that point I mentioned earlier that there’s a pretty amazing tradition of symbiosis and mutualism that humans have been party to. I refuse to say “were party to” in rigid past tense terms because I think it’s wrong to imply that it’s extinct. I think to say so would be a folly of hubris, and I’m going to lean on the words of somebody else to help me make that point.

A few days before my conversation with my coworker, I had rewatched one of our programs from back in October that featured Mackenzie Grinnell, who works in the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe’s Traditional Foods & Culture Program and also co-founded a cider company a few years back with his best friend. His October 2021 presentation, broadly about the concepts of placemaking and belonging, stuck with me for several reasons. But there was a point Mackenzie made that landed with extra force on second viewing.

After he unpacks the connotations of the S’Klallam word for gatherer, he describes this experience his Tribe is having now with being able to go back to gardens planted by their ancestors that they haven’t had access to for about 200 years. He referred to them as forgotten gardens, but qualified his use of “forgotten” this way:

Forgetting is like putting blame on ourselves that we forgot it. But it wasn’t forgotten because it was taken away from us. That knowledge was violently ripped away. What it takes to maintain those areas, a lot of that information was lost. But it’s coming back to us. We originally got this knowledge from the land itself. From the species that are growing there — from the plants and animals. They came to us and they told us how to live with the land. So we’re going back and relearning these things. We’re going back to these gardens that our ancestors planted hundreds or thousands of years ago and we’re reclaiming those.

At some point in my conversation with my coworker about mass extinction, I mentioned that I had rewatched Mackenzie’s presentation and paraphrased that point above. To me, it kind of captures the nuance that although genocide was the goal of settler colonialism, it’s arrogant to imply that wisdom, culture, and language developed over thousands of years in careful collaboration between species could be eradicated in just a few centuries. In Mackenzie’s words, that knowledge is from the land itself. Even if the land is ill and maimed from the invasive, self-cannibalizing program of dispossession and extraction that’s been imposed on it, it’s not dead. It’s still there. And the gatherers are still there. Logically speaking, it makes sense that the knowledge will still reside there too as long as those things are true.

The concept that Four Fifths a Grizzly takes its name from — that crazy amount of overlap in DNA among all lifeforms — felt analogous to Mackenzie’s point to me. I don’t think it’s anything Doug Chadwick says explicitly in his book, but a conviction I certainly took away is that it’s somewhat arrogant to credit humans with the extinction of lifeforms because it implies that all traces of certain species have vanished, permanently and completely, when that’s just not true. The building blocks for those lifeforms purported to be extinct are still very much alive. And given the amount of DNA-level similarity between all life on Earth, it’s reasonable to suppose many of those building blocks for lost beings are very much alive in us anthropoids. I choose to believe that the wisdom of bygone Earthlings is still in our midst for us all to draw from.

Now, I still don’t expect to arrive at a satisfying answer regarding what’s different about this particular mass extinction event. Perhaps the atoms that we’re all made of were present in some other form for previous ones, but for practical purposes, I feel comfortable saying none of us were really around to see how those other cataclysmic events played out. Nonetheless, I’m inclined to believe that being a member of a species that has played an outsized role in the pace of this current die-off while also having a high degree of awareness about it means we bear a great responsibility to our fellow Earthlings. That’s what I mean when I say I believe we all have a responsibility to reduce harm even if all logical projections based on current trends suggest we have nothing shy of genocide-scale losses to look forward to.

Something that Chadwick repeatedly invokes in Four Fifths a Grizzly as a major redeeming quality of human beings is that we possess “an extraordinary brand of imaginative intelligence coupled with social mechanisms for sharing and building upon information that appear to be unrivaled.” I take what Mackenzie Grinnell shared about the ancient knowledge that emerged from the land as evidence that humans have deployed that inventiveness — our singular ability to learn, observe, and share information — with symbiotic results before. There’s no reason we can’t do that again before the next cataclysmic event wipes us all out. I’d personally prefer that we all at least try to go out in a spirit of solidarity. Something about the idea of our collective atoms at least being able to split on amicable terms seems like it would set up future forms of life made of the same smithereens for some success.

One of the last tidbits from that whole conversation about mass extinction with my coworker that pleasantly surprised me was about Montana. Generally, when somebody starts talking about my home state with a twinkle in their eye nowadays, I tense up. I’m always prepared to hear yet another fetishized take of Montana that’s liable to make me gag. But that doesn’t match what my coworker proceeded to say at all. Rather than talking about Montana like it’s some kind of scenic amusement park where regular folks don’t have to struggle more and more every day to eke out a living, she marveled at how much of prehistory is legible on the landscape throughout the state.

Based on what she described, it sounds like her previous job took her on at least one occasion to a fossil excavation site in Phillips County, way the hell up in the state’s northeast corner. As a child of southwestern Montana, I confess I’m pretty unfamiliar with the terrain up that way, but apparently the landscape is pretty fucking astonishing if you have some comprehension of the geologic phenomena that formed it. 

I told my coworker how rare and refreshing it was to hear that as the basis for somebody’s fondness for Montana. I mentioned something about the new gilded age and the way the tradition of the ultra-wealthy extracting from the Mountain West never really left, it just mutated from things like mining and logging to tourism, recreation, and real estate. I don’t remember exactly how I phrased it, but I know I expressed some frustration with what I can only describe as the collective amnesia about the legacy of extraction in Montana when the scars from the previous gilded age are still visible on the landscape — for some places even in the form of Superfund sites.

This led to a small final meander in our conversation to what I feel is many a western Montana kid’s favorite genre of talking points — the one wherein we get to discuss why Butte is a big fucking deal. It was clear to me that not only had my coworker made a point to visit Butte before, but she made an effort to understand the nuanced story the landscape tells there, too.

What our conversation made me realize — besides all that stuff about mass extinction events and human accountability and hubris — is how amazing it is that both the legacy of prehistoric geologic forces and the scars of the Anthropocene can be legible on a landscape. And while I recognize that a U.S. state like Montana is defined by (mostly) arbitrary political boundaries, that may well sum up why I still feel such a responsibility and deep sense of belonging to that area of the North American continent.

The landscape tells us all kinds of stories about previous global die-offs. In the case of those gardens Mackenzie Grinnell spoke about, it also tells us how to live in reciprocal collaboration with other beings. It also bears the wounds of the Anthropocene. But if we operate with the understanding that the land is our classroom and our textbook — that it’s always carried with it instructions for mutuality that humans do have the ability to learn — surely there are lessons for our shared recovery in even the wounds.

A Quick Afterword…

For any of you out there reading or interested in reading Four Fifths a Grizzly, I would encourage you to also read this piece for perspective. In his book, Doug Chadwick lays out an ambitious initiative to help us navigate our grim biodiversity outlook that involves stabilizing the contiguous ecoregion that stretches from the Canadian Yukon to Greater Yellowstone. Chris La Tray brilliantly outlines why landback has to be part of any conversation and plan to protect land and restore habitat. I’m begging you to read it in full, but here’s a snippet:

When thinking about impacts on people, the organizations doing this work must think beyond impacts on white people jobs, white people recreation, and white people property rights, and I’m not convinced enough of them do so. Effort must be made in returning land to Indigenous people for the same reason land is being protected for wildlife. It is critical to the continued existence, and restoration, of Indigenous culture and lifeways.

I have to say that in addition to what I already shared from Mackenzie Grinnell’s presentation back in October, another thing that has stuck with me is the active role the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe has had in land restoration (not that I should’ve been surprised — I already knew this story involving their Lower Elwha relatives). I realize that something they have that many tribes currently lack is a land base within or proximate to their usual and accustomed places. And they did not come by that easily.

For context, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe may well have been “landless” (in the occupiers’ terms) after the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 had members of the Tribe not been able to pool their resources and purchase 210 acres east of the Dungeness River back in 1874. Then, because their land base was privately owned and not a reservation, they lost federal recognition in the termination era of the 1950s. They were ultimately able to regain federal recognition in 1981, but it should’ve never been that complicated for these gatherers to maintain their place near the land they know how to take care of. For any long-term, mass restoration of life and land to succeed, I’m convinced that Indigenous folks are going to lead the way. They always have.