Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,55
that unsettles me very deeply. This is a postapocalyptic landscape. It’s a site of total ecological collapse.”
Among the group, this sentiment was met with general agreement. It was a beautiful place, but its beauty was cold and unyielding, and largely empty of animal life.
“It is,” said Paul. “We’re on the edge of civilization out here, in a place that’s been stripped bare of life by civilization. That’s part of the reason we chose it.”
By “we” he meant he and Andres Roberts, the wilderness guide with whom he’d arranged this retreat. Andres was yang to Paul’s yin: a cheerful man with a soft Liverpool accent and a quiet but potent charisma, and an uncanny knack of shaping and focusing the group’s energy by subtle modulations of his own manner—a shift in posture, a mischievous grin, a bowing of the head, gentle and solemn.
“In a way,” said Paul, “this place is a Ground Zero of the industrial age. All the trees in these hills were cut down to provide fuel for industry, to build ships for colonial expansion. An entire attitude toward nature and toward the world spread outward from this place we’re in, these islands.”
Someone else brought up the Great Oxygenation Event, which had happened about two and a half billion years ago, a mass extinction from which all subsequent life on Earth had evolved. Back then, the world was populated exclusively by single-cell organisms, which lived beneath the surface of oceans that were bloodred due to the massive levels of iron in the water. These microbes relied exclusively on anaerobic methods of respiration—until one species, the cyanobacteria or blue-green algae, began to use the Sun’s light to generate vastly more energy than its anaerobic colleagues, by which method it thrived and increased its numbers exponentially, creating via the disruptive innovation of photosynthesis an exploding surplus of oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere, toxic to almost every other living thing on Earth. This one rogue microbe changed the atmospheric constitution of the Earth, causing the obliteration of most existing life on the planet and preparing the way for the evolution of multicellular organisms such as ourselves.
“We sort of are those bacteria,” said Caroline Ross, an artist who resided on a riverboat on the Thames. “What we are living through, and causing, is like the oxygenation catastrophe. We are making the carbon catastrophe.”
She spoke in a quiet and measured tone of how, some time back, she was visiting her brother and, after an intense argument on whose subject she did not expand, she had wandered into his backyard, feeling furious and heartbroken, and had found among the rocks there the fossilized remains of a sea urchin, a species that had, she said, been wiped out many millions of years ago, four mass extinctions before our own. It was a beautiful thing, she said, and holding it in her hand she had felt the slow and inexorable relinquishment of her anger and sadness. She thought of that fossil often, she said, and when she did so she wondered whether we humans would ourselves make good fossils, beautiful imprints in the geological record for some unimaginable future species to wonder over, causing it to think about its own passing from the Earth, its own infinitesimal presence in the dizzying vastness of time. She said that sometimes, in her darker moments, she wished that humans would just cease existing already, or dwindle to a hundred thousand or so in number.
“It’s all going to come to an end, and that’s okay,” interjected a woman with a refined accent. She had a cascade of dark hair, fashionable glasses; she lived in London and made films that were more or less experimental in form. “Nature will reemerge from this, and recover, and it will be beautiful. On some level we are a cancer, and the world will cure itself of us. I want to enjoy the life that I have left. I want to sow good seeds.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about Caroline’s question, about whether we would make beautiful fossils. For all its darkness, what had unsettled me in her slow and measured monologue was how it seemed to come from a place not of misanthropy, but of deeply wounded love—for the world, and for people, too, despite the violence they had done to it. And there was something in this contrast, in her gentleness and despair, that drew me in. I myself had, from time to time, been known to turn my mind to the future