Field Guide to the Anthropocene

Hello everyone: I went outside at midnight to see the lunar eclipse as it reached maximum coverage (about 96%). After several minutes, the strange and beautiful crescent of Moon appeared from behind thick cloud cover. I rushed inside, woke Heather up (as she’d requested), and she trundled outside to see… darkness. She waited as long as her sleepy eyes allowed, then went back to bed. I hope you all had a better view.

paddling through the sky / credit: Nell Anthony Hello everyone: This was a week busy with other things, from other work to my birthday to prepping for a triathlon, so I’ve revised a personal favorite from three years ago, when I had only about 15% of my current subscribers. It’s been updated, rewritten, and has an entirely new ending. The essay starts on a canoe trip in the rain, travels through the astonishing writing of Lewis Thomas, and ends up in the sky rather than beneath it. Enjoy.

Herring gull eggs / credit: John Haslam, source Hello everyone: As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news. Now on to this week’s writing: Here’s the image that’s haunted me this week: Children from a small fishing village brought out to an offshore island and paid to walk on gull nests and crush their eggs. My grandmother Sally (my mother’s mother) was one of those children, here in midcoast Maine.

an ancient bristlecone pine / credit: Yen Chao, source Hello everyone: I was surprised to see so little response to last week’s piece, “Positive and Negative,” about the problem of PFAS “forever chemicals” in the batteries that underpin the renewable energy revolution. It’s not a fun or lyrical essay, but I so think it’s a vital and little-discussed story about a crucial environmental tradeoff that we shouldn’t be making, and about solving the problem before it causes too much harm.

promise and peril: PFAS-laced grid-scale battery systems / credit: Hood County News Hello everyone: As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news. Now on to this week’s writing: If you’ve been paying any attention in recent years to the rapid revolution in non-fossil energy production, you’ve noticed a lot more discussion about batteries.

an ancient text of script lichen (Graphis scripta) / credit: Richard Droker, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Hello everyone: As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news. Now on to this week’s writing: As a writer and word geek, I’ve led a life often fixated on odd little questions about, say, alphabetic order and the etymology of “harm”. I used to keep the large American Heritage Dictionary at my bedside for light reading. Words are an endless playground.

the endangered Golden-cheeked warbler / credit: Richard Crossley, from The Crossley ID Guide Eastern Birds, source Hello everyone: I start off this week in the political darkness, but the writing aims for the light, so please stick with me. As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

living bridge woven from Ficus elastica roots / credit: AditiVerma2193, source Hello everyone: As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news. Now on to this week’s writing: I have never seen a fig tree in a forest. Or maybe I did, in brief trips many years ago to Nepal and Australia, but didn’t notice. Perhaps this is true for you and your travels as well.

not waving but burning / NARA and NVIDS Public Domain Archives Hello everyone: It may reveal something about my capacity for patriotism that I’m much more interested in watching the World Cup while cheering for whatever team catches my fancy than in thinking about the flag-draped parades of America’s semiquincentennial.

If you had to pick a place to live… / credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA Hello everyone: I’ve been stretched a bit thin recently, and forgot to offer solstice greetings last week. I hope that for all of you, in both the northern and southern hemispheres, the solstice offered a moment of reflection on the movement of the spheres, and on our good fortune to be here for a little while within the wonder. As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.