“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 extinction of our species, and to the many ways in which creation in its entirety might be better off without us.
One evening around that time I took part in a public discussion about the future of humanity—the topic, more or less, of a book I’d recently published—and after the discussion had ended, a damp and pallid young man had cornered me to give me his thoughts on the matter. He said that in five billion years or so, the sun, having burned through all the hydrogen in its fiery core, would be transformed into a red giant and would expand to engulf much of the solar system, likely even burning up the Earth itself in its explosive demise, and so it was—“obviously,” as he put it—necessary to put in place a strategy whereby humanity could continue to survive on some planet far from our own doomed world. I told him that it seemed to me a long shot, given the way things were shaping up—by which I was alluding to the comparatively modest self-inflicted temperature rises we were facing in the coming decades—that our species would survive long enough to witness the consumption of the world by literal cosmic fire. But what I wanted to know, I said, was why it was obvious that we needed an exit strategy, that we should want to survive indefinitely as a species. It caused me no real sadness, I told him, to think that humanity might not exist five billion years from now. I found myself, on the contrary, strangely cheerful about the prospect. Couldn’t we just view the eventual death of the sun as an opportunity to call it a day, cosmically speaking? The man looked at me with what seemed like profound bafflement, and suggested that the attitude I’d just outlined was deeply ethically unsatisfactory, given all the future humans who would, in such a scenario, never come to live. He couldn’t understand, he said, why I would be okay with humanity as a whole ceasing to exist. Did this not, he asked, fly in the face of a humanist philosophy? I had not said anything about being a humanist, and was in fact not sure I would want to describe myself as such, but I let the matter slide. It seemed to me that we were facing each other across a vast philosophical chasm, one that would not be breached in this conversation, or any other we might be likely to have.
* * *
—
Now and then over the succeeding days, as we walked the hills and valleys, Caroline and I fell into step with one another. She was on more intimate terms with nature than anyone I’d previously encountered, and I was impressed by her extraordinary knowledge of trees and plants and, in particular, species of mushroom. She described herself, half-jokingly, as a Womble, in reference to the 1970s BBC children’s television show about furry creatures who lived beneath Wimbledon Common, where they hid from human beings, of whom they generally had a low opinion, and turned their refuse into useful items.
“I make good use of the things that I find,” she said. “The things that the everyday folks leave behind.”
These words, she explained, were taken from the show’s theme song.
She had gone to art college, and had practiced as an artist for a time, before succumbing to what sounded like a deep despair about the futility of producing, of putting more objects into the world, which was, she felt, the last thing the world needed. After years as a musician, singing with various London post-rock bands, it was only fairly recently that she’d gotten back into making art, working solely with materials she had made herself, and making those materials only out of things she found in nature, or that had been discarded by other people—pens made from gull feathers, sketchpads made from pulped linen rags and threaded with bark strips, ink made from oak galls.
An oak gall, she explained, was a bulbous protuberance found on the branches of oak trees, caused by secretions of wasp larvae. From the days of the Roman Empire up until the Industrial Revolution, these were the primary source of ink, but in the last year or so they had become more expensive and difficult to source, she said, on account of the online vaginal health community mysteriously deciding that these wasp nests possessed certain potent vagina-tightening properties, leading to them being sold on Etsy for exorbitant sums. In order to make art out of premodern materials, she said, she now had to get her oak galls from a seller in Germany who imported them from Southeast Asia.
“You can’t ever return to the pristine place,” she said, with a certain rueful humor. Even a small measure of aesthetic abstinence from modernity required submission to its operations.
I had cause to reflect upon this delicate balance of resistance and accommodation when I noted a small animal skin pouch laid on the table in front of her during one of our conversations. When I asked her about it, she told me it was her smartphone case. She had made it, she said, using the materials and techniques that would have been employed by a Neolithic craftsperson, had there been any requirement for smartphone cases in the Neolithic era.
One evening, Caroline told me about how she’d recently become preoccupied to the point of obsession with Easter Island. She was fascinated in particular, she said, with the idea that the demise of the once-thriving island civilization formed an uncanny reflection of our own particular impasse. There was a theory, she said—albeit one that had been fiercely contested by many historians—that the heads themselves, the giant humanoid constructions known as moai for which the island was primarily known, had been a major cause of the civilization’s collapse. When the first Polynesian settlers arrived on the island in the thirteenth century, it was a lush and densely forested environment. Over time, though, population growth and environmental degradation caused by agriculture led to fierce competition over resources, and to tribal conflicts. Deforestation was greatly exacerbated, according to this theory, by the relentless construction of the moai. The construction and transport of these gigantic monoliths, built by tribal chiefs in veneration of their ancestors and as symbols of their own prestige, required massive quantities of wood. Even as the evidence of ecological collapse became overwhelming, the islanders kept constructing the monuments, kept chopping down trees in order to transport them, until there were no more trees to chop. By the time the first Europeans arrived in 1722, soil degradation and deforestation had caused a total collapse, and the population of the island was down from its peak of ten thousand to a few hundred.