It was June, 1992. My sister and I were out of school and our grandparents took us on an epic road trip out west, to see the same places they had seen on road trips in the 1950s and 1960s. They had bought a motorhome, a Tioga, not a big one but still a proper motorhome, with its own bathroom and two beds, one of which folded back into the kitchen table by day. We set off from southwest Ohio and headed south.

First was Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, then Texarkana, Waffle Houses, KOA campgrounds, the desert, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, where the bats swarmed at dusk, the Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, McKittrick Canyon, Gila National Forest. Between hiking through caves or woods or desert during the day and playing UNO in the evening, we would hit the open road, advancing along the meticulous itinerary Grandpa had typed up. I sat up front with the road atlas—the little copilot. Between cactus, canyon, and sand dune, we would encounter the abandoned settlements of lost civilizations, even as the Anthropocene was taking flower.

From the artifice of the cliff dwellings and abandoned Pueblo settlements to now seeing the shattered glass bottles sparkling in the ditch in the Navajo reservation, I felt a pulse of the uncanny. White man and wolf, white man and buffalo, white man and native American—what I was noticing had not always been there to notice. Observing ribbon of road mile after mile, the jackrabbits and armadillos and roadrunners flirting with death-by-tire, I daydreamed an alternative future.

“The winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts—the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present,” write the editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Artfully divided into two sections—Ghosts and Monsters—the former contemplates the wake of extinctions, disasters, and mayhem left behind by the “the hubris of conquerors and corporations” while training the reader “to pay attention to overlaid arrangement of human nonhuman living spaces, which we call ‘landscapes.’” Almost surprisingly, the book feels like a travel guide to the Anthropocene—a tour of #abandoned forms, landscapes, and material history that primes us to see what has already been lost while at the same time noticing the manmade quicksand beneath what species and environments we still have.

What is at stake in these essays is not what the Anthropocene is but how it will be lived.”

—Mary Louise Pratt, Coda to Ghosts

In a sumptuously written essay about a semi-wild space on the US-Mexico border, Lesley Stern trains a material culturist’s eye on a terrain of canyon and ridge, of shantytown and freeway, and of la frontera, “a shining steel knife, solid, unscalable, slicing through the landscape.” She finds a tomato plant growing in the rich trickle of raw sewage; a community garden constructed of salvaged tires. Houses built from dumped garage doors and other waste materials sheltering an accretion of immigrants from still poorer locales, a glimpse of a possible worldwide Thunderdome future. And all of it nestled against the “most populated border crossing in the world,” six lanes speeding south, six inching north. Underneath the makeshift urban, traces of the natural remain, taking unpredictable forms, insinuating themselves across boundaries. The essay, titled “A Garden or a Grave?”, trains the reader to observe shapes and forms in transition from state of nature to wasteland: “to see [the landscape] as mutable: solids and liquids. Obstructions and flows. Steel edges and permeable borders.”

If Stern’s vision of Tijuana is dystopic, then Nils Bubandt’s descriptions of the mud volcano that buried villages on Java’s north coast is positively post-apocalyptic. Like many of our planetary disasters now, the trauma was forged in cooperation between a humanity living beyond its means and an earth willing to help reflect our hubris back onto us. The “vast elevated landscape of mud” 36 feet (11 meters) thick and over 1,700 acres in extent, “barren and flat” and smelling of rotten eggs, forced thousands from their homes and continues to spread, as Bubandt writes in “Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene,” even as people roam it looking for baubles. Some blame the volcano, named Lumpur Lapindo, on natural gas drilling, others, like the oil company involved and its cohorts in the Indonesian government, on the earthquake; those with a more neutral point of view blame both in combination.

The essays in Ghosts link around the concept of observing through the anthropogenic terrascaping to a sort of authentic earthly substrate buried beneath. Relationships write the stories of their changes over time in the landscape, producing a text, in the way that the shapes of chestnut trees in the central Italian highlands tell of a lost agrarian community in Andrew S. Mathews’s essay, “Ghostly Forms and Forest Histories.” What do such landscapes-as-texts tell us about our prospects in the Anthropocene?

In praise of megafauna, Jens-Christian Svenning urges us to look past our “shifting baseline syndrome” to the environment as it existed in deep time, and as it could be again, rather than merely as it was before in our own lifetimes. As he says, “A paleoecological perspective is so important: attention to longer histories allows us to appreciate the rich, diverse landscapes that have existed in pasts beyond human memory.” This “paleoecololgical perspective” would show us biodiversity we can’t even imagine now; moreover, it would show us mastodons pre-Holocene, rhinoceros, giant ground sloths as normal fixtures of the environment rather than as papier mâché exhibits. It would show how alienated our own landscapes are from the long natural order. It might also show us “the potential for biodiversity under different climatic conditions.” A probability map for a fuzzy future in which we restore megafauna, deliberately.

§

Atlas in my lap, desert out the windshield, I thought: We should make everything between the cities free from development, wild; give it back to the American Indians. Wolf, bear, buffalo. Restore the land to its dispossessed. I envisioned some sort of elevated superhighway coursing above the treetops of a primeval forest. City-to-city travel and modern life would go on, but the wild would exist, too.

And, back home, on our own corn and soybean fields, we should allow the acorns, berries, and samaras to take root and restore the great forest that had come before. To make what was flat, plain, and silent, tall, thick, and noisy with life again. How much more interesting my after-school wanderings would be!

§

The megafauna roaming before early humans hunted them to extinction kept tree canopies from growing to great heights and closing over. Thus, “the dense temperate forests imagined to have covered much of Europe and eastern North America prior to agriculture could therefore be a sign not of ‘untouched’ wilderness but of vast extinctions,” Svenning writes. Not only was the corn-soy-corn-soy fieldscape that surrounded me a creation of the Anthropocene . . . so were the thick, tall woods, both the actual extents I played in and the sprawling forests of my daydreams. The primeval forest in my imagination, even, was an anthropogenic illusion.

§

Whereas Ghosts trains its attention on the missing and on the material mutability of a world that will eventually forget all but our fossils, Monsters warns us not to view life in terms of individual species but rather in terms of “multispecies entanglements.” Individualism is and has always been an illusion—even down to the molecular level. No species stands out as one special thing unto itself, really, but rather exists through an assemblage of interconnected lives—a “holobiont.” The editors write: “In ancient times, prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) gave birth to monsters in which one organism engulfed others or joined immoderate liaisons, forming nucleated cells and multicellular organisms called eukaryotes. Ever since, we have muddled long in our mixes and messes. All eurkaryotic life is monstrous.”

Consider our bones. Our endoskeletons, which we only pay attention to in X-rays once something has broken, resulted from the ancient removal of “[c]alcium ions [from] inside marine cells, toxic if not pumped out,” as science writer Dorion Sagan writes in the coda to Monsters. Over millions of years, Sagan continues, “Adventitious stockpiling of . . . calcium phosphate on the inside . . . led . . . to . . .  skeletons.”

Only now, with improved scientific instruments and genetic science, does the picture of life as long coevolutionary process begin to resolve into clarity. The Hawaiian bobtailed squid, for example, hunts at night by replicating down-shining moonbeams from its body. Only it’s not the squid’s doing, as Margaret McFall-Ngai writes in “Noticing Microbial Worlds”; the squid relies on the Vibrio fischeri bacteria, glowing in its translucent stomach, for its ability to catch food. And so it is with mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots—we now know that to till is to sever an ancient symbiotic arrangement that, it turns out, works.

All eurkaryotic life is monstrous.

When industrial processes suppress symbiotic relationships, as in the form of monoculture fields farmed by agribusiness methods, once-symbiotic relations turn sour and “[a] new kind of monstrosity attacks us: our entanglements, blocked and concealed in [modern industrial processes], return as virulent pathogens and spreading toxins.”

A salmon farm, for instance, is not properly viewed as just a salmon farm. The salmon need protection from parasitic sea lice, which requires concentrations of wrasse, a small type of fish that eats dozens of sea lice a day—so long as the nets are kept clean of kelp, which, if present, they may choose to eat instead. The scale of the salmon farming industry then requires a wrasse farming industry, which requires the wholesale domestication of a new species. Food for the young wrasse, tiny zooplankton and arthropods whose populations themselves are little understood, must be sourced sustainably, and bacterial populations in the wrasse enclosure must be managed. In the end, the sustainable salmon farm is better described as a “late-industrial multispecies resettlement camp,” Marianne Elisabeth Lien writes in “Unruly Appetites: Salmon Domestication ‘All the Way Down.’”

And as we mess with nature by addition and concentration, so do we lose more than we know through subtraction. Once we’re down there with the microbes, which have their own specific requirements for life, then we are beyond our abilities to predict our god-acting. Take the saiga, a camelesque antelope living in the central Asia plains. In 2015, within days and over a huge area, 200,000 of them—two thirds of their total—perished suddenly and unexpectedly. Until recently experts were completely baffled by the actual cause—a normally symbiotic bacterium, Pasteurella multocida, living in the antelopes’ guts, turned pathogenic due to a temperature increase caused by climate change—a bio-time-bomb.

§

I was on the swing set at a KOA somewhere in the desert. I had gone off on my own, after dinner. Divots had been scuffed into the sand beneath each swing. A couple swings over from me swung another boy. He had dark skin and straight black hair. He was a Native American. A third boy came to the swings. He was white, said he was from North Carolina. It’s far beyond my recall to remember how the conversation drifted to this point, but I remember him saying, “My daddy killed himself with a shotgun. Went out in the shed, shot himself.” To me he seemed a fabulist. He wouldn’t stop saying stuff. The Native American boy had a big head, too. Next thing I know, the other two boys were swinging in a sort of contest, higher and higher. There was some sort of challenge aspect to the swinging. And the challenge carried over to the old metal carousel, where they got it spinning faster and faster. Last thing I remember before I walked back to the motorhome was them facing off against each other across the carousel, holding on tight, forever spinning. Heck, they might be still there spinning for all I know. Or buried under dust.

“There is a fall coming,” proclaim the authors of the Dark Mountain Manifesto, published in Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times. “This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy being forged worldwide in its name.”

That’s us. That’s our transatlantic flights, our streaming video, our year-round bananas, our eroding Iowa fields and diminishing Amazon rainforest, our red tide beaches and plastified, acidified oceans.

We all know who the villain is: “the bankruptcy of the hegemonic Western worldview,” (Carla Stang: “Rampant Rainbows and the Blackened Sun”) which in this collection is given a “grim, knowing face, crenellated and unyielding,” reminiscent of one of Marvel’s cosmic supervillains, like Dr. Doom or Darkseid or Thanos, bearing “hunger, and desire, and resentment” behind his eyes (Steve Wheeler: “The Song of Ea”). This villain consumes frontiers and “replace[es] . . . countless grounded cosmologies with an increasingly singular cosmology rooted in longing” (Tim Fox: “Openings”). As the editors of Ghosts write, hitting the same note as those of Lava, “Our era of human destruction has trained our eyes only on the immediate promises of power and profits.”

There is a fall coming.

—Dark Mountain Manifesto

Dark Mountain Project cofounder Dougald Hine proposes a useful way of thinking and acting in the Anthropocene: “I have come to see improvisation as the deep skill and attitude which we need for the times that we’re already in and heading further into,” he says, improvisation being “the skill of acting without knowing what is coming next, of being comfortable with the unknown, with uncertainty, with unpredictability.” Hine contrasts his principle of improvisation with that of orchestration, which, while it proved useful in marshaling human resources through the industrial age, has become a fatal tendency in the Anthropocene. We all know by now where this is going—the examples of the Javanese mud volcano, the Norwegian salmon farm, and Central Asian saiga show those open to noticing. Trying to out-engineer our holobiont-ness nets us and poisons us.

As an example of improvisation thinking, Florence Caplow’s haunting pastoral essay on the Manzanar National Historic Monument, the Nevada desert camp where “Ten thousand men, women and children [Japanese and Japanese-Americans] . . . were interned” during World War II, gives a recipe for a zen wild lot, 30 feet long by 15 wide, forged out of the organizational insanity of a wartime US government: “Winding through the grove of [locust] trees was a series of empty concrete pools and channels, sensuously curved. It seemed as if someone had shaped the concrete like a potter working clay, with a deep assurance, a kind of joy in shaping. A stone bridge arched over one of the channels, flat stones placed just so for the walker’s feet, everything still solid and strong. Along each side there were paths beneath the trees, outlined in stone. Larger boulders were placed here and there, inviting the walker to sit, to look. Everywhere the shadows of leaves were dancing.”

§

To leave our trajectory of extinction we have to affirm our holobiont reality, and to think and act in terms of paleoecological time written in the landscape and the wisdom of the ancients, aboriginal practices, the values of the indigenous—those who, surviving through the Ice Age and learning how to collaborate with nature learned to survive indefinitely on Planet Earth. As the damage surmounts and bad actors continue to capitalize habitat, engineer toxins, and un-earth carbon, the likelihood is inevitable human extinction. Yet we still have time to notice. To rethink things. To awaken ourselves to the fact that we are not born of sun god or super-ape but rather are the living brightness concentrated at the end of a giant network of cellular life and solar energy—and maybe then start to live purposefully on our last home.

§

The sun was one big snowflake of white. The dunes were white and glaring. While my eyes were protected behind enormous Oakleys, my head continually itched. Little tiny bugs swirled around me. They were flying in through the mesh of my hat and biting my scalp. I removed my hat and scratched my head. When I looked at my fingernails, I was surprised to see gunk collected under them—sand and dead skin. I hadn’t thought the desolate desert would be so . . . swarmy. The dunes enclosed us; only uphill walking led back to a vantage point from which we could again see the motorhome . . .

This summer marks the 26th anniversary of that road trip and I can’t help but dwell on time and the shifting condition of World. Is the desert still there, are the campgrounds? Do the roadrunners still dart? Do the bugs still form clouds over the dunes? When my grandparents discovered the western USA for themselves, the world contained about 3 billion people; by 1992 it was 5.5 billion, and by the time I get around to taking my own children, let alone grandchildren, it will be greater than 8 billion. I, product of monocropped fields, daydreams of forests, and the dogma of pinnacle-of-humanity-just-over-the-horizon, consider myself Generation 0 of the Anthropocene. Now I find myself helping to raise two members of Generation 1, who grow up in the shadows of leaves dancing.

*the title of this essay comes from Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion (1981). I should also mention that I’ve rewatched both The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Fury Road in the past week . . .

*featured image taken on the rim of Capulin Volcano, Capulin Volcano National Monument, New Mexico, June 20, 1992

*all photos by Marylin Barnett