The Anthropocene: an entangled, messy world

There’s a quote about the stickiness of the Anthropocene that has stuck with me: “the more we struggle to distance ourselves from the Anthropocene, the more stuck we become”.

The quote comes from Robert Macfarlane’s books Underland, which I (mostly) enjoyed reading. One of its chapters makes the case for the stickiness of humanity’s hubris and debris to be inseparable from Nature. The implications of this, are profound.

For starters, it forces us to see the Natural world not as an untouched otherness from the human world, but instead as one entangled world. It’s all one and the same: the rolling tides of plastics on a polluted city beach, and the lone peak in remote wilderness, from which a cell phone tower can be seen in the distance.

Doubling-down on entanglement is the path to becoming unstuck.