The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us

Apps for Apes

On a blue-sky day at the Toronto zoo, flocks of children squired by teachers and parents mingle excitedly between exhibits. Some kids pull out cell phones and send texts or snap pictures with the easy camaraderie of wired life. Clustered noisily along a large domed habitat that’s been designed to look like a multistoried Indonesian forest complete with tree nests and meandering stream, they watch two orangutan moms and young weaving fluently through a maze of thick, flat vines, which in reality are fire hoses. Orangutans are the swivel-hipped aerialists of the ape world, with ankle-length arms built for sky-walking, opposable thumbs and big toes, swervy knees, and bowed ankles. As a result they can twist into almost any angle or pose. In amazement I watch a young female swing smoothly from vine to vine, then grab two with wide-spread hands and feet, flatten her hips, rotate her wrists, and hang still as an orange kite snagged in the treetops.

Even with knuckle-walking far behind us, we sometimes feel the urge to brachiate in that way, hand over hand on a playground’s “monkey bars.” Yet we’re stiff-jointed and feeble by comparison. We may share 97 percent of our genes with orangutans, but they remain the ginger-haired tree-dancers and we the chatterbox ground-dwellers. In the wild, orangutans spend most of their lives aloft, maneuvering with pendulous grace, as they pursue mainly solitary lives, except during childrearing. Moms raise one kid every six to eight years, doting on their young and teaching them the ways of the forest, where edible fruits abound but must be safely judged—and some aren’t easy to peel or crack open because the rinds are either tough or spiked like medieval weaponry.

One of the orang moms swoops down to the ground as if on an invisible slide, picks up a stick, and fishes around inside a tree trunk until she snares edibles that she coaxes up and eats. The once-raucous students grow quietly transfixed as they peer at her skillful tool-using, especially the way she downs the morsels like eating peas off a knife.

Beyond the glade, well away from the crowds, I find a long-haired seven-year-old boy staring intently at an iPad and tapping the screen with one finger, which unlooses the pocket-sized roar of a lion followed by the buzzy honk of a flamingo. He glances at me with big brown almond-shaped eyes under a shag of thin auburn hair.

If my mane of black hair, frizzed wide in the heat, amuses him, he doesn’t laugh. After holding my gaze for the sheerest moment, he turns back to his way-more-interesting iPad, gripping it with both hands, then with hands and naked feet. Surprisingly clean feet, I must say, and the largest hands I’ve ever seen on a seven-year-old. My whole hand would fit into his palm.

But that’s not unusual for a Sumatran orangutan, and Budi, whose name means “Wise One” in Indonesian, is growing quickly and starting to show signs of puberty: the peach-fuzz beginnings of a mustache and beard, and the billow of what will one day be a majestic double chin that puffs and vibrates when, as a two-hundred-pound adult, he gulp-warble-croons his operatic “long call.” There’s no sign yet of the giant cheek pads between the eyes and ears that will frame his face, acting as a megaphone to shoot his long calls half a mile through dense canopies.

His companion, Matt Berridge, is a tall, slender, forty-something, dark-haired man, holding the iPad near the bars so that Budi can play with it but not drag it off and deconstruct it. The zoo’s main orangutan keeper, Matt is the father of two young sons, both iPad devotees. Ape boys will be ape boys, after all.

The Apps for Apes program is sponsored by Orangutan Outreach, an international effort to help wild orangutans, whose bands are dwindling, and improve the lives of those in captivity around the world, by providing mental enrichment and more stimulating habitats.[1] Nourishing the mind is a high priority because these great apes are about as smart as human three- to four-year-olds, and just as inquisitive. Clever tool-users, they wield sticks for many purposes, from batting down fruit to fishing for ants and termites. They fashion leaf gloves to protect their hands while eating thorny fruit or climbing over prickly vines. Day-dwellers, they fold a fresh mattress of leaves in the canopy before sunset each day. They lift leaf parasols overhead to shelter from extreme sun and fold leaf hats and roofs to keep off the rain. For drinking water, in a pinch, they chew and wad up leaves to make a sponge, then dip it into rain-filled plants. Before crossing a stream, they’ll measure the water depth with a branch. They build dynamic mental maps of all the food trees in their leaf-cloud canopies.

And like their human counterparts, orangs enjoy playing with iPads. But they’re not addicted to them. They’re just not as enthralled by technology as we are.

“Like, I have a seven-year-old son,” Matt tells me. “He’s on it all the time. Not Budi.”

This kid likes the luminous screen, but he wouldn’t sit for cramped hours just staring at it.

“How are we so enamored of this thing that’s so unnatural and takes you away from everything?” Matt asks. “In one way, you’d like to have your own kids occupied at times, but when you see that the orangs are never going to get obsessed with it, knowing their huge intelligence, it gets me thinking: How smart are we to spend all this time staring at this thing? Like, even myself, you know, I don’t test my memory anymore. I go… dee deedle dee dee.” He demo-types on the screen. “I’ve become almost totally dependent on these machines. So am I weakening my brain?”

“Strawberry,” a woman’s voice says as Budi taps the strawberry on the screen. “Strawberry,” she repeats when he finds a match. Matt rewards him with tidbits of fresh strawberries, apples, and pears. The lush tropical rainforests of Sumatra offer a cornucopia of hundreds of exotic fruits, the orangutan’s favorite fare.

Another app—of pooling water—fascinates Budi. It looks like water, ripples like water, and when he touches it, it plashes and burbles. But it doesn’t feel wet. And when he lifts his fingers to his nose, he doesn’t smell water. From his sensory perspective, it’s strange. Not as strange, though, as interacting with humans and other orangutans via Skype.

The first time Budi saw Richard Zimmerman, the director of Orangutan Outreach, calling to him in a halo of light, he touched the screen, as if thinking, He’s talking to me. Then, puzzled, he reached over and touched Matt’s face. On the screen, a talking human, who knew him by name, was looking right at him and smiling, calling to him in a friendly voice. Why was Richard’s face flat and Matt’s face three-dimensional? He’d watched television lots of times, his favorite being nature films with orangutans. Matt sometimes showed him YouTube videos of adult male orangutans issuing their grown-up long calls, which always drew a fascinated stare. Yet the screen had never spoken to him. Hobnobbing with humans, rubbing shoulders with other orangs, meeting amiable strangers, playing with iPads, all had become staples of daily life. But this was an altogether different kind of socializing, and, although he didn’t realize it, a step leading him deeper into the Human Age.

Parents today worry about the toll of screen time on their children’s brains; the American Medical Association recommends none at all before the age of two. Yet a tech-enthused parent can even buy a child’s “iPotty for iPad,” a potty-training seat with built-in iPad holder, and find potty-training apps and interactive books at the iPad app store. Matt isn’t concerned about Budi’s iPad play, because unlike his own boys, Budi is a casual iPad user, and no one has studied the effect of screen time on the brains of orangutans. Would it make their senses and our own more alike? Anyway, because Budi is growing up surrounded by zoo life, human technology and culture will influence his brain in myriad ways, just as it does the brains of children. For good or bad, we use our rich imaginations to transfigure the world for ourselves and other creatures, banishing some critters we regard as “pests,” while inviting others to share the curiosities we’ve invented (medicine, complex tools, food, special lingo, digital toys), urging them to blur the line with us between natural and unnatural.

IMAGINE, IF YOU like, Budi holding an iPad whose apps and games are chapters in this book. By touching the screen, he opens one, then another, merely listening to the story as human voices stream past, or watching colorful faces and vistas intently. In some he even catches a glimpse of himself, iPad in hand, as either an ape kid at play or a vital ambassador for his dwindling species. Both roles are his real-life destiny.

Lifting one hairy orange finger over the screen, Budi hesitates a moment, then touches the first chapter. When he does, a snowstorm opens up, with college students dashing between buildings, books clutched inside their parkas…

Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind

Knee-deep in the blizzard of 1978, when wind-whipped sails of snow tacked across Lake Cayuga, and the streets looked like a toboggan run, I was a student in upstate New York. Despite the weather, classes met, and scientists with souls luminous as watch dials were talking about nuclear winter, the likely changes in Earth’s climate in the aftermath of a nuclear war: the sun white cotton in a perishable sky, dust clouds thickening over the Earth, plants forgetting how to green, summer beginning at twenty below zero, and then the seasons failing all living things. It seemed a possible scenario, since in Washington and Moscow, politicians were outdaring each other with playground bravado. This was the first time I’d heard my elders suggesting that we were now capable of unraveling the whole atmosphere shrouding Earth, and I was both wonder-struck and worried.

Only moments before, in geological time, we were speechless shadows on the savanna, foragers and hunters of small game. How had we become such a planetary threat? As the lectures and snow squalls ebbed, we students seemed small radiant forms in a vast white madness.

A quarter of a century later, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen (who discovered the hole in the ozone layer and first introduced the idea of nuclear winter) stepped onto the world stage again, arguing that we’ve become such powerful agents of planetary change that we need to rename the geological age in which we live. Elite scientists from many nations agreed, and a distinguished panel at the Geological Society of London (the official arbiter of the geologic time scale) began weighing the evidence and working to update the name of our epoch from its rocky designation, Holocene (“Recent Whole”), to one that recognizes, for the first time, our unparalleled dominion over the whole planet, Anthropocene—the Human Age.[2]

By international agreement, geologists divide Earth’s environmental history into phases, based on ruling empires of rock, ocean, and life; it’s similar to how we use “Elizabethan” and other royal dynasties to denote periods of human history. Deep ice cores in the Antarctic tell us of ancient atmospheres, fossil remains reveal ancient oceans and life forms, and more is written in silt and cataloged in stone. Previous periods, like the Jurassic, which we identify with dinosaurs, lasted millions of years, and we sometimes cleave them into smaller units, as changing epochs and eras slide into view. Each one adds a thread, however thin, to the tapestry. How wide a stripe will we leave in the fossil record?

PEOPLE WHO ARE recognizably human have walked the Earth for roughly two hundred thousand years. During those millennia, we survived by continuously adapting to our fickle environment. We braved harsh weathers and punishing landscapes, and feared animals much fiercer than we were, bowing to nature, whose spell overwhelmed us, whose magnificence humbled us, and around which we anxiously rigged our lives. After a passage of time too long to fully imagine, and too many impression-mad lives to tally, we began rebelling against the forces of nature. We grew handy, resourceful, flexible, clever, cooperative. We captured fire, chipped tools, hewed spears and needles, coined language and spent it everywhere we roamed. And then we began multiplying at breathtaking speed.

In the year 1000 BC, the entire world population was just 1 million. By AD 1000 it was 300 million. In 1500, it had grown to 500 million. Since then we’ve started reproducing exponentially. The world population has quadrupled since 1870. According to the BBC News website, when I was born, on October 7, 1948, I became the 2,490,398,416th person alive on Earth and the 75,528,527,432nd person to have lived since history began.[3] In the Middle Ages, we were still able to count people in millions. Today there are 7 billion of us. As the biologist E. O. Wilson says, “The pattern of human population growth in the twentieth century was more bacterial than primate.” According to Wilson, the human biomass is now a hundred times greater than that of any other large animal species that has ever existed on Earth.[4] In our cities 3.2 billion people crowd together, and urban planners predict that by the year 2050 nearly two-thirds of the world’s projected 10 billion people will be city-dwellers.

By the end of this decade, the history of planet Earth will be rewritten, textbooks will slip out of date, and teachers will need to unveil a bold, exciting, and possibly disturbing new reality. During our brief sojourn on Earth, thanks to exhilarating technologies, fossil fuel use, agriculture, and ballooning populations, the human race has become the single dominant force of change on the planet. For one species radically to alter the entire natural world is almost unprecedented in all of Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history.

The only other time it happened was billions of years ago, before anything like golden-shouldered parakeets or marine iguanas, when the atmosphere was a poisonous brew and a time-traveling human would have needed to wear a gas mask. Then only spongy colonies of one-celled, blue-green algae blanketed the shallows, dining on water and sunlight, and pumping torrents of oxygen—their version of flatulence—into the atmosphere. Gradually, the air and ocean seethed with oxygen, the sky sweetened, and Earth welcomed creatures with lungs. It’s a humbling thought, but one life form’s excrement is another’s tonic. For nearly five billion years, life ticked and tocked through an immensity of bold experiments, which the algae’s recreation of the planet made possible, including all sorts of leaves and tongues, pedigrees and tribes, from Venus flytraps to humans. Then, improbably for origins so mundane, in roughly the last two or three hundred years, humans have become the second species to dramatically alter the natural world from earth to sky.

Humans have always been hopped-up, restless, busy bodies. During the past 11,700 years, a mere blink of time since the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age, we invented the pearls of Agriculture, Writing, and Science. We traveled in all directions, followed the long hands of rivers, crossed snow kingdoms, scaled dizzying clefts and gorges, trekked to remote islands and the poles, plunged to ocean depths haunted by fish lit like luminarias and jellies with golden eyes. Under a worship of stars, we trimmed fires and strung lanterns all across the darkness. We framed Oz-like cities, voyaged off our home planet, and golfed on the moon. We dreamt up a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels. We may not have shuffled the continents, but we’ve erased and redrawn their outlines with cities, agriculture, and climate change. We’ve blocked and rerouted rivers, depositing thick sediments of new land. We’ve leveled forests, scraped and paved the earth. We’ve subdued 75 percent of the land surface—preserving some pockets as “wilderness,” denaturing vast tracts for our businesses and homes, and homogenizing a third of the world’s ice-free land through farming. We’ve lopped off the tops of mountains to dig craters and quarries for mining. It’s as if aliens appeared with megamallets and laser chisels and started resculpting every continent to better suit them. We’ve turned the landscape into another form of architecture; we’ve made the planet our sandbox.

When it comes to Earth’s life forms we’ve been especially busy. We and our domestic animals now make up 90 percent of all the mammal biomass on Earth; in the year 1000, we and our animals were only 2 percent. As for wild species, we’ve redistributed plants and animals to different parts of the world, daring them to evolve new habits, revise their bodies, or go extinct. They’ve done all three. In the process, we’re deciding what species will ultimately share the planet with us.

Even the clouds show our handiwork. Some are wind-smeared contrails left by globe-trotters in airplanes; others darken and spill as a result of factory grit loosed into the air. We’ve banded the crows, we’ve hybridized the trees, we’ve trussed the cliffs, we’ve dammed the rivers. We would supervise the sun if we could. We already harness its rays to power our whims, a feat the gods of ancient mythology would envy.

Like supreme beings, we now are present everywhere and in everything. We’ve colonized or left our fingerprints on every inch of the planet, from the ocean sediment to the exosphere, the outermost fringe of atmosphere where molecules escape into space, junk careens, and satellites orbit. Nearly all of the wonders we identify with modern life emerged in just the past two centuries, and over the past couple of decades, like a giant boulder racing ahead of a landslide, the human adventure has accelerated at an especially mind-bending pace.

Every day, we’re more at the helm, navigating from outer space to the inner terraces of body and brain. We are not the same apes flaking tools on the savanna, toting gemlike embers, and stringing a few words together like precious shells. It’s even hard to imagine our mental fantasia from that perspective. Did it feel more spacious or every bit as streamlike? We’re revising the planet and its life forms so fast and indelibly that the natural world from which we sprang—atoms to single cells to mammals to Homo sapiens to dominance—is far from the same wellspring our ancestors knew. Today, instead of adapting to the natural world in which we live, we’ve created a human environment in which we’ve embedded the natural world.

Our relationship with nature has changed… radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. How we now relate to the land, oceans, animals, and our own bodies is being influenced in all sorts of unexpected ways by myriad advances in manufacturing, medicine, and technology. Many of nature’s mysterious stuck doors have shivered open—human genome, stem cells, other Earth-like planets—widening our eyes. Along the way, our relationship with nature is evolving, rapidly but incrementally, and at times so subtly that we don’t perceive the sonic booms, literally or metaphorically. As we’re redefining our perception of the world surrounding us, and the world inside of us, we’re revising our fundamental ideas about exactly what it means to be human, and also what we deem “natural.” At every level, from wild animals to the microbes that homestead our flesh, from our evolving homes and cities to virtual zoos and webcams, humanity’s unique bond with nature has taken a new direction.

I began writing this book because I was puzzled by certain questions, such as: Why does the world seem to be racing under our feet? Why is this the first year that Canada geese didn’t migrate from many New England towns, and why have so many white storks stopped migrating in Europe? The world is being ravaged by record heat, drought, and floods—can we fix what we’ve done to the weather? What sort of stewards of the future planet will today’s digital children be? What will it mean to travel when we can go anywhere on our computers, with little cost or effort? With all the medical changes to the human body—including carbon blade legs, bionic fingers, silicon retinas, computer screens worn over one eye with the ability to text by blinking, bionic suits that make it possible to lift colossal weights, and a wonderland of brain enhancers to improve focus, memory, or mood—will adolescents still be asking, “Who am I?” or “What am I?” How will cities, wild animals, and our own biology have changed in fifty years?

Without meaning to, we’ve created some planetary chaos that threatens our well-being. Yet despite the urgency of reining in climate change and devising safer ways to feed, fuel, and govern our civilization, I’m enormously hopeful. Our new age, for all its sins, is laced with invention. We’ve tripled our life span, reduced childhood mortality, and, for most people, improved the quality of life—from health to daily comforts—to a staggering degree. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.

If we could travel back to, say, the Iron Age, few of us would go without packing certain essentials: matches, antibiotics, corrective lenses, compass, knife, shoes, vitamins, pencil and paper, toothbrush, fish hooks, metal pot, flashlight with solar batteries, and an array of other inventions that make life safer. We wouldn’t travel light.

Black Marble

As our spaceship enters the roulette wheel of a new solar system, hope starts building its fragile crystals once again. Disappointment has dogged our travels, but we are nomads with restless minds, and this sun resembles our own middle-aged star. Like ours, it rules a tidy jumble of planets looping in atypical orbits, some unfurling a pageant of seasons, others hard-hearted, monotone, and remote. They’re a strange assortment for siblings, with many small straggling hangers-on, but we’ve encountered odder night-fellows, and variety is their lure. One fizzy giant trails dozens of sycophantic moons; another floats inside a white cocoon. We weave between rocky, hard-boiled worlds, swing by a blimp tugging a retinue of jagged moons, dodge the diffuse rubble of asteroids, skirt a hothouse of acid clouds and phantom light.

Slowing to a hyperglide, we admire all the dappled colors, mammoth canyons of razor-backed rust, ice-spewing volcanoes, fountains fifty miles high, hydrocarbon lakes, scarlet welts and scourges, drooling oceans of frozen methane, light daggers, magma flows, sulfur rain, and many other intrigues of climate and geology. Yet there’s no sign of living, breathing life forms anywhere. We are such a lonely species. Maybe this solar system will be the harbor where we find others like ourselves, curious, questing beings of unknown ardor or bloom. Life will have whittled them to fit their world, it doesn’t matter how.

One more planet to survey, and then it’s on to the next port of call.

On a small water planet flocked over by clouds, sequins sparkle everywhere. Racing toward it with abandon, we give in to its pull, and orbit in step with nightfall shadowing the world, transfixed by the embroidery of gold and white lights—from clusters and ribbons to willful circles and grids. Crafted lights, not natural auroras or lightning, but designed, and too many, too regular, too rare to ignore.

IN 2003, ABOARD the Space Station, Don Pettit felt his heart pinwheel whenever he viewed Earth’s cities at night. If only everyone could see Earth like this, he thought, they’d marvel at how far we’ve come, and they’d understand what we share. A born tinkerer, he used spare parts he found in the Space Station to photograph the spinning planet with pristine clarity, as if it were sitting still. When he returned home he stitched the photographs together into a video montage, an orbital tour of Earth’s cities at night, which he posted on YouTube. His voice-over identifies each glowing spiderweb as we sail toward it with him, as if we too were peering out of a Space Station window: “Zurich, Switzerland; Milan, Italy; Madrid, Spain.

“Cities at night are caught in a triangle,” he says with awe tugging at his voice, “between culture, geography, and technology.… Cities in Europe display a characteristic network of roads that radiate outwards.… London, with a tour down the English coast to Bristol. Cairo, Egypt, with the Nile River seen as a dark shape running south to north, the Pyramids of Giza are well lit at night… Tel Aviv on the left, Jerusalem on the right…”

Glowing gold, green, and yellow, the Middle Eastern cities seem especially lustrous. He points out India’s hallmark—village lights dotted over the countryside, softly glowing as through a veil. Then we fly above Manila, where geometrical lights define the waterfront. The dragon-shaped lights of Hong Kong flutter under us, and the southeast tip of South Korea. In the welling darkness of the Korea Strait, a band of dazzling white grains is a fleet of fishing boats shining high-intensity xenon lamps as lures.

“There’s Tokyo, Brisbane, the San Francisco Bay, Houston,” Pettit notes.

We don’t intend our cities to be so beautiful from space. They’re humanity’s electric fingerprints on the planet, the chrome-yellow energy that flows through city veins. Dwarfed by the infinite dome of space with its majestic coliseum of stars, we’ve created our own constellations on the ground and named them after our triumphs, enterprises, myths, and leaders. Copenhagen (“Merchants Harbor”), Amsterdam (“A Dam on the Amstel River”), Ottawa (“Traders”), Bogotá (“Planted Fields”), Cotonou (“Mouth of the River of Death”), Canberra (“Meeting Place”), Fleissenberg (“Castle of Diligence”), Ouagadougou (“Where People Get Honor and Respect”), Athens (City of Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom). We play out our lives amid a festival of lights. The story the lights tell would be unmistakable to any space traveler: some bold life form has crisscrossed the planet with an exuberance of cities, favoring settlements along the coast and beside flowing water, and connecting them all with a labyrinth of brilliantly lit roads, so that even without a map the outlines of the continents loom and you can spot the meandering rivers.

The silent message of this spectacle is timely, strange, and wonderful. We’ve tattooed the planet with our doings. Our handiwork is visible everywhere, which NASA has captured with graphic poignancy in “Black Marble,” its December 7, 2012, portrait of Earth ablaze at night. A companion to the famous “Blue Marble” photograph of Earth that appeared forty years ago, this radical new self-portrait promises to awaken and inspire us just as mightily.

On December 7, 1972, the crew of Apollo 17, the last manned lunar mission, shot the “Blue Marble” photograph of the whole Earth floating against the black velvet of space. Africa and Europe were eye-catching under swirling white clouds, but the predominant color was blue. This was the one picture from the Apollo missions that dramatically expanded our way of thinking. It showed us how small the planet is in the vast sprawl of space, how entwined and spontaneous its habitats are. Despite all the wars and hostilities, when viewed from space Earth had no national borders, no military zones, no visible fences. One could see how storm systems swirling above the Amazon might affect the grain yield half a planet away in China. An Indian Ocean hurricane, swirling at the top of the photo, had pummeled India with whirlwinds and floods only two days before. Because it was nearly winter solstice, the white lantern of Antarctica glowed. The entire atmosphere of the planet—all the air we breathe, the sky we fly through, even the ozone layer—was visible as the thinnest rind.

Released during a time of growing environmental concern, it became an emblem of global consciousness, the most widely distributed photo in human history. It gave us an image to float in the lagoon of the mind’s eye. It helped us embrace something too immense to focus on as a single intricately known and intricately unknown organism. Now we could see Earth in one eye-gulp, the way we gaze on a loved one. We could paste the image into our Homo sapiens family album. Here was a view of every friend, every loved one and acquaintance, every path ever traveled, all together in one place. No wonder it adorned so many college dorm rooms. As the ultimate group portrait, it helped us understand our global kinship and cosmic address. It proclaimed our shared destiny.

NASA’s new image of city lights, a panorama of the continents emblazoned with pulsating beacons, startles and transforms our gaze once again. Ours is the only planet in our solar system that glitters at night. Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and for eons the nighttime planet was dark. In a little over two hundred years we’ve wired up the world and turned on the lights, as if we signed the planet in luminous ink. In another forty years our scrawl won’t look the same. There are so many of us who find urban life magnetic that our cities no longer simply sprawl—they’ve begun to grow exponentially. Millions of us pack up, leave jobs and neighbors behind, and migrate to the city every year, joining nearly two-thirds of all the people on Earth. In the future, more and more clusters will appear, with even wider lattices and curtains of lights connecting them. Many display our curious tastes and habits. A harlequin thread drawn from Moscow to Vladivostok and dipping into China is the Trans-Siberian Railway. A golden streak through a profound darkness, the Nile River pours between the Aswan Dam and the Mediterranean Sea. A trellis connecting bright dots is the U.S. interstate highway system. The whole continent of Antarctica is still invisible at night. The vast deserts of Mongolia, Africa, Arabia, Australia, and the United States look almost as dark. So, too, teeming jungles in Africa and South America, the colossal arc of the Himalayas, and the rich northern forests of Canada and Russia. But shopping centers and seaports sizzle with light, as if they’re frying electrons. The single brightest spot on the entire planet isn’t Jerusalem or the Pyramids of Giza, though those do sparkle, but a more secular temple of neon, the Las Vegas Strip.

Newer settlements in the American West tend to be boxy, with streets that bolt north-south and east-west, before trickling into darkness at the fringes of town. In big cities like Tokyo, the crooked, meandering lines of the oldest neighborhoods glow mantis-green from mercury vapor streetlights, while the newer streets wrapped around them shine orange from modern sodium vapor lamps.

Our shimmering cities tell all (including us) that Earth’s inhabitants are thinkers, builders and rearrangers who like to bunch together in hivelike settlements, and for some reason—bad night vision, primal fear, sheer vanity, to scare predators, or as a form of group adornment—we bedeck them all with garlands of light.

Handmade Landscapes

Now let’s zoom in closer.

The Earth isn’t the same when you fly over it at three thousand feet and look for signs of humans. It’s easy to lose your bearings. All the reassuring textures of daily life are lost. Gone are the sensuous details of wild strawberry jam, a vase of well-bred irises with stiff yellow combs, the smell of wild scallions beside the kitchen door. But it’s a grand perch for viewing our tracks on the ground—visible everywhere and just as readable as the three-pronged Y’s etched into the snow by ravens or the cleft hearts stamped by white-tailed deer.

The landscape looks very different than it did to our forebears, although we still use the sixteenth-century Dutch word (lantscap) to mean the natural scenery of our lives. Peering out of an airplane window, it’s clear how we’ve gradually redefined that rustic idea. No longer does it apply only to such untouched wilderness as Alpine crags, sugared coastlines, or unruly fields of wildflowers. We manufacture new vistas and move so comfortably among them that quite often we confuse them with natural habitats. A field of giant sunflowers in Arizona or an extravagance of lavender in Provence offers a gorgeous naturalistic tapestry, even though both were sewn by human hands.

From the air, you can see how mountains lounge like sleeping alligators, and roads cut alongside or zigzag around them. Or slice clean through. Some roads curve to avoid, others to arrive, but many are straight and meet at right angles. Where forests blanket the earth, a shaved ribbon of brown scalp appears with implanted electrical towers shaped like stick men.

We not only bespangle the night, we broadloom the day. In summer, our agriculture rises as long alternating strips of crops, or quilted patchworks of green velour and brown corduroy. Miles of dark circles show where giant pivoting sprinkler systems are mining the water we unlocked deep below ground, which we’re using to irrigate medallions of corn, wheat, alfalfa, or soybeans. Lighter circles linger as the pale shadows of already harvested crops. Evenly spaced rows of pink or white tufts tell of apple and cherry orchards. Among houses and between farms, small fragments of wooded land remain untouched: either the land is too wet, rocky, or hilly to build on, or the locals have set it aside on purpose to protect or use as a park. Either way, it proclaims our presence, just as the canals and clipped golf courses do.

Where retreating glaciers once dropped boulders and stones, scattering rocks of all sizes along the way, hedgerows border the crops. Farmers first had to unearth the rocks and boulders before they could till the land, and they piled the riprap along the edges of fields, where they were colonized by shrubs and trees that thrive in crevices and trap the drifting snow. On the first warm spring days, all of the snow will have melted from the corrugated brown fields, but not from the rocky white-tipped hedgerows that frame them.

Where dark veins streak the mountains, coal miners have clear-cut forests, shattered several peaks with explosives, scooped up the rubble, dumped it into a valley, and begun excavating. The blocks and crumbles of a stone quarry also stand out, and the terraced ziggurats of a copper mine rise above an emerald green pool.

Where mirages swim in the Mojave Desert’s flan of caramel light, tens of thousands of mirrors shimmer to the horizon, each one a panel in an immense solar thermal facility. In other deserts around the world, and on every continent, including Antarctica, arrays of sun-catchers sparkle. Oil refineries trail for miles, swarmed over by pump jacks attacking the hard desert floor like metal woodpeckers and locusts.

Our pointy-nosed boats dot the ports and lakeshores; our tugboats wrangle commercial barges down the blue sinews of rivers. Newly hewn timber looks like rafts of corks floating toward the sawmills. Where marshlands attract flocks of migrating birds, one may also spot the scarlet paisley of our cranberry bogs, and the yellow of the mechanical growers that flood the bogs and then churn the cranberries to loosen them from their vines, corralling the floating fruit in long flexible arms. Red capital T’s are the stigmata of our evaporation ponds, where salt concentrates hard as it’s harvested from seawater, in the process changing the algae and other microorganisms to vivid swirls of psychedelic hues. One sees our dams and harnessed rivers and the long zippers of our railway lines, and even occasional railway roundhouses. There’s the azure blue of our municipal swimming pools, and the grids of towns where we live in thick masses piled one upon the other, with the tallest buildings in the center of a town, and long fingers of shorter buildings pointing away from them. The cooling stacks of our nuclear power plants stare up with the blank eyes of statues. Low false clouds pour from the smokestacks atop steel and iron plants, factories, and power stations.

These are but a few signs of our presence. Of course, our scat is visible, too. Junkyards and recycling centers edge all the towns, heaped with blocks of compressed metals and the black curls of old tires, swirling with scavenging gulls.

We’ve created a bounty of new landscapes, and lest the feat be lost on anyone, we even tack on the suffix “scape” to describe them. I’ve come across “cityscape,” “townscape,” “roadscape,” “battlescape,” “lawnscape,” “prisonscape,” “mallscape,” “soundscape,” “cyberscape,” “waterscape,” “windowscape,” “xeriscape,” and many more. And let’s not forget all the “industrial parks.”

Although our handmade landscapes tend to fade into the background, just a stage set for our high-drama lives, they can be breathtaking. In Japan, tourists bored with volcanic mountains and gardens, and urban sightseers given to kojo moe, “factory infatuation,” are flocking to sold-out tours that specialize in industrial landscapes and public works, which are viewed by bus or boat. Especially popular are the nighttime cruises that feature mammoth chemical factories spewing smoke and aglitter with star-clusters of light, overseen by the moon and more familiar constellations. It’s become a popular date for romantic young couples.

“Most people are shocked to discover that factories can be such beautiful places,” says Masakatsu Ozawa, an official in Kawasaki’s tourism department. “We want tourists to have an experience for all the senses including that of factory smell.”

“If you come to Tokyo, don’t bother going to Harajuku,” the city’s shopping district, Ken Ohyama writes in his book Kojo Moe. “Go instead to Kawasaki,” an industrial hub rich in rust, contaminated water, and polluted air. For that’s where the industrial scenery is the most vivid. Some Japanese lawmakers would like a few of their working factories designated as World Heritage Sites, to draw even more tourists.

For the past twenty-five years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been documenting “manufactured landscapes” all over the world. Many of his most startling photographs were shot inside Chinese factories that ramble for blocks, where workers pass nearly all of their daylight hours surrounded by machines, products, and each other, under artificial light. The size and scale of their surroundings play upon the eyes and mind as a landscape. So does each floor of a large office building in, say, Singapore, divided into dozens of honeycomb cubicles.

I find Burtynsky’s studio loft on a busy street in downtown Toronto. Large wooden tables flank several small offices, and a row of tall windows offers a portrait gallery of the day’s weather. A tall, slender man with graying hair and neatly trimmed mustache and goatee greets me, and we retreat into his book-lined office. He’s wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt with a small coyote logo howling up at his face. His voice is whisper-quiet, there’s a calm about him almost geological in its repose, and yet his eyes are agile as a leopard’s.

“You’ve been called a ‘subliminal activist’…”

Burtynsky smiles. The moniker fits.

“Part of the advantage one has as a Canadian,” he explains, “is that you’re born into this country that’s vast and thinly populated. I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn’t changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament. And also, I hope, a poetic narrative of the transfigured landscape and the industrial supply line. We can’t have our cities, we can’t have our cars, we can’t have our jets without creating wastelands. For every act of creation there is an act of destruction. Take the skyscraper—there is an equivalent void in nature: quarries, mines.”

Quarries as inverted architecture. I picture hollowed-out geometrical shapes, Cubist benches, ragged plummets. You can’t have a skyscraper made out of marble or granite without a corresponding emptiness in nature. I haven’t thought of our buildings in quite this way before, as perpetually shadowed by a parallel absence.

“And yet these ‘acts of destruction’ are surprisingly beautiful,” I say.

“We have extracted from the land from the moment we stood on two feet. When we look at these wastelands, we say, ‘Isn’t that a terrible thing.’… But they can also be seen in a different way. These spots aren’t dead, although we leave them for dead. Life does go on, and we should reengage with those places. They’re very real and they’re very much part of who we are.”

My mind shimmies between two of his photographs: the stepped walls of an open-pit tungsten mine in northwestern Spain and a pyramid of lightbulb filaments, electronics, rocket engine nozzles, X-ray tubes, and the other particulate matter of our civilization. They’re very different from the landscape photographs of the first half of the twentieth century, when Eliot Porter, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston celebrated nature as the embodiment of the sublime, with reverence and respect, in all its wild untrampled glory. Burtynsky’s photographs capture the wild trampled glory of humanity reveling in industry. For ages, nature was the only place we went to feel surrounded by forces larger than ourselves. Now our cities, buildings, and technologies are also playing that role.

Even calling something “nature” is a big change, Burtynsky suggests, from a time when nature existed all around and within us. Then we separated ourselves by naming it, just as, according to the Bible, Adam named the animals. Once we named them, they seemed ours to do with as we wished. Yet we were never as distant as we thought, and if we are learning anything in the Anthropocene, it is that we are not really separate at all. An important part of the landscape, our built environment is an expression of nature and can be more, or less, sustainable. The choice is ours.

IN THE HERE and now of an orangutan kid’s life, Budi relinquishes his iPad for a moment. Then Matt lifts a hand, points down with his first finger, and swirls it around as if he were stirring up an invisible brew. On cue, Budi turns around and presses his back to the bars so that Matt can give him a scratch. Matt obliges, and Budi shrugs in pleasure, then presents one shoulder, arm, and back again for more.

“He just got his big-boy teeth a couple of months ago,” Matt says. “His baby teeth fell out at the beginning of the year… he got rid of those giant Chiclets.” Matt places some fresh fruit tidbits into Budi’s mouth.

“He’s very careful with your fingers.”

“When he was really little he would bite—Hey, let go,” Matt says, gently removing Budi’s finger from a flap of iPad cover he’s trying to pry off. “But then he had smaller teeth. When I’d squeal, he’d let go. Just like he was testing to see. He’s a little bigger now, and even if he didn’t mean to hurt me, he could.”

They may be the same weight as humans, but orangutans are about seven times as strong, and may not realize the damage a playful yank or slap could do to a human. Yet they’re also empathic enough to recognize another’s pain, regardless of species, and feel bad about causing it.

“If he knows how to behave with people, the nicer his life’s going to be—as he gets older he can do things like present body parts so that people can look after him. There’s no guarantee that he’ll be at this zoo forever, so it will be nice to say, This is the language Budi knows. This is what you need to know to communicate with him.”

Budi’s mom, Puppe, wanders over to see what we’re doing. Elderly by orangutan standards, at thirty-six, she’s the oldest of the zoo’s orangutans, with mature grayish skin (juvenile skin, like Budi’s, is paler), a Buddha belly, and wrinkling around her nose and mouth. Her face looks strikingly humanlike, as does Budi’s. Orangs meet our gaze with familiar faces and expressions across a hazy evolutionary mirage. Small wonder that, in Indonesian, their name means “Orange Forest People.”

Budi climbs the bars above his mom and dangles onto her head in a handstand, then slides upside down across her shoulders and rolls sideways off her back with a half twist. But she doesn’t seem unduly bothered. After raising five tykes, she’s used to such antics, and in any case she’s always had a placid personality, a trait she’s passed on to Budi, who tends to be relatively quiet as well. Not that orangs make much noise. The males may groan their long call to tell receptive females that they’re hunks and other males not to mess with them, but the females and young always stay so close together that they only need to make subtle squeaks and grunts. Also, they’re virtuosos of the visual. Most of their mutual knowing flows through an anatomy of signs, in which body language and pantomime offer a shared vocabulary. So Matt’s work with them always includes gestures as well as words. It’s a technique that’s also gaining popularity among human parents with toddlers—teaching them basic sign language to make themselves understood before they can speak.

“Show me your tummy,” Matt says, turning his attention to her and quietly gesturing come here with both hands.

“Let me see your tummy, Puppe,” he says, pointing to her hairy orange belly. His tone with her is tender and respectful.

Puppe presses her big tummy close to Matt, who gives it a gentle rub. When he offers her some fruit she places a few pieces in one hand and delicately eats them one at a time.

“Where are you going, kiddo?” Matt says, as Budi runs off to a corner.

Grabbing a crinkly blue tarpaulin, he wraps himself up Caped Crusader style and returns to iPad play, triggering gorilla and rhino calls. Then Budi reaches for a control bar with buttons outside of the cage, and Matt brings the remote closer to him and lets him push the button that lifts a door on the wall dividing his enclosure from the next one. Hauling the tarpaulin overhead, he kicks a large ball through the door and dashes after it, brings it back, and pushes the button to close the door. Open, close, open, close. He’s like any kid getting a rush out of opening and closing drawers and doors.

Matt believes in giving the orangs as much volition as possible, and lots of mental and sensory stimulation (or privacy if they wish).

“We make almost all their choices for them, and an intelligent animal should have opportunities to make more choices themselves,” Matt says, “from deciding on the type of food they want that day to what activities they’d like to do.”

“They didn’t choose to be ambassadors for their ill-fated species,” I think aloud, wondering if future geologists will discover that we allowed orangutans to go extinct in our age, or if we were able to rescue them at the eleventh hour.

“No.” His face clouds over.

“The situation in the wild is very bad, I gather.”

“The last I’ve heard,” he says sadly, “is that the population is segmented, and right now none of the Sumatran orangutan populations are sustainable in the long term, unless we can create corridors and protect those areas. There are so many benefits to orangutan corridors—they handle the storm water, they prevent erosion, they produce oxygen, they provide places for orangutans to live. The owners don’t want orangutans near their palm plantations, but if there were functioning corridors, there would be less animal–human conflict.”

So there’s an Orangutan Awareness program at the Toronto Zoo, with education, outreach, and fund-raising for global orangutan projects. And there’s the signature Apps for Apes program (at twelve zoos thus far) reminding people how much we have in common with the other great apes. When we see an orangutan at his iPad we naturally think, He could be my son, my brother, myself.

Budi touches a game on his iPad and the screen becomes an extravaganza of flurrying creatures, alive and finning, bubbling and whirling, in an underwater prehistoric world that Budi will never see. Nor will we, for we only know them at a standstill, as uninhabited bones, relics of a previous age as dramatic as our own.

A Dialect of Stone

I’m wearing a fossil trilobite pendant around my neck right now. Black with prominent ribs in a silver bevel, it resembles a wood louse, and I wonder if it could rolypoly itself and somersault as wood lice do. Mostly, I wonder what its compound eyes saw so long ago. My trilobite is only an inch long, but I’ve held one nearly two feet wide in a neighbor’s private collection, its ribs a xylophone impressive enough to play a tune upon. Trilobites are uncanny instruments of life.

Millennia before the Pliocene’s celebration of the spine, when grazing quadrupeds roamed, silver birch leaves flickered like tiny salmon, and grebes first hinted at lunacy, trillions of trilobites prowled the ocean floors and paddled mud banks ajell with bacterial slime. In the evolutionary arms race, they grew armor plates, jointed legs, tough, chitinous jaws—anything to beat extinction’s warrant. When they died, they bedded the muzzy swamplands. Today human bone-tumblers ogle their chalky remains, their exquisite herringbone shells. Trying to understand their habits, we sometimes allude to their cousins, the crab, spider, and millipede, and say “adaptive radiation about a common theme.” As if that explained the papery organs within, or all the crises that fed their opportunity.

The most successful water animal ever embalmed as fossil, trilobites kept refining and upgrading themselves, over three hundred million years, until around twenty thousand different species freewheeled through deep and shallow seas on what must have seemed a trilobite-smitten planet. Some worked as stealthy ocean predators and scavengers, others as mild-mannered plankton-grazers, and still others fell into cahoots with sulfur-eating bacteria. Some developed protruding antlers and crackerjack spines. They scanned their realm with some of the oldest eyes on record, bug-eyed peepers with many lenses that weren’t organic but mineral, made of six-sided crystal calcium prisms. These radically different eyes didn’t provide crisp images but did offer a very wide field of view and motion. When a mass extinction wiped out trilobites 260 million years ago, their ancient lineage yielded to our world of insects with multifaceted eyes. But in their heyday, trilobites trolled the water world, and when they died their calcium carcasses fell to the bottom, crystal eyes and all, where layer upon layer of sediment enshrined them, gluing and compacting their bones with bits of coral and other calcium-cored creatures. Then time stacked its heavy volumes upon them, squeezing out the excess water and leaving behind limestone laced with skeletal remains. Today we use raw limestone in our roads, and grind it for paints and toothpastes—which means we use ancient trilobites, coral, and other fossils to help scrub our mouths.

That’s also what it would take to fossilize humans—not as populous as trilobites but the most successful land animal ever. Just as well. I don’t know how I’d feel brushing my teeth with the remains of ancient in-laws, or outlaws.

DRIVING DOWN THE highway that skirts Lake Cayuga, between glacial chunks of rock, I pass the uncanny work of erosion, a great sculptor of landscapes. Geologic eras are piled one on top of the other like Berber rugs, trilobites and other fossils bear witness to the evolution of life, and a host of creeks and waterfalls fume into the deep, gray-blue lake a thousand feet below. The wide ribbons of gunmetal gray and black shale I pass came from low-oxygen mud. Once this region was a shallow tropical sea that, as it evaporated, left not only mud full of marine-life skeletons that hardened into limestone but salt deposits, some of the deepest in the world. Colliding continents, 250 million years ago, stressed some of the rocks until fractures formed, land lifted, sea levels rose and fell. It’s easy to forget, when you look out over the rolling hills, that you’re seeing what once was the bottom of a sea, not the top of a mountain.

By the time dinosaurs appeared, 240 million years ago, the seas had retreated, leaving dry land, where dinosaurs stomped their footprints. When the ice age arrived, only 2 million years ago, it spread vast sheets of ice that repeatedly charged forward and dragged back, in the process gouging the deep Finger Lakes while streams cut the gorges of upstate New York. Sometimes large fossils appear from that era, like the mastodon (a hulking relative of the elephant with exceptionally long tusks) that a bemused local farmer found in his field several years ago.

Most of the life forms that once inhabited the planet have vanished, leaving no trace behind. Their remains have been polished down by the elements and bulldozed by the slow-motion avalanche of the glaciers. But geologists like Cornell University’s Terry Jordan can read a tale in the rock strata, the Earth’s dialect of stone, including the chevrons that tell of some sea-tossing event, maybe a hurricane like Sandy or Haiyan.

I like Terry Jordan from the first moment we meet in her office beside one of the sinuous plummeting gorges that are a hallmark of this lake district, a place for the geologically curious, loaded with fossils. It’s her blue argyle socks—the crisscrossing design echoes the angles one sometimes sees in rock creased by spells of turmoil, the shadow of a buckling or churning calamity so long ago that we can only date it to within tens of thousands of years.

Specializing in sediment, the earth scruff that remains long enough to petrify into pinnacles and mutate into mesas, she’s taught geology for much of a human lifetime. That seems long to me, but in her view of the past it’s only a speck.

“Does it ever feel strange thinking in such long, slow units of time, when today’s world is all about speed?” I ask.

Shaking her head with a laugh, she says, “No, I’m amazed by people who don’t think this way. How can they not see it?”

The “it” is our place in the rocky bones of history. Admiring a chunk of rock on a table by Terry Jordan’s window, I lift it in my hands and peer at the embossed fossils on its surface, where ram’s-horn-shaped ammonites look like they’re butting their way out.

“This is a wonderful place for fossils,” I say. “Do you think our bones will show in the fossil record in this way, oh, say, ten million years from now?”

“Only if we’re trapped in sediment!” she says, with a slightly impish smile. Then, seriously: “Maybe people living in coastal areas like New Orleans, Tokyo, or the Netherlands, or island nations—areas that will sink and disappear in mud when the sea level rises.”

When we talk about the Age of the Dinosaur or the Age of the Trilobite, we expect to find fossils. But that’s not true in the Age of Humans. It’s not necessarily our bones that future geologists will ponder, but an altogether different kind of evidence. Not our bones but our residue will signal the beginning of the Anthropocene, a point delineated by a “golden spike”—a marker scientists pound into the rock strata to denote an internationally agreed-upon start of a geological time period. Most spikes are in Europe’s heavily studied ribbons of exposed rock, with seven golden spikes in the United States, and dozens more throughout the world.

Let’s suppose once more that we are astronauts, this time visiting Earth millions of years after humans have left to pioneer other worlds, allowing Earth to lie fallow for a spell and restore its bounty. Few signs of us remain—on the lush, overgrown surface, that is. Exposed rock and ice cores outline our story, and a future geologist—we’ll call her Olivine—is looking for “time-rock,” layers that show magnetic, chemical, climatic, or paleontological signs of the new age that we created.

From the warmth of her sky-tent tethered above what once was Patagonia, she travels the world and digs, measures, and tests, unearthing clues like shards of pottery. In sedimentary rock near the coasts, she pores over the fossil remains of cities: low-lying mazes once called Miami or Calcutta. She detects radioactive pulses from nuclear waste dumps. She finds a layer of woodland pollen suddenly replaced by agricultural pollen, and another ribbon where agriculture gave way to cities. Seams of concrete and metal abound. Scouting the oceans, she detects how, in our age, we plowed up the seabeds by bottom-trawling with large heavy nets dragged across the ocean floor, scooping up any marine life in their paths. Olivine is briefly envious. They were the first generation of humans, she thinks, with the instruments and satellites to be able to measure how geology was changing during their own lifetime. What an exciting era that must have been.

Everywhere she travels, she stumbles upon a mass of fossils of species far from their native habitats, and clumped together, on a scale unique in all of Earth’s geological history. Long before we began shuffling life forms, species invaded new lands when continents collided in slow motion. But during our geologic moment, we’ve rushed the process, and quickly surpassed plate tectonics as a rearranger of species.

Olivine smiles as she identifies rose and Scotch broom pollen in a rock sample not far from her tent, in Patagonia, once a wild and windswept frontier where armadillos roamed and the beach pebbles were jasper. Roses in Patagonia, she thinks. Those old Anthrops were rose addicts. And Scotch broom—didn’t they realize it would spread for miles? Probably transplanted by settlers. She knows the Scotch broom flailed long pokers of yellow flowers and, with weedlike momentum, colonized hundreds of acres and retuned the chemistry of the soil.

Special prizes are bits of human bones, whose DNA shows how our species began continent-jumping like hopping spiders, with some lineages predominating but most mixing, homogenizing, traveling far from their native shores, in a worldwide flux binding us all together.

She and her colleagues have argued some about the exact start of the Anthropocene—Agriculture? Industry? Nuclear bombs?—but they all agree that our world dramatically changed around the year 1800. That’s when the Industrial Revolution, powered by a massive use of fossil fuels, led to rising carbon dioxide levels. We tend to forget that the steam engine was first invented to pump water out of coal mines, and only later adapted to move boats, cars, and trains. It’s also when land clearing speeded up, and ecosystems were converted from mostly wild to mostly human-centered. Agriculture and mining became mechanized giants, spilling more fertilizer into the rivers and oceans, and more pollution into the air. The new textile mills and factory system drew laborers from the country into rapidly booming modern cities. That’s when we first began adapting the planet to us on a large scale—changing the climate, changing the oceans, changing the evolution of plants and animals.

In the process, we’ve left our signature everywhere. Our impact is already measurable in the geologic record. The rocks hum with radioactive elements from atom bomb tests of the 1960s. The fossil pollen Olivine studies in the strata will reflect how, during our epoch, the wild brew of species that once thrived for centuries on the prairies and in the forests suddenly gave way to unbroken fields of single crops—corn, wheat, soy—and vast clans of cows, pigs, and chickens.

Because plastics take so long to degrade, they, too, will show up in the fossil record. Not as flattened lawn chairs and PVC pipes, but as veins of tiny plastic tears, which is as far as plastic denatures. Quasi-crystals (crystals with orderly but nonrepeating patterns), transparent aluminum, and other newly invented forms of matter will appear in the matrix as well.

That alone is astonishing. We’re adding new elements to the sum of creation. The wide world of nature, with all its chemicals and potions, plants and animals, rocks, crystals, and metals, is not enough for us.

We’re also minting brand-new states of matter, metals no earthly eyes have ever seen—photonic clusters that can slice like light sabers, ultracold quantum gas known as polar molecules, fleecy electric, synthetic radioactive elements from einsteinium through copernicium to ununoctium, among many other artificial sprinklings. Monuments needn’t be large, or even visible to the naked eye, to declare our godlike powers. It’s one thing to rearrange bits and bobs of nature to create, say, an antibiotic or an atom bomb. But it’s quite another to cook up exotic blazons of matter, adding them like new spices to the cosmic stew. I’m amused to think of a future geologist like Olivine puzzling over weird taffylike wads, trying to figure out what chem lab sport might have spawned them.

All of these elements will ultimately show up as indisputable signs of our presence. We’re leaving tracks in the strata never seen before in Earth’s five billion years. What did you add to the fossil record today? The plastic from a six-pack or a water bottle? A midden of candy wrappers, plastic bags, and orange juice cans? Did you drive your car? If so, you’ve changed the weather by a whisker, and that, too, will ultimately add to the patterns in the rock, a legacy of our meddling from deep sea to outer space.

Monkeying with the Weather

How extraordinary that we’ve modified the whole big baggy atmosphere, where the carbon dioxide, now climbing to historic levels, is a third higher than even two hundred years ago. The synthetic fertilizers that plump up our crops churn out more nitrogen than all of the plants and microbes do naturally. Analyzing sedimentary core samples from Arctic lakes, future geologists like Olivine will see how we’ve addled the chemistry of the oceans and the air.

We’re but one hotshot species on a planet squiggling with life, and yet we’ve grown powerful enough to befuddle the world’s weather and sour all the oceans. That’s the speed and scale of our influence. On land, humans figure as a geologic agent comparable to the relentless power of erosion or volcanic eruption, and in the oceans, our impact is on par with an asteroid’s. The reef death we’ve caused will be visible in the fossil record. As a point of comparison, the last time reef death happened was sixty-five million years ago, when a real asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs and many other life forms.

Once you’ve glimpsed reef death, you don’t forget its lunar landscape. I’ve always loved scuba diving and the cell-tickling feel of being underwater. Offshore in Jamaica, I once swam through a button collector’s variety of vividly colored fish and was so spellbound that one hand automatically touched my chest and my eyes teared. My guide’s eyes questioned me through the fishbowl of his face mask. There was no way to mime that I wasn’t hurt or frightened, but jubilant, merely glad to the brink of tears. How do you scuba-sign wonder?

Are you in trouble? he signaled.

No, no, I answered emphatically. I’m okay… My heart is stirred—I put an open palm over my heart, then made a stirring motion in the water—and my eyes… I made a rain-falling movement beside one eye with my fingers.

Surface? he motioned, his knitted brow adding a question mark.

No! I signaled stiffly. I’m okay. Wait. Wait. I thought for a moment, then made the sign French chefs use in commercials, the gestural esperanto for This dish is perfection, making a purse of my fingers and exploding open the purse just after it touched my mouth. Then I swept a hand wide.

Even with the regulator stuffed in his mouth and his eyes distorted behind the faceplate, he made an exaggerated smile, yawning around the mouthpiece so that I could see he was smiling. He nodded his head in a magnified Yes!, then made an Okay sign with one hand and led me deeper, using his compass and surfacing once to check his direction by sighting the boat.

After a ten-minute swim, we suddenly came to a maze of underwater canyons thick with enormous sponges and coral fans, around which schools of circus-colored fish zigzagged. Plump purple sea pens with feathery quills stood in sand inkwells. Tiny tube worms—shaped like Christmas trees, feather dusters, maypole streamers, and parasols—jutted out of the coral heads. Sea relationships are sometimes like those in a Russian novel; a worm enters the larder of a fine, respectable coral to steal its food, and just stays there, unevicted. I moved my palm over a red-and-white-striped parasol, and in a flash it folded up its umbrella and dragged it back inside the coral. A game divers love to play with tube worms. Hocus-pocus and the tube worm vanishes.

On a coral butte just in front of us, a dark gorgonian jutted out between the canyon walls, its medusoid hair straggling in the current. I laughed. That gorgonian’s hair’s like my own, I thought. And then I remembered: We’re mainly saltwater, we carry the ocean inside us. That was the simple, stupefying truth—as a woman, I was a minute ocean, in the dark tropic of whose womb eggs lay coded as roe, floating in the sea that wet-nursed us all. I pulled my mask up and washed my face with saltwater, fitted it back on, and exhaled through my nose to clear it. From then on, I was hooked, and often returned to the sea to reexperience the visible links of that invisible chain.

I was lucky. When I returned to that same spot twenty years later, I found the bare bones of a deserted reef, a moonscape.

There’s no need to travel to the Caribbean to spot climate change’s handiwork—I see it in my New York backyard. Perhaps you do, too, if you take the time to look closely. The looking closely part is essential. For most people, everything may still seem normal, because the seasons come and go in a familiar way, even if one blows in stormier or exits drier than usual. For many of us, the changes are too subtle to notice as we go about our lives.

But clues abound, and not just in my own backyard. Global warming is fiddling with garden thermostats to such an extent that the National Arbor Day Foundation has redrawn the U.S. Hardiness Zone Map—which tells gardeners what and when to plant. For thirty years (as long as the maps have been drawn), Ithaca lay in frostbitten, forget-about-lavender-hued-roses zone 5. Now most of New York State is in the warmer planting zone (6) that used to lie farther south. The “what” and “when” to plant have changed, but not in a predictable way.

A row of ornamental cabbages (always annuals) has begun overwintering and sending up tall stalks of bushy yellow flowers for the first time. No one told the pansies, high summer blossoms, to call it quits in early winter. They keep blooming through snow showers, frost crackles, and quick melts… always with a pensive face. What became of all my Japanese beetles, those polychrome hedonists who used to mate in flesh piles, while eating, atop the roses? I haven’t seen any for three years. But the number of Lyme ticks and other insects has soared. When I first moved to upstate New York decades ago, no Lyme ticks trickled through the grass; the cold climate was too hostile. They usually begin their blood-sucking on the white-footed mouse. Last summer’s prolonged sizzle reduced the acorn crop, a mouse staple, and with fewer mice to hitch rides on and use as all-purpose canteen-nursery-gadabout-vectors for disease, the pesky parasite ticks began hopping aboard more humans. At least that’s how it seemed; people venturing across a meadow inevitably returned with a Lyme tick in tow.

Imagine if you arrived home from work one day to discover that your pet spaniel had morphed into a wolf. You know that dogs evolved from wolves that we domesticated and hybridized… you just didn’t expect to find one gnawing on the sofa leg. Something similar happened in my garden. A favorite yellow Canadian rose bush, well adapted to the cold climate, has been blooming faithfully and true for years. Like many other garden roses, it’s a hybrid produced by grafting domestic and wild strains together. However, last summer, the rose suddenly revealed its lurking Id. To my amazement, from its feral heart it launched flutelike canes of heavily-flowering, tiny white roses. The wild rose ribs sprang from the same trunk as the well-bred yellow tea rose ribs. It was like having Siamese twins, one of which was Neanderthal, the other Homo sapiens.

Heaven knows what it will do this summer. Wild roses are hardier, better adapted to unstable temperatures. Will climate change favor one or the other? Will all of the domesticated roses run wild? A garden is always full of surprises. Last summer, for the first time in the decades I’ve lived here, my yard was a deafening amphibian rave, where hundreds of croaking frogs (especially the drum-eared bullfrogs, whose croak should really belong to a snoring bull, and the smaller banjo-plucking green frogs), bleatingly love-sick, drowned out human conversation. This year all I expect is the unexpected.

Canadian scientists warn of fewer backyard ice-skating rinks and frozen ponds in the future, and in some regions none at all, because of winter’s waning bite. This inspired geographers at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, to found a website to track the effect of a warm climate on Canada’s tradition of thousands of icy flat playgrounds.

“We want outdoor rink lovers across North America and anywhere else in the world to tell us about their rinks,” they urge on RinkWatch.org.[5] “We want you to pin the location of your rink on our map, and then each winter record every day that it’s skateable. We will gather up all the information from all the backyard rinks and use it to track the changes in our climate.”

Many of Canada’s legendary ice hockey players learned to skate on such tiny rinks, and Canadians hold them dear. An invisible thorn in the ozone layer can be denied, but when backyard hockey season is delayed, people notice.

Not everyone is warming up. Jim River, Alaska, a grizzly bear’s backyard and a grizzled hiker’s paradise, set a record low of -80°F. Residents there said the air hurt wickedly to breathe; they could feel it grate on every cell inside the nose. Exposed skin and eyes burned. Spit froze before it struck the ground. Frostnip took its toll. After a short spell outside, as people stepped back indoors, eyeglasses fogged up and froze to the face.

From Colorado to British Columbia, due to twenty years of unusually warm weather, spruce and pine bark beetles have chewed through four million acres of trees. This is fabulous for the bark beetles, but bad news for all the drought-weakened trees. Wildfires gust across their dry remains, sending flares through vast swaths of vegetation, as in the historic wildfires that blackened over 170,000 acres of caramel-mesa-ed New Mexico, and the record-breaking wildfires in mountain-blessed Colorado.

These massive conflagrations are bad not just for timber harvesters and tree lovers but for anyone who thrives on oxygen-rich air, since forests are the lungs of the planet, inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. We inhale their flammable waste to stoke the fires in our cells. They inhale ours. Bears, humans, and trees are as seamlessly connected as in and out breaths. And all this ash lies down quiet as snowfall, slowly settling to leave its trace, our trace, as the fire-debris weaves into the geological record. A fine line perhaps, but indelible as the cinders of Vesuvius.

Frostbite and torched forests may be the extremes, but 2012 and 2013 were legendary scorchers throughout the United States. Across the heartland, around the church suppers, cicada songs, and quiet nights of teenagers sitting on the paint-peeling white bandstands in the middle of town, frying heat doomed crops and broke 29,300 high-temperature records. Fall drought withered crops in 80 percent of the country’s farmlands. Broad-brimmed-hatted, slow-drawling Texans saw the driest year since record-keeping began in 1895, drier even than the rawhide soil of the Dust Bowl. So dry that, as farms resorted to irrigation, public water supplies plummeted. The Lone Star State alone had $5 billion in damages. Not just from crop losses, either. The earth became so parched that it cracked all over like a callused heel, in the process wrenching apart water mains (forty in Fort Worth alone) and buckling the pavement on bridges and roads.

Worldwide, the past year ushered in record-breaking snowfalls, droughts, rains, floods, heat, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, even plagues of locusts. The whole bag of tricks, biblical in their proportions, including weather pranks we usually expect, but not all and everywhere and wound up to such an extreme. Taken as a whole, as one weatherworks out of balance, it understandably starches the mind, widens the eyes, and fills parents with worry about their children’s future. Every six years or so, the United Nations Panel on Climate Change issues a report. In September 2013, the panel of 209 lead authors and 600 contributing authors, from 39 nations, poring over 9,200 scientific publications, came to these landmark conclusions: global warming is “unequivocal,” sea levels are rising, ice packs are melting, and if we continue at this pace we “will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate.” However, they added, we can slow the process down if we begin at once.[6]

How the story plays out will be a tale told by the silent, everlasting rocks, in colorfully hued bandwidths. They’ll recall a time when Earth was swarmed over by intelligent apes who whipped the weather into something they hadn’t quite intended.

Yes, our tinkering has given Earth a low-grade fever, which we need to quickly calm before it climbs. But global warming won’t be tragic everywhere and for every species. That would only be true if Earth’s creatures, landforms, geology, waters, and climate were spread evenly around the planet, and they’re not. Earth is a patchwork of many different habitats, and climate change will visit them in uncanny ways: cool hot zones, heat cool zones, flood dry zones, dry temperate zones. Thanks to climate change, Europe’s growing season has been lengthening, with warm-season crops thriving farther north, to the delight of farmers (although in central and southern Europe, crops have suffered because of the extreme heat and drought). In Greenland, local farmers, seeing fertile soil for the first time, began avidly planting. Milder winters require less heating, which saves on energy, and travel and homesteading in the north is much easier in a warmer world. Not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, we had a famously balmy spell. During the Medieval Warm Period, from 950 to 1250, the Vikings found the lack of sea ice so good for travel that they established a colony in present-day Newfoundland.

A warmer world won’t be terrible for everyone, and it’s bound to inspire new technologies and good surprises, not just tragedy. Change is the byword everywhere, and if there’s one unchanging fact about humans it’s that we loathe change in nature, perhaps because we feel we can’t control it. We may thrive on changes in technology and locale, but we want nature to be permanent and predictable, even when shaken, like the world inside a snow globe. We yearn for continuity, and yet we live in a wildly changing world. We love life fiercely, and yet we’re creatures who die. These aren’t reconcilable paradoxes.

We may not be noticing all of our leavings in the fossil record, but from the melting ice-skating rinks of Canada and the paling reefs of Samoa to dry creeks in Australia and receding glaciers in Chamonix, people are noticing the rude change in weather. We are beginning to see, firsthand, how our tinkering with the climate touches the globe from top to bottom. In my own extended backyard of New York State, the new normal recently wore the name of Sandy.

Gaia in a Temper

The weather app Budi touches opens with a fright that his wild relatives have witnessed firsthand many times: torrential rains, snorting winds, and trees snapping—the familiar trees that orangutans mentally map for food and travel, just as we do houses, streets, and stores. Lately, though, whipped up by climate change, hurricanes like this one are growing to unforeseen and unimaginable fury.

A FREAK WINTER storm and tropical hurricane rolled into one, Sandy drew breath off Africa’s west coast, barreled across the Caribbean, and charged up the eastern seaboard of the United States, swinging left with a gut punch that smashed in houses, sucked boats out of harbors and hurled them, masts and rigging flying, into front doors and garages.

Only a day before Halloween, the scene was beyond macabre, as if a Chagall painting had suddenly come to life in a 90 mph whirlwind of whizzing trees, animals, and objects. People unlucky enough to be caught outside were pulled sideways down the streets. It was as if a monster were wrestling electrical lines to the ground, clawing up roads, turning neighborhoods into sandboxes. Piers and boardwalks crumpled like cardboard as the superstorm slapped them into the sea.

In this most densely settled area of the United States, prone to both hurricanes and nor’easters, record tides are usually measured in fractions of an inch. A major hell-raiser, Sandy even shattered the record for record-keeping—its tides had to be measured in feet. In one seaside community in Queens, after tidal surges beat the local record by three feet, a twenty-foot wave washed the whole research station into the ocean. In another town, the storm smashed furnaces and gas pipes, igniting fires that leapt from home to home, where doubly stunned residents found their first floors flooded and their roofs alight. The homes burned like surreal Fourth of July sparklers. In the beachfront town of Breezy Point, Queens, a blaze devoured 110 homes in one neighborhood while firefighters struggled to reach them through fast-flowing streets. All three regional airports shut down and canceled twenty thousand flights; Amtrak halted service to the whole Northeast Corridor. Forty-three million gallons of water gushed through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. The pounding ocean filled tunnels and subways and submerged lower Manhattan, where a flotilla of cars bobbed like colorful beetles.

I’ll never get used to sweetheart names—Debby, Valerie, Helene—referring to land-scrubbing, wave-rearing, homewrecking, cyclonic mayhem. The name Sandy sounds like it belongs to an innocent, sun-kissed surfer. I’m not sure why we choose to domesticate cataclysmic violence in this way. It’s too reminiscent of World War II pilots painting their girlfriends’ names on warplanes, a paradox captured with lyric poignancy by the pilot and poet Randall Jarrell, who wrote, “In bombers named for girls, we burned / The cities we had learned about in school.”

Before the frenzy was over, Sandy killed fifty people in the United States and sixty-nine in the Caribbean, flattened the homes and gutted the lives of thousands, and left millions more without food, water, or electricity. She also dropped three feet of wet snow in West Virginia and the Carolinas, and Tennessee received the heaviest snowfall on record. At times it seemed as if Gaia were so pissed off she finally decided to erase her workmanship, atomizing the whole shebang and flicking our Blue Marble back into the mouth of the supernovas where our metals were first forged.

Sandy is on my mind because it recently besieged my state, but 2012 also saw massive flooding in Australia, Brazil, and Rwanda; fifty major wildfires in Chile; wicked drought in the Sahel; record-setting cold, rain, and snow in Europe; and typhoons in China destroying sixty thousand homes. My head is still spinning from 2011’s Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Who can forget Louisiana’s 2005 ordeal with Katrina? And, dwarfing all of these, Haiyan, the most powerful typhoon ever recorded, which charged through the Philippines in 2013 and killed over five thousand people.

New York and New Jersey had felt relatively safe, until Sandy rearranged their silhouettes, gouging inlets and bays, creating new marshes and sandbars, changing the map, literally and metaphorically. Climate change hits hard when it batters at childhood memories. Watching news footage of homes collapsing, over and over, I kept returning to the beacon of Atlantic City, where my family spent brief summer holidays. There were no casinos lining the boardwalk then, no fancy restaurants. But what a delicious, hot, sandy carnival it offered kids. The wide beach was duned deep with scorching sand that became soothingly damp a few inches down—the perfect consistency for sculpting.

The boardwalk held endless fascinations, including saltwater taffy vendors, Belgian waffles with whipped cream and strawberries, a penny arcade with a mechanical gypsy fortune-teller and Skee-Ball bowling machines, a kazoo-playing man in front of the 5 & 10, the giant Planters Peanut Man, the charcoal artists who did quick portraits, and the crablike processions of three-wheeled wicker chairs. Because the wooden planks were warped, riding over them became a bumbling, creaking amusement ride. Pushed along, we laughed as high-heeled women kept getting stuck in cracks between the boards. And then there was Steel Pier, with all of its amusements and its diving horse.

All the run-of-the-mills neighborhoods rely on, and the balm of meaning absorbed by homes, objects, streets, and piers—all gone.

Hurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our best efforts and prophesies, nature remains unpredictable. Even aided by hindcasts, as forecasters call reading the entrails of past hurricane seasons to predict the future, we really don’t know what stew of storms the Atlantic will dish up, especially now that we’ve dumped in strange seasonings. We can’t yet predict the location of the next typhoon or tornado, even with all our high-tech weather instruments, any more than we know the final scores of the Caribbean’s upcoming cricket matches.

For people living in coastal communities, the sea has always proved a generous or temperamental neighbor. But at least they knew broadly what mood swings to expect. Experts are duly unnerved. “Freak weather events happen, right, but twice in the last two years?” said meteorologist Jeff Masters. “I think something’s up,” he added. “I think we’ve crossed over to a new climate state where the new normal is intense weather events that kill lots of people.”

YUP’IK ESKIMOS HAVE spent over a decade trying to relocate to higher ground. On the northwest coast of Alaska, only four hundred miles south of the Bering Strait, in the tiny Yup’ik village of Newtok, the residents can smell the salty breath of disaster, robed in liquid gray and pulling at their feet. Sabrina Warner suffers from a recurring nightmare: waking terrified to find the ice-clotted sea crashing in, washing the bed out from under her and collapsing her home. She and her young son swim for their lives, clinging to rooftops as their village is washed away. But there’s nowhere safe to shelter. One roof slips from her fingers after another, until no harbor remains but the roof of the school, the largest building in the village, perched like a precarious osprey nest atop twenty-foot beams that have been driven into soft earth. And then that, too, is swallowed by the blue-black mouth of the sea.

This is a plausible nightmare. As the sun-reflecting ice melts, the planet is thawing much faster in the far north, where winters have warmed by 3°F since 1975 (double the world average). The widening riverbed and marshes of the Ninglick River, which snakes around three sides of the village, are tearing at its innards before pouring into the sea. Any day now the whole village and many neighboring indigenous communities will sink into the melting permafrost, as if it were white quicksand, to join the realm of polar bears and narwhals in the rich seams of Eskimo lore. By 2017, if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ predictions are right, numerous native villages along the northwestern coast and barrier islands will be in the same fix.

As America’s first climate-change refugees, the Yup’ik have appealed to the state and federal government for help, but, according to international law, people only qualify as refugees if they’re fleeing violence, war, or persecution. And federal disaster relief laws only grant money to repair infrastructure and damage in place, not to help with relocation after slow-motion disaster. Our humanitarian laws aren’t keeping up with the Anthropocene’s environmental realities. Robin Bronen, an Anchorage-based human rights lawyer and a frequent visitor to Newtok, is working tirelessly to change them.

“This is completely a human rights issue,” she argues. “When you are talking about a people [the Yup’ik tribe] who have done the least to contribute to our climate crisis facing such dramatic consequences as a result of climate change, we have a moral and legal responsibility to respond and provide the funding needed so that these communities are not in danger.”

When the residents of Newtok do move to their new town of Mertarvik on Nelson Island, a mere nine miles away, most will return to their familiar ice-coast life of subsistence fishing, but they’ll be exemplars of a different epoch.

Tuvalu, another palm-frond island country in the South Pacific, has begun evacuating its people to New Zealand. And the president of Kiribati, an island nation of thirty-two atolls sprinkled across 3.5 million kilometers of ocean between Australia and Hawaii, is negotiating with Fiji to buy five thousand acres of land so that his population of over 102,000 can relocate. One Kiribati native, Ioane Teitiota, appealed for refugee status to Auckland, New Zealand, arguing that none of Kiribati’s atolls is more than two meters above sea level, and therefore his life was endangered by the rising seas of global warming. The judge who heard his case found the claim novel, but not persuasive.

Brainstorming from Equator to Ice

Such claims may soon become less novel, but fortunately humans are gifted with a taste for the novel that’s leading us to some innovative responses—not only old-style mechanical solutions like fossil-fuel-powered Industrial Age steel floodgates, but promising new ways of addressing root causes and harnessing solar power.

Some countries have been stalwartly battling tides for years. Maeslantkering, one of the largest moving structures on Earth, is part of a network of sluices, dams, dykes, levees, and storm surge barriers protecting the Netherlands from the blustery North Sea. Galveston, Texas, is designing what will be the United States’s longest sea wall, affectionately known as the “Ike Dike,” to protect the low-lying city from impending floods. In Venice, the $5.5 billion MOSE Project—seventy-eight mobile, underwater steel gates—will isolate the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic Sea and shield the city from floods.

In London, gated crusaders are already at their posts. Like a row of giant knights standing up to their necks in water, armor gleaming, weapons hidden, the Thames Barrier spans the river near Woolwich, downstream of central London. Behind each helmet looms an antique vision of the brain, all levers and hydraulics. Trapped in futuristic folded steel, the fixtures appear lighter than water, though in reality each gate weighs about 3,300 tons. Altogether they can close ranks beneath the waves to protect the city from storm surges.

Like so many other rivers, the Thames is not as wide as it used to be. We encrust the banks of our rivers with shops and houses, nosing out into the water, as if we long to be osmotically part of the current, in the process narrowing channels and putting our lives and property at risk. London has flooded famously in the past—307 people died in the 1953 flood—and with the world’s sea levels rising, and the city steadily sinking at a foot a century, it needs not so much Knights Templar as Knights Temperature.

In mild days and years, the gates lie open, and you can sail between the five-story-high helmets, admiring their sleek beauty and wondering what London’s son John Milton would have made of them in the 1600s. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” he wrote in a sonnet about his blindness. He meant himself, serving God, but the Knights of the Order of the Barrier also stand and wait, reminding Londoners of climate change’s reality, and how it will play out in their backyards, streets, and wharves if they don’t take steps. Meanwhile gleaming guards defend the shores. Peer into their faces and darkness greets you. They will serve a few years more before their metal weakens and they’re replaced by newer and abler paladins.

There is something ironic and fitting about using the very process that has led to trouble—the burning of fossil fuels—to forge the protectors to combat the ongoing sequelae of that very climate change, technological lords of deliverance we hope will protect us from ourselves. Better to harness the sun.

One of the most heartening solar stories comes from northwestern Bangladesh, home to the world’s largest floodplain. Even though it’s not raining at the moment, the humidity is nearly 100 percent, and the air feels thick as rubber. The monsoon season is ending, and though the sky can still rip with fierce downpours, children wearing colorful tunics and trousers hurry to the riverbank to board their solar-powered school boat. Older villagers wait for the health boat or library boat or agricultural extension boat. Thanks to one man’s ingenuity and generosity of spirit, hope floats whenever it floods.

Mohammed Rezwan, an architect and climate-change activist who grew up here, ached to see his country being ravaged by ever-worsening floods. He’s noticed that as temperatures rise and more snow melts in the Himalayas, more water surges across the Bangladeshi floodplain. Every year one-third of Bangladesh lies underwater, as if a giant eraser annually scrubs away the hand-drawn pictures of family life.

Rezwan decided that he didn’t want to design buildings only to see them and whole communities washed away before his eyes. So, in 2008, he founded Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha (which means “self-reliance”), a nonprofit that deploys a fleet of one hundred boats with shallow drafts that can skim across the lowlands, serving as libraries, schools, health clinics, and three-tiered floating gardens. He persuaded local boat builders to outfit these traditional bamboo boats with solar panels, computers, video conferencing, and Internet access. The fleet also provides volunteer doctors, solar-powered hurricane lanterns, and bicycle-powered pumps. Solar batteries on each boat can power cell phones and computers, and people may recharge lamps to take home—provided their children keep attending school. Thus far, the project reaches 90,000 families, and it expects to reach another 81,500 families by 2015.

Because people become stranded and can’t feed themselves in flood season, Rezwan invented a technique for them he calls “solar water farming.” As he explains: “The system includes floating beds made of water hyacinth (to grow vegetables), a portable circular enclosure created by fishing net and bamboo strips (to raise fish), and a floating duck coop powered by solar lamps. It has a recycling system—duck manure is used as fish food, cold-water hyacinth beds are sold as organic fertilizer, and the sun energy lights up the duck coop to maintain the egg production.”

So giggling children attend school, even during flood months, and their families can produce food and clean water despite the deluges. In this way, if monsoons or conflicts push people from their homes, the flotilla creates lifesavers of education, medicine, food, lighting, and communication.

Rezwan can’t single-handedly fight climate change, but his brilliantly simple solution is helping people adapt. The words “adaptation” and “mitigation” are appearing more and more often in the lexicon of climate scientists, who use them to cover practical (and impractical) responses to climate change.

Remember blue-green algae, to whom we owe our oxygen-besotted lives? One controversial idea is seeding the Antarctic Ocean with iron to trigger the growth of such algae. Algae thrive by absorbing sunlight and carbon dioxide, which they use to forge chlorophyll, but for that they need iron. As algae soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they sink down to the ocean floor and die. Scientists aren’t sure yet if widespread “iron fertilization” is safe for ocean animals, so they recently tried a small test, dumping iron powder into an Antarctic whirlpool (so that it wouldn’t spread). Sure enough, a giant bloom of algae diatoms arose, sucking carbon dioxide from the air, and after a few weeks many diatoms carried pearls of CO₂ to the bottom and died. Would it work safely on a large scale? That’s the big unknown. Geoengineering is a highly controversial plaything. We won’t know except by trying, and a bad outcome could be deadly. We’ve already been geoengineering the planet for decades, unintentionally, by saturating the air with CO₂ and the oceans with fertilizer—not with good results.

Geoengineering and adaptation ideas run the gamut from shucks-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that to plain nutty. The monochrome Earth method includes painting cities and roads white, covering the deserts in white plastic, and genetically engineering crops to be a paler color—all to reflect sunlight back into space. Or installing roof tiles that turn white in hot weather, black in cold. More bizarre tech fixes include firing trillions of tiny mirrors into space to form a hundred-thousand-mile sunshade for Earth, or building artificial mini-volcanoes that spew sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere to block sunlight. There’s even been a “modest proposal” that we genetically engineer future humans to be tiny so that they’ll need fewer resources.

At the other end of the globe, on the Norwegian coast, a colossal Carbon Capture Storage facility, owned jointly by Norway and three oil companies, is bagging carbon emissions before they’re released into the atmosphere and storing them in underground vaults. Carbon prisons are still too expensive to be practical everywhere, and not worry-free, but many countries are following suit. In a quest for the first technology that can efficiently, economically pull CO₂ out of the air, Richard Branson is offering a tempting prize of $25 million.[7]

Research by the cell biologist Len Ornstein shows that if the Australian Outback and the Sahara were forested, they’d absorb all of the CO₂ we’re pumping into the atmosphere every year. Obviously not an easy venture, it’s technologically possible. Grassroots indigenous, nongovernmental groups have already planted over fifty-one million trees in Africa. In time the forests, absorbing water from the soil and releasing it back into the atmosphere through their leaves, will generate their own clouds, rain, and shade, cooling things down, and providing the bonus of sustainably grown wood for their host countries.

Meanwhile, the eastern coast of the United States, from Boston to Florida, needs widespread sea barriers, preferably of sand, and also artificial barriers and gates wherever they’re workable. They needn’t be poetic knights of deliverance like London’s. They might even be a version of the natural reefs and oyster beds that once flanked the American coast.

Trillions of oysters lined the eastern shores, building up knuckle-shelled beds that blunted the storm surges, capturing waves on the reefs, where they collapsed before they could blast down the estuaries. The Hudson River estuary was famed for the quality of its oysters. Oysters closest to shore also filtered the water, which made the habitat ideal for marsh grasses, whose root systems, clinging to the land, kept it from eroding.

We’ve largely destroyed that long, sweeping natural barricade. Now, as hurricane surges pummel cities and harbors, we’re starting to realize what we’ve lost, not just in small innocent-seeming meals of wild-gathered shellfish but through toxic runoff from cities and farms. And it’s the same the world over—85 percent of the world’s oyster reefs have vanished since the end of the nineteenth century.

To protect New York City, the landscape architect Kate Orff favors an archipelago of artificial reefs built from piles of “rocks, shells, and fuzzy rope,” to attract oysters, because oyster beds naturally act as wave attenuators. In time, the oyster-encrusted barriers would filter the water and also serve as a kind of ecological glue. “Infrastructure isn’t separate from us, or it shouldn’t be,” Orff explains. “It’s among us, it’s next to us, embedded in our cities and public spaces.”

Blue Revolution

“Mariculture,” I say, floating the image of a vertical ocean garden in my mind, as I climb into a heavy, buoyant, safety-orange worksuit designed for extended periods on cold water.

“Think of it as 3D farming that uses the entire water column to grow a variety of species,” Bren Smith says, closing his own suit over a black-and-red-checked flannel shirt and jeans, zipping the fish teeth of ankle zippers, and latching the belt. This is just the beginning of his vision for an elaborate network of small, family-owned, organic, and sustainable aquafarms arranged along the East Coast—oysters in beds under curtains of kelp—to help subdue storm surges while also providing food and energy to local communities.

Climate change is especially hard on fishermen and on farmers. The thirty-nine-year-old seaman sitting across from me in a dinghy on a frostbitten morning in Stony Creek, Connecticut, is both. Bren has a slender build with powerful arms and shoulders, a sign of his rope-heaving, cage-hauling trade. Although he now shaves both face and head, his plumage for years was natural red hair and long beard, hints of which remain. With his flame-orange watch cap, cinnamon five-o’clock shadow, and rusty-blond eyebrows, he is a study in reds, the long wavelengths of visible light.

We’re not anticipating a stumble overboard, but like many a fisherman Bren doesn’t swim, and the suit adds needed warmth through high winds and snow-thunder in the recent cannonade of winter storms.

A perennial mariner, he grew up in Petty Harbour, a five-hundred-year-old Newfoundland town with eleven painted wooden houses filled with fisherfolk and a salt-peeled wharf with jostling boats. On the rocky shore, a boy could find lobster cages, floats, anchors, ropes, seaweed-tangled shells, fish and bird skeletons, and tall tales. So it’s not surprising that, at fifteen, he dropped out of high school and ran away to sea. In Maine he worked on lobster boats, in Massachusetts on cod boats, and in Alaska’s Bering Strait on trawlers, longliners, and crab boats. At one point he factory-fished for McDonald’s.

“Do you think of yourself as a fisherman or a farmer?” I ask.

“A farmer now. It’s more like growing arugula than facing the dangers of the sea—which, believe me, I’ve seen.”

In a sense 3D farming is rotational agriculture. Bren harvests kelp in the winter and early spring; red seaweed in June and September; oysters, scallops, and clams year-round; mussels in the spring and fall. At least that’s the theory. Hurricane Irene tore up his oyster beds, which he promptly reseeded, knowing he’d have to wait two more years for harvest. Hurricane Sandy smothered the oyster beds yet again. Clams have a better chance of surviving a hurricane because they at least have a strong foot and can move a little. But oysters really are trapped. They don’t even move to eat or mate. Without the reefs, storm surges churn them up, and as the silt smothers the oysters they die, beginning the slow process of joining the fossil record. Right along with the Model Ts that sank when the Long Island Sound froze over in 1917–1918 and foolhardy souls tried driving across it.

“Ironically,” Bren says thoughtfully, “I may be one of the first green fishermen to be wiped out by climate change.”

But Bren is upbeat and confident. Fortunately, he was able to harvest some mussels in the thick of a snowstorm, just before Blizzard Nemo hit. Kelp, at least, is a post-hurricane-season crop. After Sandy he began planting the year’s kelp, and now, in mid-February, it’s nearly ready for harvest.

Unmooring the dinghy, Bren hops back in, and we motor out to his solar-powered fishing boat, placid as a tiny icebreaker half a mile offshore. En route, we weave through the Thimble Islands, an archipelago of islets, some with majestic cliffs of 600-million-year-old pink granite. Many are topped by stilted, turreted, luxe storybook houses with long wooden staircases winding down to the water.

A receding glacier left behind this spill of islands: massive granite knobs, stepping-stone slabs, and submarine boulders and ledges, some of which only appear at low tide. Named after wild thimbleberries, not thimble-sized cuteness, the cluster includes Money Island, Little Pumpkin, Cut-in-Two Island, Mother-in-Law Island, Hen Island, and East Stooping Bush Island, among many others—between 100 and 365 (depending on the height of the tide, how you define an island, and if you cherish the idea of an island for each day of the year), with around twenty-three of them inhabited by people during the summer. Harbor seals and birds abound. Each island is cloaked in its own gossip and lore, thanks in part to famous sojourners, from President Taft to Captain Kidd and Ringling Brothers’ Tom Thumb.

As saltwater and river water mix in the estuary, it offers a feeding and breeding refuge to 170 species of fish, 1,200 species of invertebrates, and flocks of migratory birds. Horse and Outer islands are wildlife preserves. For Bren it’s a fertile garden visited in summer by flocks of seasonal guests and in winter by tumultuous storms, but always spawning life above and below the surface. Today, in arc-light winter, with a chill wind slicing around the water streets, the garden is icy-blue and glaring, with air that’s clear as a bugle call.

“The granite cliffs are amazing,” I say, inhaling their feline beauty. Flecked with velvet-black biotite and streaks of cream and gray quartz, in the speckled sunlight, with the boisterous sea slapping at their base, they look more animal than mineral.

“It’s the same pink granite that helped build the Statue of Liberty,” Bren explains, “and the Lincoln Memorial and the Library of Congress. In Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the architect stands at the edge of a local granite quarry…”

“Full of capitalist machismo, as I recall.”

“Exactly!” Bren says, blue eyes flashing. “I came here in part to erase that image and that extreme ideology.”

I know the passage he means, the one in which Howard Roark, clothed only in his grandiosity, stands above the quarry, with all of nature his raw material, something to be devoured by the few powerful men who deserve to rule the world:

These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.

“I pillaged the seas,” Bren admits in a conscience-stricken voice. “When I look back over my life, I see it as a story of ecological redemption. I was a kid working thirty-hour shifts, fishing around the clock, and I absolutely loved it because I got to be on the open sea. But, you know, we scoured the ocean floor, ripping up whole ecosystems. We fished illegally in protected waters. I’ve personally thrown tens of thousands of dead bycatch back into the sea. It was the worst kind of industrial fishing.”

There was a time when cod grew large enough to swallow a child. But fishermen have been systematically harvesting the largest fish, and the cod had to mate earlier and at a smaller size to survive as a species. The successful ones passed on their genes. Now a cod will fit on a dinner plate. Soon there will only be small fish in the sea. In the process of reducing them we’ve also remodeled our vision of cod—from a behemoth that could feed a whole family to a small and harmless fish. Even those are vanishing, along with other marine life forms, in one of the greatest mass extinctions ever to befall the planet. For Bren, the whole foraging, hunter-gatherer mentality has led to decades of what he thinks of as a kind of piracy, minus the romance.

“I went back to Newfoundland once it was clear to me that fishing like that wasn’t sustainable. I loved the sea and I could see the destruction, and I became much more conscious of the ecosystem. After that I went to work on some of the salmon farms, but I saw the same sort of industrial farming. Not good for the environment, and not good for people. Wild fishing and farming fish—neither one was sustainable. The sea was in my soul; I knew I needed to work on the sea. But I was part of a new generation that wanted something different. So how could I evolve into a green fisherman, I wondered?

“I ended up here in Long Island Sound right at the time there was a movement to bring young fishermen under forty back into the fisheries. They opened up shellfish grounds. You see, it’s very hard to get shellfish grounds because they’re all owned by about six families going back generations. But when they opened up these grounds ten years ago, I came and started aquafarming. I thought, okay, on this sixty-acre plot of ocean, what species can I choose that will do several things to create sustainable food in a good way? And can I think beyond that and actually restore the ocean while we’re farming it, and leave the world better than we started, but also grow great food?

“Suddenly I found myself growing food in the most efficient, environmentally sustainable way possible—vertically. And it grows quickly. The kelp will grow eight to twelve feet in a five-month period. And the whole food column is nourishing. The oysters, mussels, and scallops provide low-fat protein and all sorts of important vitamins: selenium, zinc, magnesium, iron, B vitamins, omega-3s. We’ve analyzed the sea vegetables—different forms of algae like kelp—and they create lots of vitamins and minerals and nine different amino acids, plus omega-3s. Could you actually have something called ‘ocean vegetarianism’? I think so. During World War II, both the Germans and the British came up with this plan to deal with starvation, which they thought was going to be a huge risk in World War II, and actually they did all these studies and began feeding people algae. There’s also some modern research that if you created a network of small seaweed farms around the world that added up to the size of Washington State, you could feed the whole world. Now, you’re not going to get everyone to eat seaweed, but it shows the potential that’s there.

“This is Mookie,” he says, as we pull up to his cobalt-blue fishing boat with a sky-blue cabin door and a white deck sole that must once have matched. Thanks to the rubbing of boots, cages, ropes, and splintery dock, a trifle of paint has worn away to reveal a thin deckle-edge of sky blue.

We climb aboard, hoist anchor, and chug to his patch of ocean, a flowing field dark as gravy. Small gobs of sea spit trail the boat. Gray-and-white herring gulls spiral above, following us as they would any large predator, their yellow eyes hunting for small fish churned up to the surface.

Dropping anchor, we winch up a heavy cage and swing it carefully onto a built-in wooden bench. The cold breeze, snorting and blowing, is full of turning knives. I’m glad of the heavy worksuit, but it’s cumbersome and my movements feel moonwalk slow.

Bren pops the lid to reveal a vault of about three hundred oysters and a mix of sea creatures, including starfish, small fronds of orange algae, and a necklace of round off-white periwinkle egg capsules that look like buttons of horn or coral.

“Look at this,” he says, slicing an egg open with his teeth and extracting tiny seeds on the tip of a knife blade. “They’re snail eggs, and they actually look like miniature snails.”

Amazingly, they do. Periwinkles, flavorful sea snails, have been part of English, Irish, Asian, and African cuisine for millennia. Clinging to rocks (or oyster cages) to steady themselves, they feed on phytoplankton. But these freeloaders aren’t welcome among the oysters. Nor is the squishy round sea squirt, or the translucent segmented mantis shrimp, or the cascade of olive-green sea grapes, or the broken shells. Back they all return to the sea, except for the mass of tiny open-jawed barnacles encrusting the mesh cages. Those have mortared themselves in place and will have to wait to sink with the oysters.

Gulls swim through the sky as we pour the oysters into shallow bins on a wooden table. Our job today is to “rough up” the oysters—not injure, but stress them so that they’ll form tougher shells. Much as muscles build if you exercise them, oysters thicken their shells when tossed by the tide. Idle oysters need exercise, just as idle humans do. Without struggle, strength won’t grow. The human parallel plays with my mind; then the cold blows the thought away, and I reach for a pair of rubber gloves.

“Knead them like bread,” Bren says, showing me how.

Catching a dozen or so in my open fingers, I roll them forward with the base of my palms, then claw them back gently and repeat the undulating motion. I have become the tide.

“We touch them every five weeks,” he explains, “to make sure they’ll grow strong.”

“It sounds like you feel pretty close to them.”

“They’re like family. I plant them, I’m with them for two years, watch them grow, touch them regularly. I know every oyster personally.”

“By name?”

He laughs. “Not quite. Not yet.”

“They’re really beautiful.” I pause to pick up one of the Thimble Island Salts and look at its deeply cupped shell and golden hue, purple patches, iridescent luster. Some resemble a bony hand, others a craggy mountain range.

When Bren opens one with a knife and offers it to me, I can’t refuse. Oyster-proud, he waits for my response. Not an oyster connoisseur, I just let my taste buds speak: “Incredibly salty, silky, smooth, plump as a mitten. It tastes like a bite of ocean.”

A Proustian memory transports me to the coast of Brittany, in the shadow of Mont Saint-Michel, where people also harvest the sea. There are huge tides there, and the water is very saline—perfect conditions for raising oysters, one of the great delicacies of Brittany. I remember them tasting salty, too, but different, slightly metallic with a whisper of tea and brass. Michel de Montaigne thought oysters tasted like violets. But the flavor of oysters varies depending on their environment, and I’ve read of some that leave an aftertaste of cucumber or melon.

“Good.” He smiles. “If one doesn’t taste good I feel like a failed father.”

Returning the roughed-up oysters to their cage, we lower them back into place, swing the boat around, and check on the kelp dangling from black buoys along a hundred-foot line.

“Walking the line,” Bren says, as he eyes each string of kelp prayer flags, barely visible beneath the cloud-shadowed water. Snagging one up with a red-handled hook, he hoists it out of the water, and I’m surprised to see a long array of curly-edged kelp ribbons, about three inches wide and a yard long, some with faint moiré stripes. Like land plants, kelp photosynthesizes, but not just the leaves, the whole kelp. As a result, it pulls five times more CO₂ from the air than land plants do.

A strand feels surprisingly dry and smooth, and sunlight glows through its golden-brown cheek. A longtime staple in Asian cultures, kelp (and other algae) adds depth to Canadian, British, and Caribbean cuisines. It’s also been harvested for medicinal use since ancient times. Suffused with minerals, more than any other food, it harbors most of those found in human blood and benefits thyroid, hormone, and brain health. It also boasts anticancer, anticoagulant, and antiviral properties. It’s the “secret ingredient” in the posh La Mer line of skin creams, among others. Its alginates are used to thicken everything from pudding and ice cream to toothpaste, even the living cells poured by 3D bioprinters.

“Try some,” he says, offering me course two.

I taste a piece of kelp curl, which is chewy and rather tasteless, more texture than flavor, but perfect for noodling with sesame oil or in miso soup, as I’ve often eaten it in Japanese restaurants. Bren sells oysters and kelp to local residents and restaurants and to chefs in Manhattan.

“I think of this actually as ‘climate farming,’” Bren says, “because the kelp soaks up huge amounts of carbon and can easily be turned into biofuel or organic fertilizer. So I’m in conversation with companies, NGOs, and researchers right now. Kelp is over 50 percent sugar. The Department of Energy did a study that showed if you took an area half the size of Maine and just grew kelp, you could produce enough biofuel to replace oil in the U.S. That’s stunning! And without the negatives of growing land-based biofuel, which by the way is actually terrible. It wastes a lot of water, fertilizer, and energy. But here you can have a closed-energy farm, using zero fresh water, zero fertilizer, and zero air, while providing fuel for local communities. I grow this kelp here for food, but you could plant it in the Bronx River or in front of sewage treatment plants, which would reduce their polluting. Or you could grow kelp for biofuels.

“Over the past ten years I’ve been struggling with all of these things and trying to figure out how they could come together. Think about it. Growing food in the ocean: no fertilizer, no air, no soil, no water. None of these things that are hugely energy-intensive and huge climate risks to both freshwater and soil. When you put all of this together it’s so exciting. It’s so exciting! I can almost smell the possibility of a blue revolution joining the green revolution. And because it’s vertical farming, it will have a very small footprint.”

Not everyone agrees with his methods, especially old-style environmentalists, which he’s the first to point out.

“Now there’s a real pushback, of course, from some conservationists, because people think of the oceans as these beautiful wild spaces—which I’m so sympathetic to because I’ve spent my life on the ocean. But we’re facing a brutal new reality,” he says, his face aflame with resolve. “If we ignore the greatest environmental crisis of our generation, our wild oceans will be dead oceans. Ironically, climate change may force us to develop our seas in order to save them. We need to do that and also reserve large swaths of the oceans as marine conservation parks. This won’t solve every problem we’re facing, but it will begin to help.”

Behind all of Bren’s enthusiasm is a wave of widely shared concern about how climate change is acidifying the seas. He’s part of a transitional generation that feels the urgency of reconciling their lifestyle with the planet’s health. Call it what you will, pioneering or bioneering, because of his commitment, he was invited to join the Young Climate Leaders Network, which supports a small group of “innovative leaders and visionaries, including many who operate largely outside of the traditional environmental community, working for climate solutions.”

Bren’s eyes rest on the water. “There’s no doubt, this will mean reimagining the oceans, which is heart-wrenching and controversial for a lot of people who revere the oceans as some of the last wild places on Earth, places untouched by human hands.”

Yet the truth is that oceans are not untouched by human hands. In 2007, owners of the only salmon farm in Ireland woke one day to find its hundred thousand salmon devoured by a horde of jellyfish. Throughout the world’s oceans, trillions of umbrella, parachute, and bell-shaped jellyfish have been swarming, lured by rising temperatures, nutrient-rich agricultural runoff, and pollution. With semitransparent stealth, they sneak up on flounder, salmon, and other large fish favored by human fishermen and colonize a slew of habitats, where they eat or oust the local fish. Oceana Europe, which works to restore and protect the world’s oceans, attributes the soaring number of jellyfish to climate change and the human overfishing of tuna, swordfish, and other natural predators. City-dwellers are combating blooms of jellyfish in Tokyo, Sydney, Miami, and other harbors. During one recent summer, record numbers invaded the shallows of South Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. In Georgia, on one Saturday alone, Tybee Island Ocean Rescue reported two thousand serious stings.

The sea is a spirit level, a pantry, a playground, a mansion rowdy with life, a majestic reminder of our origins, another kind of body (a body of water), and female because of her monthly tides. But her bones are growing brittle, her brine turning ever more acidic from all the CO₂ we’ve slathered into the air and all the fertilizer runoff from our fields. While that’s terrible for creatures like coral, oysters, mussels, and clams, whose calcium shells can soften and dissolve, the warmth is a tonic for starfish, which are roaming farther north in throngs. Until, that is, their shellfish prey vanish.

“Environmentalists have been asking the wrong question,” Bren says after a moment. “It’s not just about: How can we save the oceans? How can we protect the sea animals? I agree, all of that’s important. But we also need to flip our way of thinking and ask: How can the oceans save us? How can it provide food, jobs, safety, and a sustainable way of life? I’m convinced the answer is ocean conservation with symbiotic green farms.”

Last thing, we check the remaining crop of mussels, which means back-straining, heave-hauling them up from the depths where they’re filling their mesh socks nicely, growing through the lattices like shiny black buttons, still too small for harvesting. So back they descend, too young for saffron cream sauce. I can see why he finds this part of his workday like checking on a nursery.

Scanning the lapping ripples of the Sound, it doesn’t look like an industrial landscape at all. And yet the amount of food growing below the water is incredible. There are two tons of kelp on Bren’s longlines alone. I like Bren’s “symbiotic” way of thinking. We billions of creative, problem-solving humans don’t have to be parasites in our environment—we have the technology, the understanding, and the desire to become ecologically sustaining symbionts.

On our return to Stony Creek harbor, we again pass the island-perched village of Victorian mansions and salt-white cottages, with stone chimneys for burning up yesterday’s disappointments, rain-rattled windows, sea-spying porches, and wind-worn trees and gardens. And always the deep and dazzling blue of the Sound, with hidden reefs and ledges, devious currents corkscrewing just below the surface, and, during storms, waves running like greyhounds.

The new dock looks trim, clean, and stubbornly well anchored against hurricanes. A pair of black cormorants perches on a rocky knob, and Bren gestures a welcome. Superstition tells of drowned fishermen returning as hungry cormorants, dressed in black rain gear, with webbed feet instead of boots.

Despite the cold breeze there’s a warm afternoon sun. Soon the tide will be walking in and the pink-legged seagulls skimming the shoreline. In a few months the summer crowds will arrive to eat fresh seafood, attend the puppet theater, fall asleep to the slurred voice of the ocean, and enjoy the ecstasy of coastal life and clean water, with time strapped to their wrists.