GODPARENT FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

THE GRAND CANYON:  

ENVIRONMENTAL ICON OF THE EARTH SYSTEM --

AND FOR US AS A PART OF IT

Let's stand at Mather Point on the Grand Canyon's South Rim, looking out over the world's most famous layout of this Earth’s geological epochs--

not all of them, but some of the earliest, and certainly the latest, the Anthropocene: the epoch of us, humanity’s own. Just a skim on the mighty schists of the Archean, the gigantic walls of the Mississipian Redwall, the white band of the Permian Coconino, yet here it is, our Anthropocene of the concrete and asphalt right under our feet :

and spreading south in acres of parking lots & sidewalks, metal protective railings and, off to our right, the sturdy tanks storing water brought from springs out of sight on the north side. through 12 miles of pipeline, crossing a steel suspension bridge over the Colorado way down at the bottom before climbing up the old walls beneath us.

Not too far off to the west, once even visible from nearby Maricopa Point, are the remains of a uranium mine, a 1500’ hole dug down through and behind the Canyon's walls to reach the mine's toxic treasure. These Anthropocenic evidences may rust and erode, but traces will remain to tease geologists in the far future with the power and glory of Homo sapiens, a species that wrote its passage into the stone for the ages, as we altered the Earth System, Gaia some call it, to burn its forests and melt the ice sheets remaining after the last glaciation's end, the event 12 millennia ago that set us off to populate, explore, tame, and exploit that System beyond its capability to support us.

Fortunately for those of us who consider ourselves advocates for, lovers & protectors of, the Grand Canyon, 50 years ago the United States, after a grand public debate, chose to abandon a grandiose Anthropocenic dream, a scheme that would have produced the most long-lasting and visible industrial artifact of them all -- the electrification of the Grand Canyon founded on two large concrete hydroelectric dams with all their accompanying powerplants & high-tension lines, highways, residential & commercial urban support sites, mass recreation facilities, etc., etc.

We Canyon advocates fought that scheme, fought it with every political and public-relations tool we could think of and marshal. The fight lasted five years, though its origins went back half a century. Our most intense effort was in 1965-7, with a number of notable events -- in retrospect, pivotal political moments. Interestingly, the main battleground was in Washington D.C.: the halls of Congress, the labyrinths of political corridors, the offices of the powerful. Yet the true war theater was the entire nation -- public forums, newspapers and other media, private homes of a multitude of activists -- a vast field illuminated by news flashes where a substantial citizen movement made its wishes, ideas, and words known and amplified onto the central government battlefield, on which in the end, the decision-makers, facing the new realities of a changing America, chose, ahem, to compromise, They secured their principal goals, and in exchange gave up the fantasy of an industrialized, Anthropocenized, Grand Canyon.

Through it all, the Canyon went its way. This singular icon of the natural environment discharged no powder, launched no fleets of war machines, forged no new super-weapon. True, in majesty and allure, it commanded armies of friends, it marshalled divisions of advocates. It charged us up, knowing it was there, knowing of its preternatural hold on the imaginations of those who revered it -- EVEN IF THEY HAD NEVER EVEN PLACED ONE FOOT NEAR ITS RIM.

That was the Canyon's indispensable contribution. Yet there were times when we wished for even more. Wished for the Great Forces of Nature that had dug and shaped the Canyon to rise up, gather in tangible form, and strike down with terrific power the awful blasphemers who plotted and argued for the Canyon's taming, humbling, and enslavement. We fantasized, imagining a modern realization of Major John Wesley Powell's (leader of the first river traverse) evocation of the Great Earth Forces that helped shape the Canyon turning on the Canyon's enemies: 

"What a conflict of water and fire there must have been here! Just imagine a river of molten rock running down into a river of melted snow. What a seething and boiling of the waters; what clouds of steam rolled into the heavens."

Our wishes were inappropriate to modern ways, of course, and more importantly, unnecessary. The Grand Canyon worked its magic through its human advocates. And a human scheme, a thorny crown of the Anthropocene, was thwarted through the most human of means -- discussion, debate, the words of decisions made and legislated.

Fortunately for ALL of us. The clash over the Grand Canyon -- considered as an environmental icon in the kind of world our Anthropocene is producing -- proved that we are capable of confronting the largest environmental questions, debating them through our political system, and taking decisions that privilege the environment, our life support, the Earth System (as described in, e.g., Steffen, Crutzen & McNeill, Ambio 2007, "The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?" -- though would not the title better be: "Are Humans Now Becoming one of the Great Forces of Nature?").

And now we are debating again, again on the largest scale, what kind of world we want this Anthropocene of ours to produce. The debate is world-wide now. Accepting the Anthropocene as a valid labeling of this geologic epoch, we start small with the end of the last glaciation and continue into the present of exponential impacts. In these 6, 7, 8+ millennia, Homo sapiens' activities marked, made, Earth history. Do we really stand out enough to be compared with the other Great Forces of Nature? The impacting giant meteorite, the mile-thick ice sheets, the continent-covering vulcanism? We must consider and explicate how.

Fifty miles downstream from Mather Point's evidence, another epoch, 750 millennia long, the Pleistocene, left a fine display of what Earth's Forces can do in the way of canyon damming. By the latest count, 17 times was the spectacle enacted that the Canyon's first American explorer, Powell, described in the quote above. (R. Crow et al., A new model for Quaternary lava dams in Grand Canyon based on 40Ar/39Ar dating, basalt geochemistry, and field mapping; Ryan S. Crow, Karl E. Karlstrom, William McIntosh, Lisa Peters, Laura Crossey, Athena Eyster. GEOSPHERE; v. 11, no. 5)

One assessment of the evidence most suitable to Powell's descripton suggested a lake would have been created that was 800' deep, and extended 300 miles upstream. During my first Canyon river trip 50 years ago, we might have been told the lava remnants we could see were from dams that "nearly filled" part of the western Canyon, 600 m. deep, the larger lakes extending far upstream into Utah, beyond the present shoreline of Lake Powell.

We can more accurately picture small, single-flow dams forming in a matter of days. Or larger complex dams, involving multiple flow events, that required several thousand years to form, and included several cycles of partial erosion between periods of extrusions. The lakes behind the dams would form in a matter of years and then completely fill with sediment in several hundred years. Destruction of the dams was also rapid. The overflow of the Colorado River at the downstream end of the dam undoubtedly formed rapids and waterfalls that quickly migrated upstream. As the falls approached the crest of the dam they may have become almost as high as the dam itself. (From Hambln, W.K., 1994 Late Cenozoic lava dams in the western Grand Canyon: Geological Society of America Memooir 183). 

These episodes must have ranged from the entertaining to the spectacular, considering the evidences of the flows we can still see:

although the concrete human-built dams at either end of the Grand Canyon (Hoover downstream and Glen Canyon up) dwarf what is now left of one of Nature's lava dams:




Anyway, an exciting 700,000 years, though no humans were around to admire the show, or to fuss at what the impacts were on the Canyon environment: how it was changed by the flowing lava, the damming of the river, the rising of the waters to form lakes. Opinions vary about how long the dams lasted; whether they were leaky; even whether any of the inhabitants were much disturbed. Were these invasions an environmental big deal? Looking about today, the lava remnants seem more like decoration than cataclysm, reduced by the more patient Earth forces of erosion in the context of the Grand Canyon's landscaping.

Moreover, lava flows, even into so remarkable a landscape as this Canyon, may be a Great Earth Force; yet we no longer give much credence to a mighty god Vulcan showing off, as a cause of volcanic eruptions. A Gaia of consciousness and responsibility seems to us an inappropriate, unnecessary, concept for understanding how lava flows.

Or is it? I mentioned how we Canyon advocates fighting the dams at times wished the Canyon itself could manifest Earth powers and smite those seeking to Anthropocenize it. Of course, there never was a dynamite blast blown to start dam construction. There never was a test of what the Earth's Forces might have done to those dams had they been built. Today, reservoirs of the Colorado River's two existing Anthropocenic monoliths, Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, stand half empty because the forces of climate we unleashed in part have produced a decades-long drought that curtails the uses their admirers planned and hoped for them. Had the Grand Canyon dams been built, that same force would have exacerbated the drought's effects. Such big dams do in the long term produce their own decrepitude. In our term, however, such structures are long-lasting, quintessential artifacts of our Anthropocene and its civilizations. Dams make possible, as do any power plants, the burgeoning human activities that accentuate their devastating effects. We, for instance, love our social media; their ever-busy processors and storage farms; the power plants needed to sustain their connectivity and content: All part of what is laying waste to the pre-Anthropocene world. And so on, for all the items spilling from our cornucopia of Anthropocenic wonders.

Do we have to hypothesize a sensate, conceiving & feeling Gaia in order to wonder if the Great Forces set loose by climate change -- our fires and our floods -- are all a warning, a rebounding, a revenge? We have been building our Anthropocene for almost 10 millennia. We have been ignoring our activities' ill effects -- even on us! -- for probably all that span. (smallpox; the depopulation of pre-1492 Americas; salinity; just for instances.) Now we are running in circles, screaming and shouting, about saving the world while focusing only on the past two centuries. Yet the devastations of the Anthropocene are embedded in, part and parcel of, the seamless interwoven consequences of what we celebrate as humanity's progress, our civilization.

Take your choice: we did this to ourselves over the past several millennia. Or, what we are experiencing as changes in the actions of the Earth's Great Forces is the ineluctable natural cycle of use, overuse, abuse, and unuse-ability. The lesson the Earth is teaching us, its revenge for our not caring for the environment we developed in, is that its forces are reacting to produce an environment we may or may not survive in. Certainly we will have to adjust to the changes, at great cost and with great discomfort. Some of us, anyway. Perhaps the Great Inequality our economies are currently producing is being carried out to insure that the few on top can create their own edenic bubble civilization, no matter what movie dystopia is in store for the drowning, sweltering 99%?

Or maybe, over Earth's history, we are not special. Maybe other life forms had major impacts on whatever environment they evolved in. In the Grand Canyon's region, there were ages with huge populations of many large animals. Herds, loners, grazers, predators; they too would have put on a great show as they took advantage of the fluctuating riches of ancient environments, most recently the impactful ages of Great Ice, -- Earth forces themselves. Surely all living things push the limits, bringing changes -- even perhaps too much for them to endure as the area became less lush. Did not more ancient flora and fauna, in their reaction to changing climates, contribute to change in landscape and biota? Think vast herds of bison, roaming and running. Can we not find agency, even if not intent, in what these creatures may have wrought?

And long before the Grand Canyon was even a scratch in the dirt, did not the developmental levels of the vegetable kingdom, from slime to flowering plants and towering trees, mark new geological epochs, with their ineradicable leavings? And do the dinosaurs, in all their variety and complexity, serve only as an example of sudden passive termination of an epoch? Does not their history reveal them as actors throughout their time, a diverse collection of animals whose behavior affected the Earth System? Can we really be the only biological entity ever to re-shape that System or a significant part of it, leaving our traces for later ages to come across?
Is it just, therefore, that we are the first such to be aware? Aware of making changes; observer-participants in bringing about, then being overwhelmed by knowledge of the impacts of our life style? Even that awareness is mostly recent, yes? Our present impacts, however massive, have developed if haltingly out of our inventiveness and power of change. The human desire to shape and utilize the environment is intrinsic; only with recent accumulated momentum does massive impact seem ineluctable. Indeed, we can only see that it has now become folly because accelerating change was coupled to a staggering population increase, a combination that has overwhelmed the resources of the environment in which we evolved over dozens, even hundreds of millennia, and which we have over-grown.

So we are only too aware that we can make continent-spanning world-wide decisions. The Grand Canyon -- as an icon of the Earth’s natural processes and evolution -- is still here to remind us we have the power, the social capacity, to choose our course. Threatened 50 years ago by the purest expression of the Anthropocene's forces, the Grand Canyon was saved from falling to industrial aggression and enslavement through our reliance instead on some of humanity's best ideas:
    our Parks & Preserves, in this Nation and in the world;
    comprehensive inclusion and consideration of costs and benefits of all kinds;
    generation of alternatives;
    inspired, inspiriting advocacy;
    wide-spread generation and perception of information;
    open democratic/inclusive institutions in which we debate and decide;
    avoidance and eschewing of violence to achieve goals.
That is a list of human-evolved, not just American, ideas, that we used a half century ago to maintain conditions in just one revered spot where the natural world works, while allowing ourselves to appreciate, study, enjoy, and gambol about in it. Our deploying of those ideas enabled us to ask in a determined, course-altering way how we should conduct ourselves in and around the Grand Canyon? And though the Grand Canyon is a specific place, the way we did conduct ourselves resounded and today resonates throughout American society. 

For the Canyon and its place in the world, our choices showed how humanity can make the Anthropocene work as a beneficent Earth Force. It seemed true that if we could not save the Grand Canyon, we could not save ourselves. Saving that place did not mean sealing it off. It meant we, world-wide, needed to choose what we do there, what we DO NOT do there. Our action with respect to the Grand Canyon was therefore a measure of our willingness to re-set courses and goals, and to choose the measures needed to meet them. Even so, if on a smaller scale, we are still too willing now to profiteer from the Canyon, as we help people "see" it mechanistically, without instilling respect for its having been saved from the industrial threat of 50 years ago.

We used our heads, our ideas, our imagination to bring the Anthropocene about -- and in a span only a fraction of humanity's Earth-girdling history. We may now be a Great Force of Nature, but humans did not bring about the world's current condition unconsciously. These decisions and consequences did not happen without human thought; we are not some autonomous natural process. Whether we act to intensify or mitigate the elements of the Anthropocene, we must use our faculties to choose. The Great Natural Force driving the Anthropocene is our mental activity, transmitted and modulated through globe-spanning social connections and physical activities.

The Anthropocene is not just a forum for us to flagellate ourselves for our foolishness. Like the Grand Canyon, it gains its force as an intellectual construct, an icon, an artifact, to orient us so we will think about What We Are Choosing To Do. Maybe we will too much continue to pursue evil courses; or just inertly accept what's coming from what we have already done. However, what the Grand Canyon as an icon tells us is that we CAN push for actions altering our course, moving forcefully toward an environment that will become healthy and long-lived.

In spite of its fire-and-flood, the Anthropocene is not a judgment; it is the intellectual framework, our mental environment -- whether disastrous, dystopian, or full of hope. The Anthropocene -- the Grand Canyon its icon -- is the signpost of our responsibility, inescapable, to make and carry out the decisions we think necessary to reach for the conditions and outcomes we collectively choose. We must not think Anthropocenic change is bad, period. But if human change is for the worse, we did it. Using the term should increase our realization that we have ended up in the position that no matter what, we are the agents, of whatever is coming about. In this epoch, this Anthropocene, we will not escape our responsibility that all that happens bears our imprint. And the Grand Canyon is there to remind us that we can carry out that responsibility in an Earth-affirming way.

Jeffrey Ingram

22 August 2021