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At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come,
Potawatomi is a language abundant with verbs: 70 per cent of its words are verbs, compared to 30 per cent in English. Wiikwegamaa, for instance, means ‘to be a bay’. ‘A bay is a noun only if water is dead,’
‘There reaches a point where you see other humans drowning, or washed ashore with nothing,’ says Tara, ‘where there is no possibility other than to help with all your heart. It isn’t kindness, exactly – because there is less element of choice than people think, and for this reason it is less noble.’
From the 1820s the quarry voids were put to a new use as mushroom fields: damp and dark, they provided the perfect growing spaces for fungi, which sprouted from rows of horse manure. Adaptable quarrymen made a career move into mushroom farming, and a subterranean Horticultural Society of Paris was founded, its first president being a former general inspector of the mines. At the height of the industry there were some 2,000 mushroom farmers working underneath Paris.
Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past.
When man has become so crazy that he is willing to offer his food in order to get more rich, more oil, then the craziness is complete and we have no hope any longer.’
solastalgia’, the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’.12 Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Wales when he realized that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control.
Our accumulative activities have even produced a new type of rock called ‘plastiglomerate’ – a hard coagulate that contains sand grain, shells, wood and seaweed, all held together by molten plastic produced by the human burning of beach rubbish on campfires. Plastiglomerate was first identified by geologists on Kamilo Beach in Hawaii; it has been proposed – due to its durability and distinctive composition – as a plausible future Anthropocene strata horizon marker.
I have read of how small craft hugging the Greenland coastline will sometimes find their GPS navigation devices screaming alarm, warning of collision. The coordinates of the former extent of glaciers have been inputted into the mapping, but the retreat rate has been so fast that they are sailing into and through the digital phantom left behind by the ice.
My father’s wish that his ashes be scattered to the winds in three places, so that in this way there is no grave to which we will be tied after his death, and the medium of his remembrance will be an atmosphere, a skein of associations. I
