Post-Anthropocene

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By Susan Cosier

Five small islands roughly the size of backyard swimming pools float next to the concrete riverbank of Bubbly Creek, a stretch of the Chicago River named for the gas that once rose to the surface after stockyards dumped animal waste and byproducts into the waterway. Clumps of short, native grasses and plants, including sedges, swamp milkweed, and queen of the prairie, rise from a gravel-like material spread across each artificial island’s surface. A few rectangles cut from their middles hold bottomless baskets, structures that will, project designers hope, provide an attachment surface for freshwater mussels that once flourished in the river.

Three thousand square feet in total, these artificial wetlands are part of an effort to clean up a portion of a river that has long served the interests of industry. This floating wetland project is one of many proliferating around the world as cities increasingly look to green infrastructure to address toxic legacies. In the United States, researchers are conducting experiments in Boston and Baltimore as well as in Chicago, each team sharing best practices with the other to maximize the ecological benefits of their systems. The Canadian government and local municipalities are allotting more funding for innovative projects. Floating wetlands are also multiplying in the United Kingdom, and studies to quantify additional benefits continue in Australia and Brazil.

Floating wetlands filter contaminants and take up excess agricultural nutrients that can lead to algal blooms and dead zones.

Like natural wetlands, floating versions provide a range of ecosystem services. They filter sediment and contaminants from stormwater, and laboratory experiments show that some plants have the ability to lock up some chemicals and metals found in acid mine drainage. These systems take up excess agricultural nutrients that can lead to algal blooms and dead zones, and recent research suggests they could be used to reduce manmade contaminants that persist in the environment. Though it’s difficult to quantify the exact benefits these systems offer, and they have limitations as a tool in remediating polluted waterways, they could provide another option, researchers say.

Nick Wesley, executive director of Urban Rivers, a nonprofit working with the Shedd Aquarium on the Chicago project, believes floating systems are a natural fit for the urban environment. Many urbanized river systems, he says, have the same “steel sheet pile wall, some rough-wrap riprap on the edges. We’re trying to [restore] what the naturalized river would be.” In many cities, he continues, floating wetlands could provide a low-cost alternative to conventional infrastructure projects because they’re modular and easy to install and to monitor.

Wesley’s group began, in 2018, with a floating wetlands project on the Chicago River’s North Branch. Called the Wild Mile, the installation aims to improve water quality and has already begun attracting invertebrates, including mollusks and crustaceans. Last month, the group expanded to the shores of Bubbly Creek. Urban Rivers, Shedd employees, and a team of volunteers bolted together polyethylene and metal frames, draped them with matting, dropped them in the water, added plants, and anchored the islands to the river bottom so they stay in place as the roots grow into the water. The plants will grow for years to come, part of a “riverponic” system, as Wesley calls it, that requires no soil or other substrate for support.

Floating wetlands “are having a bit of a moment,” says Richard Grosshans, a research scientist with the International Institute for Sustainable Development who works on the floating structures. “They function very similarly to a natural wetland: they have the same processes, plants and microorganisms, bacteria and algae, [which] naturally break down toxins. They take up nutrients and provide habitat. It’s kind of common sense to those of us who work with these types of systems.”

Floating wetlands were first tested in retention ponds, the kind often located near developments to hold stormwater, to see if they filtered pollution. “The front end of it was, ‘Will they work? How well do they work? And what plants should we recommend?’” says Sarah White, an environmental toxicologist and horticulturalist at Clemson University who has worked on floating wetlands since 2006. Partnering with researchers at Virginia Tech, White found that the wetland plants she tested not only did well in ponds with lots of nutrient pollution, but the adaptable, resilient plants actually thrived. She did not always choose native plants, opting instead for those that would make the islands more attractive, so that more urban planners would use them.

In the early 2010s, Chris Walker, a researcher at the University of South Australia, began testing floating wetlands in wastewater, quantifying the pollutants that four species of plants took up in their tissues and improvements to water quality. Two species, twig rush Baumea articulata and the common reed Phragmites australis, showed the highest uptake of nitrogen and phosphorus of any floating wetland research to date. “That creates a real opportunity for [the] permanent removal of sequestered nutrients,” says Walker, who is also the principal scientist for a floating wetland company called Clarity Aquatic.

One acre of floating wetland can absorb the nutrient pollution from seven to 15 acres of urban development, one researcher found.

His team also started testing the ability of floating wetlands to filter out emerging contaminants like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are not always filtered by treatment plants and are linked to elevated cholesterol levels, problems with reproductive health, and kidney and testicular cancers. The reed Phragmites australis placed in a floating wetland began absorbing the pollutant into its tissues in less than a month.

Islands anchored in cities are giving scientists an opportunity to study environments that have long been ignored. In Chicago, Austin Happel, a research biologist at the Shedd Aquarium, is beginning a study on fish near the floating wetlands in Bubbly Creek. Starting in the spring, he’ll use acoustic telemetry to tag fish captured near the wetland and monitor where they go. By the following year, he should be able to see if they use the floating wetlands as a buffet or as a place to hide from predators.

In Boston, Max Rome, a PhD student at Northeastern University, is attempting to quantify the benefits of wetlands that have been floating since 2020 in the Charles River, another historically degraded waterway. He found that one acre of wetland can absorb the nutrient pollution — usually dumped into the river via stormwater — from seven to 15 acres of dense urban development.

Rome is also looking into whether floating wetlands can create small pockets of improved water quality or habitat that allow certain native species, like freshwater sponges, to regain a toehold in the river. To do that, he monitored water quality near the wetlands and compared it to other places in the river.

“The last generation did a really good job of dealing with point source pollution — and it was a huge task,” he says, referring to the success of the Clean Water Act in reducing effluent from discharge pipes. His generation has a new job, he adds: grappling with “ecological restoration of these degraded water bodies at the same time that we do pollution reduction,” something the wetlands could help address.

Despite the benefits of floating wetlands, obstacles to widespread adoption remain. They require time and energy to install and monitor, and they could potentially cause flooding if they become unmoored and interfere with water flow. A city would also need hundreds of floating wetlands to clean up the most polluted stretches of waterways and manage the contaminants that continue to flow into them.

Another potential drawback is the threat of invasive plants colonizing a floating wetland, which would then require maintenance. One species that effectively sucked up PFAS in the Australian study, for example, is an aggressive invader already colonizing wetlands across the U.S. In addition, if the goal of a floating wetland is to permanently remove phosphorous and nitrogen from an ecosystem, managers may need to remove and compost plants so they don’t release the nutrients back into the environment when they go dormant, though ongoing research suggests that biofilms that form on plant roots and on the bottom of wetlands could continue to remove nutrients even after plants start to senesce. Plants that remove PFAS would likely need to be incinerated.

The National Aquarium in Baltimore is planning to expand its 400-square-foot floating wetland to 10,000 square feet by 2024.

Still, say researchers, floating wetlands do benefit the environment. “I think we’re just looking for one more tool in our toolbox to help manage water quality,” says Clemson’s White. “This gives us another place in the landscape where we can actually have a technology that will do it.”

The types of places that could be improved by these projects are growing more varied. The National Aquarium in Baltimore was the first place in the U.S. to test floating wetlands in a tidal system, and today 400 square feet planted in saltmeadow hay and smooth cordgrass float in the city’s Inner Harbor. The project has been so successful at lowering levels of nutrients and bacteria and at creating a refuge for wildlife — including American eels, gizzard shad, and ghost anemones — that the aquarium now plans to expand the islands to 10,000 square feet in 2024, says Charmaine Dahlenburg, the aquarium’s director of field conservation.

The Harbor islands are the National Aquarium’s fourth attempt at creating a thriving wetland system, demonstrating how difficult it can be to tailor a floating wetland to a specific location. When the aquarium first installed wetlands in 2010, geese invaded them and ate the plants. A similar problem occurred with a second version two years later. The third attempt fared better, thanks to fencing that excluded geese, but the fourth iteration — which incorporates a channel that prevents algal blooms from killing plants — fared the best.

National Aquarium researchers investigating how the floating wetlands help mitigate such blooms found that microscopic organisms on plant roots and on the bottom of the wetlands help move nitrogen from the water and through the food chain — from barnacle to crab to fish. There are ecosystem benefits above the waterline, too: Night herons and otters visit the islands, finding refuge in the grasses. Research on fish, birds, and mammals attracted to floating wetlands is not well developed, but these structures clearly provide habitat in places where buildings, bulkheads, and riprap have replaced natural wetlands.

The amount of contamination that plants can remove from aquatic environments depends on the amount and type of pollution, the plant species used, and the size of the floating wetlands. But some scientists, including Dahlenburg and Rome, are hoping that as research accumulates, government agencies will consider using such projects to mitigate contamination and wetland development.

In three Boston-area watersheds, a new regulation under the Clean Water Act will require certain commercial, industrial, and institutional properties with one or more acres of impervious surface to reduce nutrient and bacterial pollution in stormwater running off their properties, something never mandated before. Britain recently announced a requirement for homes and water companies to reduce water pollution. Floating wetlands that do that are already growing in London, and plans for other locations are in the works.

Regulations like these could compel cities to take a more aggressive approach to green stormwater infrastructure. “As that begins to happen,” says Rome, “the role that can be played by floating treatment wetlands is going to come into focus.”

The growing use of the buoyant, lush gardens — in cities that range from Australia to Europe to North America — show how even small wetland islands can make a difference. “Our little postage stamp of a wetland isn’t going to solve everything,” says Dahlenburg, of the Baltimore project. “What we’re trying to create is this model urban waterfront. We want other cities to know that there are ways to incorporate natural habitat, to bring back the ecosystem services that were lost because of industrial development.”

FULL ARTICLE: In the coastal waters off British Columbia, tribal volunteers from the Haida Nation dive for purple sea urchins amid a dense forest of rippling golden-brown kelp fronds. Sunlight filters through the canopy, creating a mesmerizing dance of light and shadow, as rays and sea lions wend through the kelp maze, sharks glide past, and bright orange garibaldis dash between the swaying fronds.

Kelp forests are biodiversity hotspots teeming with a colorful variety of seaweeds, sponges, crustaceans, and other small ocean animals, many of them found nowhere else. At one time, vast kelp beds grew in nutrient-rich shallow waters along roughly a third of the world’s coastlines, where they helped to reduce the strength of waves, minimized coastal erosion, and provided shelter to fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals.

Today, however, many kelp forests are on life support, victims of water pollution from terrestrial agriculture and coastal development, bottom trawling for fish, and an explosion of kelp-devouring urchins, like those the Haida volunteers are collecting as part of an eradication program. But perhaps the most important driver of kelp decline is the rapid warming of the ocean.

Healthy kelp forests need cool, nutrient-rich seawater to survive. As ocean waters warm, kelp can no longer inhabit parts of their former range. The crisis is escalating quickly. Kelp forests are vanishing twice as fast as coral reefs and four times faster than tropical rainforests. An estimated 40 percent to 60 percent of kelp forests worldwide have been lost or significantly degraded in the last 50 years. These precipitous declines typically received far less scientific scrutiny than higher-profile ecological crises. But kelp has gradually been getting more attention as scientists and the environmental community come to recognize the value of the carbon that coastal ecosystems, including kelp forests, can capture.

A 2023 literature review of more than 180 papers that examined the potential for kelp to store carbon suggested that the climate benefits of these underwater forests may have been “grossly underestimated,” says Albert Pessarrodana, a research fellow at the University of Western Australia and the review’s lead author. “Kelps are one of the fastest growing plants on the planet,” he said in an email interview, “uptaking as much carbon as tropical rainforests per unit of area.”

Much of the carbon that kelp sequesters ends up being released back into the marine environment in the form of leaf litter (kelp, which is a macroalgae, has leaflike structures called blades that are its organs of photosynthesis.) This detritus is typically ingested by fish and other marine organisms and excreted in a matter of days. Still, a small percentage of it ends up in the deep ocean where it remains for centuries, or even millennia. Roughly 62 million tons of carbon is carried into the deep ocean by coastal currents each year, according to two studies published in 2024.

“Unfortunately,” Pessarrodana says, “excessive warming can either kill kelps or severely curtail their growth, reducing their ability to uptake carbon.”

To counter the decline, scientists around the world are breeding new kelp varieties that they transplant as saplings into kelp habitat. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the San Diego Zoo have begun using artificial intelligence to digitally replicate kelp ecosystems and assess their vulnerability to climate change. Their findings will help focus resources on areas that are most likely to be saved. The organizations have also established a biobank to preserve kelp varieties for potential use in kelp farming and restoration projects. Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod are using selective breeding to develop kelp strains with a higher tolerance to warming waters. Similar efforts are underway in China and Australia.

The Nature Conservancy’s Scott Breschkin has been working for the past year to eliminate urchins and replant beds of golden kelp on Australia’s Great Southern Reef, an interconnected system of rocky kelp reefs spanning about 5,000 miles of coastline across southern Australia and the island of Tasmania. Though less famed than the Great Barrier Reef, it is equally biodiverse, boasting thousands of species, some of which are still unknown to science.

As Australia’s coastal waters warm, long-spined urchins are expanding their ranges, leaving virtually lifeless urchin barrens in their wake. “Once the reef transitions to an urchin desert, it is very hard to flip it back to a productive kelp habitat,” Breschkin explained, adding that urchins can persist for decades in a zombie-like state, awakening only occasionally to mow down any kelp sprouts that may appear, which makes it virtually impossible for kelp forests to recover. Eradicating sea urchins, he says, is a critical first step for kelp restoration.

Jono Wilson, the director of ocean science for The Nature Conservancy’s California chapter, works with KelpWatch.org, a partnership of academic institutions and government agencies that is using satellite imagery and drones to monitor the distribution of canopy-forming kelps along California’s Pacific coast and assess where kelp restoration efforts have been successful. These undersea forests are often characterized by boom-and-bust cycles, flourishing and retreating as ecological conditions change, Wilson says. But recent climate-driven losses have been unprecedented. A 2013 to 2015 ocean warming event known as “the Blob” reduced kelp populations in Northern California by 95 percent.

Since 2015, water temperatures in California’s kelp forests have not dropped below 57 degrees F, a rough threshold beyond which kelp cannot thrive. Higher temperatures disrupt the kelp reproductive cycle, affecting their ability to produce viable offspring. Like corals, kelp bleaches when stressed, losing the chlorophyll that allows it to photosynthesize.

Kelp diebacks transform their ecosystems. “Kelp provide habitat and food for thousands of species,” says Wilson. “They are nurseries for abalone and economically important fish species like cod and rockfish. They are meccas for kayakers and recreational scuba divers.” The Nature Conservancy estimates that kelp forests contribute $250 million in economic value to California annually.

While kelp forests in Southern California are faring reasonably well — the dominant species, called giant kelp, grows quickly and can reach up to 200 feet tall — purple sea urchins are wiping out kelp beds dominated by bull kelp along the coasts of Central and Northern California. Wilson and his team are exploring ways to control those urchins. They are developing new kinds of more efficient urchin traps — round mesh devices baited with fish — and working with fertilizer companies to create a viable market for urchin shells, which contain calcium, nitrogen, and other plant nutrients. The Norwegian seafood firm Ava Ocean is currently using crushed urchin shells to produce a mineral-rich alternative to traditional bone-meal fertilizers.

There have also been attempts to support the native sunflower sea star, a voracious consumer of sea urchins. Populations of this predatory starfish, which can grow as large as a car tire, have been reduced by 90 percent since the outbreak, in 2013, of sea star wasting disease.

Scientists recently isolated the bacterium responsible for the epidemic, giving them a better shot at helping sea stars recover. Aquariums in California and Oregon have successfully treated their affected sea stars with antibiotics, and scientists are hoping to learn how to breed disease-resistant sunflower starfish that can be released into the wild.

There have also been efforts since the late 1980s to breed and reintroduce sea otters, another urchin predator, to the coastal waters where they once flourished. Driven to the edge of extinction by the fur trade in the 19th and early 20th centuries, otters have now substantially recovered in parts of their former range. They now number well over 3,000 individuals in Northern California. Otters are also staging a comeback along the coast of Washington and British Columbia. Kelp forests where the otters have been released are faring noticeably better than kelp forests without otters.

So far, kelp restoration projects in the U.S. have been small scale, with most covering less than a hundred acres. Such projects are “very expensive and subject to zoning laws that make [them] hard to initiate,” says Kyle Cavanaugh, a coastal geographer at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “These localized projects need to be scaled up if we hope to turn the tide on the loss of kelp habitat.”

Kelp restoration is happening on a far larger scale in East Asia. More than half of South Korea’s kelp forests have been lost or badly degraded over the past century. But thanks to the world’s largest kelp restoration projects, the nation now boasts 71,660 acres of kelp forest. Its goal is to eventually re-green 75 percent of its coastline. Farmers in South Korea harvest nearly a billion dollars worth of seaweed each year, cutting only the upper fronds and blades of the macroalgae. There are also more than 700 restoration projects in Japan where kelp, known as kombu, is a staple in Japanese cuisine, most commonly used in soups.

Kelp’s value as a food source, and to a lesser extent as an ingredient in cosmetics, skincare products, and biodegradable packaging, may be one key to its survival. But if we don’t find a way to slash emissions of greenhouse gases, experts say, the long-term prospects of kelp and other key ocean ecosystems may be bleak. “It’s likely that we’ll see more destructive marine heat waves and warmer waters overall,” says Cavanaugh. “Beds of far less-productive turf algae will replace giant kelp and prevent it from becoming reestablished.”

In Maine and in other coastal regions around the world, carpet-like turf algae is already replacing kelp, according to a paper published last month by the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine. This is “a radical ecological transformation,” says the University of Maine’s Shane Farrell, the study’s lead author. “The good news is we now understand what’s driving this shift, and this will help us predict when and where it will happen next and create different conservation strategies to combat it.”

FULL ARTICLE: Wood is a well-known insulator: it does not let current or heat flow through easily. But when wet, it can conduct electricity because of water and the dissolved minerals and salt it contains. And now, researchers report a simple chemical route to change the microscopic structure of wood and boost the electricity it produces when wet.

The amount of electricity is still small, but enough to run LED lights or a calculator. Using larger pieces of wood or connecting multiple smaller devices could produce enough power for a laptop, said Yuanyuan Li, a professor in the Department of Fiber and Polymer Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

“If we wanted to power a laptop, we would need about one square meter of wood about one centimeter thick, and about two liters of water,” she said in a press release.

The concept is called hydrovoltaic energy. “A big issue with hydrovoltaic energy harvesting from organic materials is the extremely low power output [with] which it is difficult to power practical devices,” says Jonas Garemark, a doctoral student and co-author of the work published in Advanced Functional Materials. “In our work, we can reach microwatts per square centimeter, which provides useful power outputs.”

Natural wood contains long, empty channels called lumen that conduct water. These channels can be micrometers to millimeters wide. There has been a lot of research on nanoengineering wood to change its chemical makeup and nanostructure, which impart unique properties such as elasticity, pliability and transparency. But, says Garemark, “no one has so far attempted to utilize the empty spaces within natural wood.”

The KTH researchers decided to fill these voids with even smaller porous structures. The thought was that this would speed up the flow of water through the structure and increase the effective surface area between water and wood.

Making the efficient wood-based generator involved a one-step chemical treatment. The researchers immersed a piece of balsa wood in a water-sodium hydroxide solution for 48 hours at –6°C. This causes the cell walls in wood to partly break apart, causing a dense jumble of tiny cellulose fibers to collect in the lumen.

The dense network of fibers creates many smaller pores, which boosts water uptake and surface area charge, just as the researchers predicted. Their measurements showed that the modified wood produced 10 times more electricity than natural wood when soaked in pure water.

Until now, researchers have most commonly used materials such as graphene, carbon black or porous metal oxides for hydrovoltaic energy harvesting, Garemark says. All these require a lot of energy to prepare.

The new wood-based generator is a low-cost, sustainable alternative for low-power devices. “This material is made completely from wood, and the preparation requires only one single step following green chemistry principles,” he says. Plus, this is just the beginning for hydrovoltaic energy harvesting from wood. “This is a relatively new topic and there are many exciting possibilities that has not been explored yet.”

Source: Jonas Garemark et al. Advancing Hydrovoltaic Energy Harvesting from Wood through Cell Wall Nanoengineering. Advanced Functional Materials, 2022.

FULL ARTICLE: At first glance, these nine sites scattered across the globe seem unremarkable. A peat bog in Poland’s Sudeten Mountains. Searsville Lake, in California, and Crawford Lake, in Ontario. A stretch of seafloor in the Baltic Sea, a bay in Japan, a water-filled volcanic crater in China, an ice core drilled from the Antarctic Peninsula, and two coral reefs, in Australia and the Gulf of Mexico.

But these sites share a significant characteristic: they are all finalists in a remarkable scientific competition that’s expected to announce a winner in the next few weeks. The selected location will — if accepted by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the scientific body that names the Earth’s eras and epochs — both define and represent what scientists are calling the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch that reflects how profoundly humans have altered the planet.

While naturalists and scientists have pondered humanity’s impact on the Earth for centuries, it took until 2000 for the term Anthropocene to gain traction, propelled into the public by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch-born atmospheric chemist who, in 1995, shared a Nobel Prize for research on the depletion of the planet’s ozone layer, and the American ecologist Eugene Stoermer. In 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was formed to determine if a new epoch — marked by human-caused changes — was, indeed, warranted.

Human-made climate change is one of many reasons given by the working group to support its case for the Anthropocene. Humanity has also flooded the planet with synthetic chemicals and new radioactive isotopes that will be measurable far into the future, the group argues, and has derailed the natural course of evolution by moving species between continents. In this long view, cities, industrial sites, tunnels, and mines are geological formations in their own right, packed with “techno-fossils” that will long outlast current civilizations.

While almost all of science accepts the severity of recent environmental change, some geologists oppose framing it as a new geological epoch. Debate is ongoing, but after painstakingly compiling and publishing evidence, the 40 scientists of the AWG have determined that the Anthropocene is sufficiently distinct from the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago.

“We see a clear, abrupt, and global transition from the previous Earth epoch to something new,” says Colin Waters, the AWG’s chair and a former member of the British Geological Survey.

While Crutzen and Stoermer originally proposed the onset of the Industrial Revolution as the Anthopocene’s starting point, scholars continue to debate when human impacts became significant enough to change the chemical composition of sediments and rocks, the metrics of epochal change. After much deliberation, the AWG homed in on the 1950s.

That’s when a wave of nuclear tests released exotic radioactive elements and isotopes into the atmosphere, and their fallout settled into soils and sediments. The 1950s also marked the beginning of rampant consumption, which injected millions of tons of plastic, processed metals, and synthetic chemicals into the Earth’s systems.

Before the Anthropocene can be officially proclaimed, the AWG must name a single site that permanently captures the epoch’s novelty.The scientific markers include the presence of fly ash and carbon isotopes typical of fossil fuel combustion, increased levels of nitrogen and phosphorus — two elements used in fertilizers — or radioactive elements and isotopes previously absent from the geological record. The site will be declared a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), and it will play a similar role for geology as type specimens, housed in museums, do for describing species of plants and animals.

Other chapters in Earth history have their own GSSPs. The onset of the Jurassic period, for example, is represented by a site in the Austrian Alps where certain species of ammonites and foraminiferes first appear as fossils. Such sites — there are scores of them around the world — are marked with a “Golden Spike” rammed into the rock and an explanatory sign.

According to the rules of geology, a GSSP site needs to meet a long list of criteria. Most importantly, it needs to preserve indefinitely the most typical changes in the chemical composition of sediments and rocks, or in the organisms that have turned into fossils. Sites with a high risk of being washed away or disturbed by either animals or humans are not suitable. Also, a site must be adequately thick and accessible, so it can be examined by scientists.

Of course, there are plenty of places that reflect how humans have altered the biosphere and its geology — including megacities, with their glomerations of minerals, metals, asphalt, glass, and eroded landscapes. A GSSP, however, needs to show characteristics that can be found worldwide, not just in particular spots.

The Ediacaran Period, which ended some 540 million years ago, is marked by a gold spike in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. The Ediacaran Period, which ended some 540 million years ago, is marked by a gold spike in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. James St. John

Once the call for proposals went out in 2019, scientists began sifting through data from past expeditions and measurement campaigns. Some sites were quickly discarded, including Berlin’s Teufelsberg, an 260-foot-high hill made of rubble from World War II and municipal waste. “Such a manmade elevation looked like a good candidate, but then it turned out that this hill was created directly on sand from the Pleistocene,” says Reinhold Leinfelder, a Berlin-based biogeologist and member of the AWG. “The Holocene was totally missing, and that’s not good for a reference point, [which] needs to offer a continuous geological record.”

After much careful vetting, the contest has now been narrowed to nine sites, and the researchers behind each candidate have presented their site’s special features in scientific publications and to the AWG’s twenty-three voting members.

The Śnieżka peatland, situated 4,700 feet above sea level in the Sudeten Mountains in southern Poland, looks like a natural bog. But it tells a history of human interference, says geologist Barbara Fiałkiewicz-Kozieł of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. According to her analysis, from about 1950 on, the bog shows “sharp changes in the deposition of multiple, independent geochemical markers” reflecting fossil fuel combustion, industrialization, and nuclear weapon tests, along with signals of climate change.

Francine McCarthy, a micropaleontologist at Brock University, in Ontario, reports that the lakebed under Crawford Lake, in Ontario, “is the only site with undisturbed annual laminations over centuries,” including remains from an Indigenous settlement, European colonization, Canadian logging operations, and modern agriculture. She stresses that beneath the lake, “there are no burrowing organisms to disturb the sediments, allowing the precise calendar age of sediments to be determined by layer counting, just like tree rings.”

The team proposing Searsville Lake, south of San Francisco, emphasizes the site’s human origins. “Searsville is a compelling paradigm for the Anthropocene because the construction of a dam … created this depositional environment,” says Allison Stegner, a palaeobiologist at Stanford University. She describes the lake’s sediments as an “exceptionally detailed Anthropocene archive accumulated via natural geologic processes” with layers of plutonium-239 and plutonium-240 datable to individual seasons of specific years. Many different chemicals typical of human activity have been blown and deposited here by Pacific Ocean winds, she says, which “means they originate from all over the planet and constitute a repository of global dimensions.”

In China, geologist Yongming Han, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, submitted a former volcanic crater called Sihailongwan Maar. While mercury does occur naturally, here its levels increased sharply after 1860, in line with industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels, which contain the heavy metal.

In Japan, paleobiologist Michinobu Kuwae, of Ehime University, has submitted Beppu Bay, located on Kyūshū Island. Surrounded by urban sprawl, spas, chemical industries, and fruit orchards, the bay is a microcosm of humanity’s impact. Kuwae has identified a significant increase in nitrogen and phosphorus flowing into the bay from anthropogenic sources. The nutrients have spurred the growth of dinoflagellates, a phytoplankton known to thrive in conditions of marine ecological degradation. Kuwae has suggested that the increase of dinoflagellates could be a significant signifier of the new epoch.

Two scientists from Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research have taken a core sample at a depth of 790 feet in the Baltic Sea that shows a pronounced change in color. The oldest layers of sediment “were generally well-oxygenated, mixed by organisms, and of a homogenous, light gray color,” says senior scientist Jérôme Kaiser. After being “significantly impacted by human activity in the mid-1950s,” he adds, the core turned dark “due to a significant increase in the content of organic matter preserved in the sediments.” The sharp color change was caused by a huge influx of nutrients from agriculture and the spread of so-called “dead zones,” where a lack of oxygen prevents the degradation of organic matter.

Clearly, the most beautiful of the sites that might symbolize the Anthropocene are two coral reefs. North Flinders Reef lies 90 miles north of the main band of the Great Barrier Reef, off Australia’s northeastern coast. West Flower Garden Bank in the Gulf of Mexico is considered one of the healthiest coral reefs in U.S. waters, with 50 percent live coral coverage. Both sites look untouched by humans and are far removed from cities and industrial sites. But when geologists took samples from the coral reef structures, they discovered evidence of human impact.

“North Flinders Reef has been impacted by humans since the end of the 19th century through ocean warming, changes in ocean salinity and nutrient cycles, and carbon uptake from [burning] fossil fuels,” says Jens Zinke, a paleobiologist from the University of Leicester, who compiled the proposal. Kristine DeLong, a marine scientist at Louisiana State University, examined a sample drilled at a depth of 70 feet at West Flower Garden Bank, a 10-hour boat ride from the mainland, and found evidence of nuclear explosions, fertilizer, and the burning of fossil fuel.

Even the continent farthest from human population centers now tells the story of the Anthropocene. Liz Thomas, a paleoclimatologist with the British Antarctic Survey, has nominated a site in the Palmer Land region of the Antarctic Peninsula. The closest area of human activity is a scientific research station more than 400 miles away, she says. Yet when she and her colleagues drilled and extracted an ice core there in 2012, they found radioactive and chemical traces similar to those in other candidate sites, though at lower concentrations. Because the oldest layers of her core contain bubbles of air with much lower concentrations of CO2 and methane than the current atmosphere, she says, her site offers a “truly global perspective for the Anthropocene.”

Naming one representative place is the AWG’s last big task before handing matters over to a senior group of scientists in the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the timekeepers of Earth’s history. Should the Anthropocene later be formally recognized by geology’s top scientific body, the International Union of Geological Sciences, the winning site will act as a stark reminder of human impact.

The scientists who have submitted proposals hope that giving a single site this status might raise awareness of threats to ecosystems and the need to preserve them. Barbara Fiałkiewicz-Kozieł hopes that the GSSP title for the Polish bog she has nominated would be “motivation for better protection of peatlands in general.” Kristine deLong, who submitted West Flower Garden Bank coral reef, says that the still-healthy reef will “hopefully be a survivor in 100 years, such that divers in the year 2100 will see a live coral and not a dead coral as the GSSP.”

As chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, Colin Waters is neutral on which site ought to represent the Anthropocene and is focused on organizing a well-informed vote that leads to a 60 percent majority for the winning site. If the International Union of Geological Sciences formally proclaims the Anthropocene, Waters thinks, the public will take notice.

“It is a big step if the most important geological bodies confirm, after long consideration, how radical the change in the geology of the planet is due to us as a human species, and that the crucial changes have taken place within 70 years,” he says. The recognition would also make it clear “that we cannot simply return to the Holocene world.”

Nearly half of the planet’s bird species are in decline, according to a definitive report that paints the grimmest picture yet of the destruction of avian life.

The State of the World’s Birds report, which is released every four years by BirdLife International, shows that the expansion and intensification of agriculture is putting pressure on 73% of species. Logging, invasive species, exploitation of natural resources and climate breakdown are the other main threats.

Globally, 49% of bird species are declining, one in eight are threatened with extinction and at least 187 species are confirmed or suspected to have gone extinct since 1500. Most of these have been endemic species living on islands, although there is an increase in birds now going extinct on larger land masses, particularly in tropical regions. In Ethiopia, for example, the conversion of grassland to farmland has caused an 80% decrease in endemic Liben larks since 2007. Just 6% of bird species globally are increasing.

Since 1970, 2.9 billion individual birds (29% of the total) have been destroyed in North America. The picture is just as bleak in other parts of the world – since 1980, 600 million birds (19%) have been destroyed in Europe, with previously abundant species such as the common swift, common snipe and rook among those slipping towards extinction. Europe’s farmland birds have shown the most significant declines: 57% have disappeared as a result of increased mechanisation, use of chemicals and converting land into crops. In Australia, 43% of abundant seabird species have declined between 2000 and 2016.

Dr Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International, said: “We have to stop these declines and start getting on track for recovery. Our future, as well as the world’s birds, depends on it. If we continue to unravel the fabric of life, we’re going to continue to place our own future at threat.”

The report is made up of a compendium of other studies, and because birds are the best-studied group on the planet, it gives an idea of the state of nature more generally. “Birds are useful for telling us about the state of the planet. What they say is that nature is in poor condition, lots of species are in decline,” said Butchart.

Birds are cornerstones of healthy ecosystems, so their disappearance is likely to have myriad negative knock-on effects. Hornbills, for example, disperse large seeds in tropical forests; turkey vultures dispose of organic waste, while seabirds help in the cycle of nutrients between sea and land, keeping coral reefs healthy.

The previous State of the World’s Birds report, released in 2018, found 40% of bird species worldwide in decline.

Wildfires feature more prominently in this report than previous editions, having increased and ravaged previously unaffected habitats. The succession of heatwaves, droughts and floods in recent years will lead to widespread species extinctions if they continue, researchers warn, highlighting the importance of addressing the nature and climate crises at the same time.

Growing evidence links the health of bird populations to human health. Covid-19 is a warning of what could happen if we continue to destroy the natural world, with 70% of zoonotic diseases originating in wildlife. A highly pathogenic variant of avian flu – the result of intensive farming – has driven rapid declines in some bird populations this year. More than 300 outbreaks have been reported in UK seabird colonies.

The report comes ahead of the Cop15 meeting in Montreal in December, a once-in-a-decade opportunity to create new legislation to tackle the biodiversity crisis. Butchart hopes the findings will feed into the final statement from Montreal. “The key action needed now by governments is to make sure a really ambitious and bold global biodiversity framework is adopted. We’ve got to bend this curve, so by 2030 we’re on a mission of being nature positive,” he said.

This means increasing the number and quality of protected areas, conserving remaining habitats and restoring those that have been degraded. Preventing the illegal killing of birds, managing invasive species, reducing fisheries’ bycatch and preventing overexploitation of natural resources will all help.

The report is not all gloom. According to BirdLife, between 21 and 32 bird species would have gone extinct since 1993 without conservation work. It cites the creation of a new seabird haven the size of France in the North Atlantic, estimated to protect 5 million birds.

Juliet Vickery, chief executive of the British Trust for Ornithology, who was not involved in compiling the report, said: “The fact that nearly half of all bird species are declining and one in eight is at risk of extinction reinforces the fact that we are living through a biodiversity crisis. It requires action at every level, from local to global. This carries a strong warning about the health of our natural world.”

Birds in trouble The South American harpy eagle, which stands 1 metre (3 feet) tall and feeds on monkeys and sloths, is one of the world’s largest birds of prey. It was uplisted from near threatened to vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list in 2021 because of a combination of forest loss, hunting, poaching and collisions with power lines. It has declined by 50% in 60 years.

The secretary bird, a raptor from sub-Saharan Africa, went from being vulnerable to endangered in 2020 after habitat degradation driven by the burning of grasslands and intensive livestock grazing. Birds are also captured for the wildlife trade.

The lesser florican, a species endemic to the Indian subcontinent whose males perform leaping rituals to get the attention of females, has declined by 90% in 20 years, mainly because of the loss of grassland habitats and the predation of its chicks by feral dogs. There are believed to be fewer than 1,000 mature individuals left, and it is now critically endangered.

The impressive vocal abilities of the Central American yellow-naped Amazon has made it one of the most sought-after parrots in the pet trade. It has declined by more than 80% in 30 years, mainly due to poaching and the expansion of agriculture, and as of 2022 is critically endangered.

The Bahama warbler was badly affected by Hurricane Dorian in 2019, especially on Grand Bahama, where 95% of its habitat is believed to have been destroyed. It was listed as endangered in 2020.

Excerpt:

**Clifi Will Not Save Us – Turning Narrative Theory on its Head

On climate fiction, or clifi:**

Perhaps the underlying message is that you’re supposed to entertain the reader, but more and more, I greet the question with a weary smile-grimace that reveals the skull of me that’s likely to be buried in the ground sometime in the next twenty to thirty years. The search for hope is hopeless or beside the point. Fiction can’t save us in this particular way, although it can pretend to, but if in a book a heroine survives climate crisis, this has no corresponding nexus or loci in the real world, no matter how strong the will of the reader that it be otherwise. [i]

This is one of the foremost anglophone clifi authors working today, whose work is both consistently influenced by climate crisis and who has achieved a pinnacle of literary fame, Jeff Vandermeer. As a fan of his work, I was extremely excited to read this polemic of his, published just over two years ago in Esquire. In it he traces the lineage of the term clifi and sketches its relationship to speculative fiction, expresses his thoughts and opinions on his own works and other key clifi texts of the past half century, and he critiques Amitav Ghosh, so he really doesn’t leave much to ask for.

As a scholar who works on econarratology and science fiction in particular, my attention was captured by Vandermeer’s auteurist perspective on this issue in literature, in genre fiction, in the publishing industry, and ultimately in terms of policy and lifestyle. Econarratology and unnatural narratology have offered some really interesting thoughts on how people engage with narratives, from the cultural, the material, to the cognitive turn from the work of Erin James on Postcolonial Econarratology to Jan Alber on unnartual narratology. And while various genres have their theorists and practitioners, it is those of us working in and around clifi that feel a mounting pressure to make the stories do something. Nobody that works on detective fiction is expected to prevent murders.

But as Vandermeer points out, stories don’t work that way. So here I want to offer some remarks on climate narrative more generally that pushes against the archaic idealism of calls for clifi to provide a solution for the technical issues that surround us in the form hope.

I offer that a self-consciously fictional genre cannot provide a framework for change. This is because there are all sorts of narratives that work in various ways to influence power structures, politics, and policy, and clifi must be multiply mediated through various metadiscourses to access these power structures, to become political and turn into policy. This transformation relies on methods of narrative dissemination and various registers of affective engagement. Clifi can, over time, provide a conduit for transforming empirical circumstances to artistic representations and finally to ideology, something that can provide a framework of common sense that can interface with the political and economic institutions that can actually avert climate disaster. Maybe.

Here I identify four types of climate narrative:

I want to begin with what most people likely think of when they think of clifi, especially in its speculative mode, that is, the dystopia, or as I prefer to think about it, the failed utopia. My example here is the TV series based on The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Obviously, this hellscape is no utopia for June Osbourne, but it may be for the various commanders, their wives, and so on. The TV series makes more of the climate catastrophe that haunts Atwood’s novels as we see inside the colonies. Peter Hajdu also points out that “As a cautionary tale, the 1985 novel chiefly warned about the dangers of an ideological climate and a toxic environment metaphorically, but today both that novel and its sequels solicit readings that focus on the literal toxicity of the environment which, lacking a prompt reaction, can bring about answers rather similar to what Gilead did.” [ii]

Another register of clifi that is neither utopian nor dystopian, so I refer to Vandermeer’s fiction as simply Topian, that is, the narrative takes place in a world where the climate presents challenges to characters through an uncanny flux in literary space and time, or chronotope as narratology might have it. His Southern Reach series revolves around Area X, a place of mystery and danger located in the Florida swamps that evokes the Zone of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s Stalker at the same time as it references the uncanniness and ambient danger of American wetlands.

Another way of articulating climate catastrophe is through utopian literature proper, and here I want to offer Everything for Everyone, an Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072. This book, from an indie press and written in the form of an oral history, adheres to the traditional Jamesonian formula for a utopia: essentially a how-to manual, according to Gabriel Burrow.[iii] The book is way outside the mainstream With that, I want to transition to the fourth type of climate narrative I wish to investigate, the empirical. First, emergent climate narratives are those that arise from media discourse about climate events: storms, floods, and other catastrophes, but also the technological, legislative, and cultural developments around climate. While each piece of the puzzle is self-contained to some degree, emergent climate narratives cohere with one another to become grist for the mills of other narratives, including the three I list above. The other side of this empirical continuum is the institutional. These are narratives, real or imagined, that are adopted by governments, industries, NGOs, and cultural milieus. As an example, I present Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii’s work on Japanese narratives around CCS technology. The viability of CCS as a means of solving global warming caused by carbon emissions is famously dubious, and although there is strong evidence that Japan, in particular, is not employing CCS technology at anything near a rate that could positively impact climate, the official narrative in Japanese government and industry is one of techno optimisim and techno nationalism. These metadiscourses unite in the story of CCS’s potential to mitigate climate change with the fantasy of leaving the fossil fuel industry intact, uniting environmentalists and capitalists in the myth of a technological curative granted to a uniquely industrious people.[iv]

This narrative is indispensable to these institutions precisely because the technology is not working – clifi that is doing some actual lifting. How this works is partially disclosed by Saskia Brill in their article A story of its own: creating singular gift commodities for voluntary carbon markets.[v] Here, Brill points out the peculiar economic form taken by Carbon Credits, which function all at once as commodities, singular items, and autonomous gifts. A crucial aspect of carbon credits is that, contrary to how the characteristic of the commodity form is its neutrality in regards to origin of the product, carbon credits rely upon a certain morality or ethical imperative to grant them value in the first place. It’s almost a rhetorical form of labor that the credits must have access to for their value to be valorized.

To try and understand this process, the move from emergent to institutional climate narrative and the role in this move played by clifi as a self-consciously fictional genre, I want to stand clifi on its head a bit and disambiguate the metadiscourse of climate narrative writ large. As we’ve seen from Brill’s work on Carbon Credits, and as we see in many facets of the carbon capture economy that perpetuates a fiction – that market interventions can attenuate the worst excesses of fossil capitalism – the stories around these technologies, products, etc. are in some sense real fictions; carbon credits pretend to value in ways that are very similar to Marx’s own ideas of “fictitious capital,” that is, debt, in volume III of Capital.[vi]

These more technical interpretations of Marx’s key texts coincide with some interesting philosophy that links materialism with the affective and political, and remember that according to Deleuze and Guattari, the arts create percepts and affects.[vii] Jason Read is one philosopher who uses pop culture to demonstrate the link between Marx and Spinoza to understand counterintuitive political phenomena. Read’s work fleshes out a theory of ideology that accounts for the often-self-destructive actions by individuals and institutions. One of Read’s favorite interlocutors, Yves Citton, makes a number of compelling contributions here in terms of the interface of the personal and political vis a vis desire, the importance of the attention economy to late capitalism, and the constitution of ideology through an assemblage of narratives that are at least heterogenous, and often contradictory in his work Mythocratie.[viii] This process of narrative bricolage is a general notion that guides more specific processes outlined above, particularly the case study of Japanese narratives around CCS technology, which harnesses the passions involved in techno optimism and nationalism in such a way as to subvert the obvious contradiction between the CCS’s reality and the institutional narrative of its potential to unfetter a mode of production that is fueled by oil and coal.

To conclude, Jeff Vandermeer is correct when he claims that clifi cannot and will not save us. Far from a gesture of false humility in acknowledgement of his own centrality in the genre, Vandermeer is pointing to the constructed nature of the subgenre and its subtle and nuanced connections to our climate reality. As Citton points out, there is a metalepsis inherent to narrative that demands we situate ourselves inside and outside the narrative at once, and this metalepsis is all the more pronounced within the framework of self-conscious genre fiction and non-fictional narratives that nevertheless fail to correspond to reality. Emergent narratives about climate, employment, global markets, etc. assail us via social media, curated by predatory algorithms. This becomes the grist for the mill of cultural production, providing the foundations for – and limits to – the imaginary of clifi authors. And while hope itself can never solve a problem of this magnitude, over time narratives of many types are assimilated to ideological persuasions and even adopted by institutions, which can then become essential to legislation, market innovations, and similar interventions that have a chance at saving our skins.[ix]

[i] “Climate Fiction Won’t Save Us,” Esquire, April 19, 2023, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43541988/climate-fiction-wont-save-us/.

[ii] Hajdu, 305.

[iii] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2007); Gabriel Burrow, “The Low Bar: Crisis and Utopia in M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022),” n.d.

[iv] Shinichiro Asayama and Atsushi Ishii, “Selling Stories of Techno-Optimism? The Role of Narratives on Discursive Construction of Carbon Capture and Storage in the Japanese Media,” Energy Research & Social Science 31 (September 2017): 50–59, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.06.010.

[v] Saskia Brill, “A Story of Its Own: Creating Singular Gift-Commodities for Voluntary Carbon Markets,” Journal of Cultural Economy 14, no. 3 (May 4, 2021): 332–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1864448.

[vi] Karl Marx, Ben Fowkes, and David Fernbach, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, V. 1: Penguin Classics (London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981).

[vii] Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, European Perspectives (New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Pr, 1994).

[viii] Yves Citton, Mythocratie: storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2010).

[ix] “The Handmaid’s Tale,” SVOD, The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2025 2017); M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions, 2022); Annihilation, SVOD, Science Fiction (Netflix, 2018); Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, First Edition, Southern Reach Trilogy 1 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

When people think of landscape architecture, small-scale recreational spaces like urban parks, gardens, and golf courses may come to mind. MacArthur “Genius Award” winner Kate Orff has a grander and more ecologically ambitious vision.

Orff, director of Columbia University’s Urban Design Program, believes that architects should do more than just create beautiful spaces: They also need to work with nature to create resilient living environments that both help to knit human communities together and protect them against the ravages of climate change.

SCAPE, the New York City-based design firm that Orff founded in 2007, is currently working in Louisiana on a project that will counter sea level rise and land loss in the Mississippi River Delta. SCAPE has also partnered with the Atlanta Regional Commission to create a 125-mile-long trail and greenway along the Chattahoochee River, which aims to bring racially diverse communities along its banks together, based on their shared love of the river.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Orff said that it is not enough simply to restore natural systems to their former condition. “There is no ‘pure nature’ that’s outside of us, untouched up there in the foothills somewhere,” she said. “We’ve ‘made’ the world what it is already, so now we need to take a very, very strong hand in the remaking. … A big part of climate adaptation may simply be unbuilding what we’ve already built.”

Yale Environment 360: What is the role of landscape architecture in an era of climate change?

Kate Orff: Since I went to school in 1997, the world has radically changed, and so have our views on what is necessary and important. So what I’ve done is taken the tools that I’ve learned as a licensed professional landscape architect — horticulture, grading and drainage, shaping the ground and the earth. But I’ve used them with a very different purpose.

One goal of mine is to think of landscape architecture not as a top-down thing where I impose my vision, but much more as a community-driven way to channel many voices. The second goal is to focus on the impact of climate change and to shift the whole profession towards large-scale climate adaption projects.

e360: You set up SCAPE to engage in these kinds of ecological projects.

Orff: That’s right. SCAPE is a private design practice, so we have conventional projects like waterfront parks and gardens, but we also do really large-scale resilience and adaptation planning.

One example is that we worked with Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority on a massive plan that essentially looks at the state and helps guide investment and projects for the coastal region.

Louisiana has lost about 2,000 square miles of land to anthropogenic factors like sea level rise. We’ve been helping to develop a master plan for coastal restoration and risk reduction that combines marsh creation with bottomland reforestation, sediment diversions, and related landscape restoration and job-creation strategies.

“What we’re trying to do is integrate many local projects into a larger scale systemic approach, into a larger scale resilience plan.” e360: So basically you are looking at this large region and proposing what to do in various parts of it?

Orff: Yes, so that it all comes together. Often we are only responding in a piecemeal way. We have system collapse, but we address it with single limited projects here and there. What we are trying to do is integrate many local projects into a larger-scale systemic approach, into a larger-scale resilience plan.

e360: Tell us about the Living Breakwaters project. What stage are you at, and what are your goals there?

Orff: After Superstorm Sandy hit in October 2012, New York City’s Department of Housing and Urban Development started this project called Rebuild by Design. We worked with them to develop the Living Breakwaters project in Staten Island. It’s essentially a stone-core breakwater that is seeded with oysters, a structure that takes that harmful wave action out of the equation and helps rebuild the beach. It’s also bringing a critical intertidal marine ecosystem back into the urban landscape where it has been decimated. Next year oyster cultivation is going to start up.

e360: Oysters were once an important species in New York Harbor.

Orff: Right, they were a keystone species until they collapsed in around 1900. We went from a harbor that was maybe 20 percent oyster reefs to zero. That was a profound physical change. We essentially went from slower, cleaner water to faster, dirtier water, because oysters filter the water, especially of excess nitrogen. It led to a collapse in much of our marine life.

e360: A project like this entails a new way of thinking about landscape architecture, doesn’t it? You are not just designing the physical landscape. You are taking an active hand in designing the biological environment as well.

Orff: Now, with the sixth extinction, we need to think radically differently about what infrastructure means. We need to include life and see that living landscapes are a form of infrastructure in the sense that forests, for example, clean our water and our air. Oyster reefs clean the water and buffer the shore, and mangrove forests help keep our coastal shorelines intact. An exciting change is that we are reframing ecosystems as infrastructure, and we are testing and modeling their efficacy.

e360: This is sometimes referred to as green infrastructure, isn’t it?

Orff: Yes, it is essentially the design and deployment of living systems — reforesting, restoring coral, building bio-swales to capture and hold water. It’s basically thinking about the physical landscape and the ecological systems that sustain us and weaving them back into cities, weaving them back into the fabric of our communities in order to help us adapt in the long term, not just to respond to emergencies.

e360: I’m intrigued that, in talking about such matters, you don’t generally speak about “restoring nature.” You speak instead of something you call “regenerative design.” What’s the difference?

Orff: Restoring nature is trying to bring back nature for nature’s sake. As much as I, too, am guilty of that desire at times, this is simply not possible because our water quality has changed, and our air and water temperatures have changed. What I’m trying to do is rebuild natural systems in a strategic way that reduces climate risk for communities.

e360: You’ve been quoted as saying: “There’s no more natural nature. Now it’s a matter of design.” What did you mean by that?

Orff: We humans are profoundly impacting the planet. There is no “pure nature” that’s outside of us, untouched up there in the foothills somewhere. We’ve “made” the world what it is already, so now we need to take a very, very strong hand in the remaking. It is a matter of design in the sense that it requires work, intention, design, funding, political skills. It’s not a naive or nostalgic attempt to restore the past. Instead, it’s layering up natural systems to reduce risk, building this hybrid future of stewarded nature.

e360: In Staten Island you are building a breakwater offshore, but in other places you have advocated tearing down some built structures to allow water a place to go during floods.

Orff: We have to soften our shorelines, we need to remove roadways from critical migration paths. Otherwise, flash flooding will get worse, and our biodiversity will continue to plummet. So a big part of climate adaptation may simply be unbuilding what we’ve already built. Rather than thinking of design as something merely additive or “beautifying,” we need to think about undoing our environmental mistakes, like damming rivers, bulkheading our shorelines, and concretizing streams. We need to start making room for rivers and floods.

e360: We’ve tried to control nature with big infrastructure projects. But that can backfire, can’t it?

Orff: For decades, infrastructure has been constructed as “single-purpose,” often designed by engineers to isolate one element of a system and to solve one problem. For example, on Staten Island, during Superstorm Sandy, a levee designed to keep water out was overtopped, resulting in a “bathtub effect” that trapped water inside a neighborhood rather than keeping it out and resulted in several deaths. We try to lock natural systems in place. But, of course, that is not the way that natural systems respond, and it is wholly insufficient for a climate-changed environment where we’re experiencing more intense rain in many regions, where we are facing more extreme heat, where sea levels are rising. The old rules, frankly, no longer apply.

e360: One region that you’ve thought a lot about is the Mississippi River. You’ve proposed a Mississippi River National Park. How would that work?

Orff: We need to think more comprehensively about the American landscape. We used to do that — even if it was Route 66, which went across the country, or when we set up the National Park System. There was a time when we were thinking at a bigger scale. Now we are so polarized, so fragmented, that we’re only able to think about the next thing that is immediately possible in a small area.

So the Mississippi River National Park was an idea that proposed a larger vision, connecting the river back to its floodplain and connecting its stakeholders — from the Iowa pig farmer to the Louisiana shrimper — and, in my mind, ultimately reducing the risk that some of these communities would be facing.

e360: The national park framework would be a way of bringing the river back to a healthy state?

Orff: The national park framework, as flawed as that might be, is a way to pull together these lands for recreation and climate adaption purposes and to bring the river back as a living system. Because right now it is not. The river is fragmented and exists in the lower Mississippi as a pollution drain, and the upper river all runs behind constructed levees so when we do have a flood it is just massive.

e360: On a somewhat less ambitious scale, you have a project in the Atlanta metropolitan area called the Chattahoochee RiverLands, a 125-mile-long bikeway and greenway that passes through both white and Black communities. You’ve said that such projects can help bring polarized communities together.

Orff: For this project, we cut through red tape, charting a path of access through a mosaic of public and private lands. It’s a radical effort to stitch together a historically fragmented public realm that showcases the river’s ecology and history. Beyond its physical footprint, the goal of the RiverLands is to raise public awareness, improve connections and access, address a long legacy of environmental racism, expand mobility for underserved communities, and build on a strong regional legacy of water resource conservation and protection.

It is also about bringing people together from communities that don’t always have much interaction — and that is already working. Rivers have such power to bring people together, to link up disjointed places, and bring life back into cities.

Description of the book:

"More than sixty speculative art and design projects explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes.

In the age of the Anthropocene—a era characterized by human-caused climate disaster—catastrophes and dystopias loom. The Anthropocene Cookbook takes our planetary state of emergency as an opportunity to seize the moment to imagine constructive change and new ideas. How can we survive in an age of constant environmental crises? How can we thrive? The Anthropocene Cookbook answers these questions by presenting a series of investigative art and design projects that explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes. This cookbook of ideas rethinks our eating habits and traditions, challenges our food taboos, and proposes new recipes for humanity's survival.

These more than sixty projects propose new ways to think and make food, offering tools for creative action rather than traditional recipes. They imagine modifying the human body to digest cellulose, turning plastic into food, tasting smog, extracting spices and medicines from sewage, and growing meat in the lab. They investigate provocative possibilities: What if we made cheese using human bacteria, enabled human photosynthesis through symbiosis with algae, and brought back extinct species in order to eat them? The projects are diverse in their creative approaches and their agendas—multilayered, multifaceted, hybrid, and cross-pollinated. The Anthropocene Cookbook offers a survival guide for a future gone rogue, a road map to our edible futures."

The complete book can be downloaded at Z-Library: https://b-ok.xyz/book/23307959/efb1a7