Footprints by David Farrier review – fossils of the Anthropocene

David Farrier’s idea in this book is to try and imagine our present moment of climate and ecological crisis from a far-distant future. What fossil traces will post-industrial human civilisation leave behind for the future to find? Roads and vast cities, long abandoned and forgotten, will show up as layers in the geological strata; our buried radioactive waste will still be deadly; our throwaway plastic will persist until eventually “over the coming millennia, hydrocarbons leach from the fossil plastic, accumulating in small deposits and setting in motion a slow chemical return” to its origins as oil. Future archaeologists may comment on the dreary sameness of our collective biomass: almost all of it Homo sapiens, along with the few species we like to eat. Which future archaeologists would those be, by the way? Sometimes Farrier is addressing human generations to come; at other times he’s thinking on timescales longer than any species is likely to last, let alone ours with its over-sophistication and bad habits. One microbiologist fantasises that some day a “commune of evolved bees” will encourage bee-scientists to study the Anthropocene as “a warning for all hive-kind”.

The transience of what appears indestructible has been a rich theme in poetry and story. The mists shift on a bleak hillside in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, where bloody Cobweb Castle is visible, now vanished and forgotten; Saxons write poems about stumbling on the ruins of Roman Aquae Sulis; Batman chases villains round the fallen grandeur of Gotham City. Farrier’s argument is nuanced slightly differently, channelling our contemporary angst. It’s not only that our way of life is transient. Our heedless interventions in the life of the planet – herding, ploughing, planting, building, mining, smelting, processing, communicating – have degraded its complexity and beauty in ways that will long outlast us, leaving their ineradicable taint. “We live in the shadow of an eclipse that will endure perhaps as many as ten million years before sound, shape and colour return in full to the land and the oceans.”

The climate and ecological crisis hurts us: and not only materially, physically. It hurts in the imagination, in the stories we tell. An idea of nature’s boundlessness, the recurring seasons, the ocean’s endless renewal – vaster than we are and cruelly, consolingly indifferent to us – has salved our private and public despairs, perhaps often almost unconsciously, through plagues and floods and wars, tragic ending after tragic ending. I remember the happiness I felt when we were shown black and white slides, in school, of the equatorial forest – much too long ago for any warning that it was threatened. My happiness didn’t make me want to go there; I just needed it to be there. Nature holds together our sense of being, organically, at the root; and it’s therefore in the roots of our language. We didn’t know how fundamental our trust was in “the treasure of nature’s germens” – that’s Macbeth invoking chaos – until news came that the treasure after all couldn’t be counted on.

And therefore the language and style in which we address the crisis are all-important. Obviously there’s a first responsibility for the words to produce effects: an urgent need to change minds, change governance, change practices. And then alongside that there’s the other responsibility that words have: to put up their supple resistance to stupidity and ugliness and evil, so that our consciousness of what’s at hand has form, and we can bear it. There’s a fascinating chapter in Farrier’s book on two contrasting approaches to burying nuclear waste. How can we warn the far future not to dig where we’ve put it, when we know that the future won’t understand our language?

Near Carlsbad, New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has devised a scheme that sounds like a computer game: “Five levels of warning messages, rising in complexity, and a mix of monoliths, buried clues and archives … accompanied by faces of disgust and repulsion, modelled on Edvard Munch’s The Scream … A thirty foot earthen berm, studded with magnets and radar reflectors to signal an anomaly, will enclose the inner ring of granite markers.” In Finland meanwhile, they’ve decided that “given the long lifespan” of their nuclear waste repository on Olkiluoto island – it will probably be buried at some point under another ice age – “it would be foolish to try to mark it”. They will “bury the waste in specially designed copper canisters; backfill the hole; and retreat, without leaving a single trace aboveground”; it’s meant to be forgotten. This difference, too, feels like a choice about language; it’s aesthetic as well as practical. Only one of those options is in good taste.

Farrier’s book is full of fascinating things, yet doesn’t in its totality work for me. Its central conceit, to begin with – that idea of viewing, in some unimaginably distant future, the fossils left behind by our Anthropocene – feels strained because such a future is indeed impossible to imagine. The very terms of our love for our planet will no doubt turn out in deep time to be so much stardust – or carbon, or whatever; we can’t begin to know in what ways our depredations might matter, on the timescale proposed here. No doubt Farrier wants the future-fossil idea to work as a rhetorical device, reminding us of the sheer size of our disaster now; but the harder he works to conjure the geological scale of the problem, the more tempting it is for his language to become vatic and sententious. “Fragments of artificial glass will be glazed with cataracts, like glaucomatous eyes staring blindly into the dark.”

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Farrier’s a literary critic and not a scientist, and the book is intended for a lay readership; but there just isn’t room here to begin to lay out the complexities of these diverse scientific disciplines. A reader might finish his chapter on jellyfish convinced that they’re taking over the sea (“the ocean’s one lonely god will be frilled and eyeless, drifting placidly and implacably through its vast, empty dominion”), but ocean scientist Juli Berwald, in her book Spineless, resists any certainty even as to whether jellyfish numbers are on the rise. Each “ecosystem in the ocean”, she writes, “has its own unique characteristics, with distinctive vulnerabilities, threats, and resiliences”. A reader can’t conceivably do justice to the chunks of science in Footprints: the account of lateral gene-swap transfer, for instance, or palaeoclimatologists’ varying theses of the rhythms of ice ages. An uninitiated eye can only glide over Farrier’s summaries, taking what’s there on trust and adding it on to the mounting heap of glum. “The shadows are racing onwards … life is collapsing into darkness and silence.”

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to be glum about: glum, anxious, desperate even. We have to hope to turn this stinking, filthy tanker of our civilisation around: do something globally, for the first time ever, for our collective good. Not easy. And things won’t ever all be all right again anyway, or all pristine, even at the best – they never were. Nature itself isn’t pristine, that’s a fallacy that belongs with the dream of original sin. If it’s the right moment for jeremiads, though, let’s at least have scorching ones, and not the lyric soulfulness of an admonitory headteacher. “Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the field, and upon the fruit of the ground: and it shall burn, and shall not be quenched” (Jeremiah VII, 20).

• Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier is published by 4th Estate .