Soon, or before long, or at some point, we will know with the sureness of age what this all was about. That is what we were told.
Soon we will know, for instance, who we are. How we once were one thing and now we are not. How we were young just moments ago, with our thumbs and our farms and our analog ways. At some point in the near future, at a time that feels irreversibly soon, we will leave our mark on the time scale. We will invent an epoch: the Anthropocene, a period provoked by us and named after ourselves. We will find ourselves in the earth and write ourselves into the story of time.
We will know, soon, what we talk about when we talk about the Anthropocene. There will be a moment to which we can point and feel with human’s when it began. We were animals until then, and now we’re something else. And there will be a site, an actual site with an actual plaque, and perhaps some fine words in Latin or English, and to this site, mounted in a rock, we will drag our aging bodies and bear witness to the place where our legacy was read in the sediment core.
