Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

Because the climate emergency doesn’t just affect those of us alive now; it reaches into the lives of generations who have yet to be born. Sea level rise is a slow process that will take many hundreds of years; the last trace of our carbon won’t be weathered from the atmosphere for perhaps one hundred millennia. There’s a deep time dimension to so many of these strange and urgent planetary changes—such as the 100-year storms that now arrive annually, or heatwaves in the Arctic—but it seemed to me we weren’t fully grasping this. I wanted to find out what traces we will leave for the deep future, whether this is 10,000 or 100 million years from now. Really, Footprints is about how we want to be remembered.

We’re actors in deep time now, but this is a very difficult thing to imagine—there’s nothing in our experience we can measure it against. John McPhee suggests we can think of the age of the Earth as the old English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to his outstretched fingertip, and human history as the finest paring of a fingernail. It’s a brilliant and vivid image, but perhaps not directly connected to how we live right now. The future fossil is a way to make deep time more of a tangible presence in everyday life. So many of the things we are surrounded with—such as our cities of concrete and steel, filled with plastic and glass—have the potential to become a fossil presence in the rock record. Not all of it, of course, but the sheer quantity means it’s inevitable there will be some trace of how we lived. So I began to think of future fossils in terms of the stories they will tell—as stories themselves, of a kind, that we’re telling to those who will follow us. They’re a glimpse of our planetary legacy, and so an opportunity to take hold of what we want that legacy to be.

Books on the Deep Future