Dear Friends,

The oldest known remains of homo sapiens date to nearly 300,000 thousand years ago. These ancient humans, morphologically speaking, resemble anatomically modern humans, and are classified accordingly. Further back in our human lineage, the genetic analyses of remains of the earliest human ancestors we’ve discovered date them at between 550,000 to 750,000 years old. This information is new to me. I had a vague sense of when the earliest humans evolved – maybe tens of thousands of years ago, give or take… tens of thousands of years – but my timeline was ill-formed. My comprehension of these millennia of human evolutionary history is shockingly incomplete.

The implications about the persistent longevity of humanity begin to churn in my mind. I project forward into the future. 300,000 years from now. Can we imagine humanity, however we may evolve, surviving that long into the future? The time span is too great to comprehend, too abstract, like the distance in light years starlight travels to us from the remote regions of space. Speculation runs wild. Will we recognize our human descendants? Will homo sapiens **have evolved into a new species? Will Earth still be home to whoever these hominins are? Will our sci-fi dystopian fantasies come to fruition? Will we, in fact, become devoured by some technological organism like the Borg?

Geological time, cosmological time, surrounds me. Processes that began billions and millions of years ago shaped the environment of this northeastern part of North America where I live. The explosion of matter and energy some 13 billion years ago unleashed forces that now course through my body and radiate around and through us like a vast web enmeshing all of space and time. As I walk and observe the Green Mountains of central Vermont, I see, touch, and feel forms and rocks – granite, shale, schist, quartzite – the evidence of events that occurred 350 to 450 million years ago as the bedrock of the Green Mountains coalesced. More comprehensible perhaps: the finishing touches of this landscape occurred with the cyclical advance and retreat of glaciers during the Pleistocene, or Ice Age, the last of which occurred about 12,000 years ago. The cabin-sized granite boulder my children and I scramble up and over in the woods was jostled around by sheets of ice and deposited in situ like a pebble I play with in my hands. A favorite local swimming spot, Kettle Pond, was formed when a block of dead ice was left by a retreating glacier, subsequently covered with sediment, and then melted to expose the kettle shape now filled with some of the cleanest, crispest water I’ve ever swum in.

For many and more often than not, we are condemned to think only in terms of human time. So, I try again to project our species forward within a more fathomable time scale: choose a period of 250 years, the length of time the US has been a nation. Can we imagine humanity even surviving ten generations hence until 2272? It’s a timespan too small to register major physiological evolution (perhaps) in our species, so I consider the evolution of human culture and technology, as well as how humans impact the non-human world. I invoked the idea of survival, automatically, two sentences ago, which is sad and scary, but how we will survive, equitably, is the ultimate question. Human activity is making the Earth increasingly uninhabitable for ourselves and millions of other living things. We are responsible for a mass die-off of species not seen for 65 million years, the Anthropocene extinction. And we alone are responsible for the antidote. Climate scientists believe we can still mitigate some of the more catastrophic changes to the Earth’s climate.

Barry Lopez’s book Horizons – part memoir, part travelogue – has been the recent catalyst for my wonder about the evolution of humans and our impact on the planet. Lopez (1945-2020) traveled the world, observing some of the most diverse and extreme environments on Earth, and wrote about the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture. Early in Horizons, he captures a truth about our tenuous place in this evolutionary continuum, a simple thing that I have found oddly comforting:

It is here, with these attempts to separate the fate of the human world from that of the nonhuman world that we come face-to-face with a biological reality that halts us in our tracks: nature will be fine without us. Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.

With wonder at our destructive and creative potential,

Jeremy