Stagtine, 13. Creativity or Capacity?
Section 1, Chapter 10
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The world is a stop-motion study in endless change. Today, we live in the aftershock of the greatest climate crisis in history. It began when one organism, for no apparent reason, jumped its limits and produced a poisonous gas that slowly found its way into the atmosphere.1 It was an unwanted by-product of their culture’s industry, a waste of its social evolution.
Steadily accumulating behind the undetectable, heavenly veil, this fatal gas silently worked and changed the climate. Systems of culture developed around it and a certain species grew to dominate the processes of Earth, like a child with clay.2 While epochs are often classified geologically—such as the Pliocene and Pleistocene being the two, most recent rock layers and also the two, most re- cent epochs in our history—there were discussions of calling this new, climate unsettling time as something reminiscent of its social change: -pocene, or something like that.
The climate emergency wrought by this one organism would soon suffocate nearly ninety percent of life on Earth. It would soon force one of the greatest mass extinction events in planetary history— larger than the one that ended the dinosaurs, more wide-reaching than the last Ice Age and the ensuring silence of the megafauna. It would soon overcome and redefine life itself. It would soon elevate one species to dominate beyond degree. Life, it was argued, would never be the same.
This was two billion years ago, and we are still thankful for cyanobacteria and its oxygen.
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