On a geological scale, the entire existence of the human race, from the first homo habilis to today’s sapiens, is but the blink of an eye. Can such an ephemeral phenomenon as the human being leave such an incisive mark on the body of the planet?
It would seem that the answer is yes, if we observe the disquieting ‘plastiglomerates’ gathered by the Canadian artist Kelly Jazvac in Hawaii, stones containing mixtures of natural debris and hardened plastic seen by some as a marker of the start of the Anthropocene. In the plastiglomerate the plastic and rock components are mixed so closely together that they are impossible to separate. Beyond the physical appearance, this calls a philosophical issue into play. In the plastiglomerate, in fact, we are no longer looking at two distinct substances, one artificial, the other natural, but at a single new substance that puts us directly into a new cosmogony, a new ‘background’ of reference for the human.
The fusion of natural and artificial is effectively much more sinister than people usually imagine (and imagining that the practice of recycling can re-establish order on its own seems very naive indeed). If we consider, for example, how the microplastics, corpuscles of the size of about one thousandth of a millimeter, enter the food chain of living beings, including our own. The veil the sky once gave to the earth is no longer just the design of a face. The ‘design’ is penetrating into the body of the earth, fusing with its abysmal depths, modifying its DNA.