Nature

The Radical Transformation of Fresh Kills

Great Plains. One man grabs a calf’s hind leg and lifts. Another seizes a front leg and heaves, flipping as easily as possible the two-hundred-pound animal. Then each man pulls hard to keep it still.

Nature, we learn, seeks to establish and maintain equilibrium. According to a study published late last year in Nature, Earth did just that, though not by design. It just so happens that the year 2020 marked the point at which anthropogenic mass (the mass of manmade inanimate objects) equaled Earth’s total biomass (the total mass of all living taxa, including the mass of humans and our livestock).

When the glacier finally melted, the last of the green turned yellow and brown and the dry season came like an omen. Its white-blue ice had given water to all thirteen communities of Quispillaccta in Peru and, to women and men wise enough to receive them, messages: Plant here; plant that.