I was first introduced to the Anthropocene in an environmental studies class. It was a word I’d never heard before and first described to me through examples such as lasting traces of radioactivity from nuclear weapons and our plastic polluted oceans. At this time I did not understand the word completely, to me it was an umbrella term demonstrating human impact and control on the environment.

Before reading and watching the resources for this class my first idea for this workshop was an image of one of the many blue green algae ridden lakes in Ontario. There’s no doubt sewer and industrial runoff and especially agricultural runoff are changing our natural systems. From my own knowledge and research it seems unlikely that changes in the nitrogen or phosphorus cycle will leave behind significant enough geological traces to define a new human dominant epoch. My prior knowledge of the anthropocene was entirely missing any geological aspect of the term, even though it is defined as “a proposed unit of geological time”(Anderson, 2020).

Various agricultural practices allow humans to control and change the natural environment. The industrialization of agriculture, factory farms for example as shown in my chosen image, focus on increasing production while keeping costs low. People are not separate from the natural environment. Everything we do has the potential to impact the natural environment for better or for worse, just as human activities are also impacted. Agriculture thrives in certain ecosystems, people depend on soil type and suitable weather conditions for an abundant food supply, career, and economic growth. Farming, a human activity, can be seriously impacted by a natural event such as a drought causing starvation and loss of income. Humans and our activities are entwined and a part of the world’s ecosystems. Increasingly, the human impact on ecosystems has not been harmonious but destructive and manipulative for our own benefit. With exponential human population growth and identifying humans as separate from natural systems like ecosystems, we are destroying them. With this in mind my understanding of the anthropocene is that it is a time in which humans have become disconnected from the natural world to a point where we are controlling and negatively impacting the planet in an irreversible way with no regard to long term effects. Our disturbances and dominance on the natural world will be so large that it will leave a mark on the geological record.

With my new understanding of the anthropocene I decided on an image taken from a poultry factory farm. It was tempting to find a more visually appealing image like one that would be found in Burtynsky’s film with a scenic landscape somehow altered by people. Although my image is not a landscape it does demonstrate human destruction on the natural world. The abundant consumption and biological interference of the chicken may make this bird the geological marker of our time. The chicken, originating in Asia (Meijer, 2016), like many other domesticated animals, is now commonly found throughout most of the world in populations greater than any other bird (Bennett et al., 2018). We have changed the species’ range and distribution globally. In addition, humans have altered the chicken’s genetic makeup through selective breeding. The modern broiler chicken, specifically raised and genetically bred for human consumption, may not decay the same as other bird carcasses. It is likely landfills will mummify their bones.

Chicken farming alone is not the largest human caused detriment on the planet especially compared to other forms of agriculture like cattle farming which often results in clear cutted areas for the cattle to graze and emit gases like methane and ammonia into the atmosphere. In that sense my image I chose is not the most prominent human activity affecting the planet, but in my opinion it matches my understanding of the anthropocene perfectly. The broiler chicken is now far different from its ancestors, this change would not have occurred naturally but only occured due to modern technology and knowledge. Humans have modified them to an extent where they are unable to survive without human interference while at the same time becoming the most abundant bird on earth, overall symbolizing human interference in biodiversity. As human and domestic animal populations increase, biodiversity is disappearing and biotic homogenization is more common as ecosystems are becoming increasingly similar. As populations increase most likely so will the consumption of chicken, and a substantial amount of the bones will remain intact to symbolize human alteration in the species and diversity. In my opinion chicken bones will be the symbol of our present where human systems dominate natural systems.