Humans of the Anthropocene

You can walk to the beach from where we are staying. It’s a long peel of dun-coloured sand bordered by tidy rainbow summer houses, monotonous black and white condos, and monstrous blue McMansions that blister the length of the Delmarva Peninsula. On the other side of the sand lies the heaving, implacable mass of unfathomable grey-green water that covers nearly three-quarters of the globe, once a boundary between the known and unknown, a limit-space of mystery and terror, now tamed, or so we think, to a vacation fun zone. There are lifeguards, though, lean summer kids with lazy tans, and to the north, rising from the low trees, towers built