Words: Maya Price (she/her)
A planet riddled with injustice doesn’t have to be how others find us.
From footprints and fossils, to the genetic lineage responsible for the feathery faces of penguins and chickens, the dinosaurs left their mark on our planet and its living inhabitants. After the Twenty One Pilots song Drag Path went viral on TikTok in late 2025, edits popped up featuring dinosaurs roaming the prehistoric Earth alongside footage of their living ancestors. But, as we grow teary-eyed watching two dinos from many millions of years ago curl their necks together into a heart shape just like the swans of our world today, one can’t help but wonder whether the traces of humanity that persist into the future will ever be imagined with the same nostalgia.
During the 300,000 years humans have lived on Earth, we’ve stripped it of souvenirs of its past – the rapid ongoing loss of 6,000-year-old ice in the Weißseespitze Glacier in the Eastern Alps; the extinction of a two-million-year-old subspecies of Galápagos giant tortoise – leaving far less savoury mementos of our own presence in their places. The unprecedented damage we’ve inflicted has propelled us out of the Holocene – the geological epoch that began at the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago – and into a new epoch: the “Anthropocene.”
Epochs are geological periods marked by changes in the Earth’s fossil record, which correspond to major shifts in climate and ecosystems. For instance, the Holocene was a period of relatively warm and stable climate compared to its predecessor, the Pleistocene, a change that is visible geologically through marks of glacial retreat. Now, anthropogenic climate change is creating geological signatures distinct from those of the Holocene: a 2016 study by Colin N. Waters et al. described an altered stratigraphic record due to deposits of materials including plastics, radioisotopes, and ash from fossil fuel combustion in sediments, among other anthropogenic factors. One need not look far for examples of the environmental changes spurred by the same human activities these signatures reflect. Our World in Data noted a global net loss of 4.7 million hectares of forests per year between 2010 and 2020, and The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the summer minimum of sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean shrunk by an average of 78,000 square kilometres per year between 1979 and 2024.
It’s not just the Earth’s physical features that humans have irrevocably altered. It’s also humanity itself. Take the Marshall Islands, for instance, where the United States conducted 67 nuclear weapons ‘tests’ between 1946 and 1958 near Bikini and Enewetak atolls. As the critic Jessica Hurley asserts, ‘there is no partial test of an atomic bomb.’ It cannot be carried out under lab conditions isolated from real world impacts. Many of the islands remain uninhabitable, and lingering radiation still causes birth defects, genetic disorders, and cancers among Pacific Islanders today. These radioactive contaminants have not merely marked the water, air, and soil: they have become imprints of domination and exploitation that affected communities are forced to carry for generations.
The Marshall Islands are just one example of the tragic pattern of the West’s treatment of non-Western land and peoples as disposable resources. They’re also a reminder that, while human responsibility for devastating planetary change must be recognized, not all of humanity is equally responsible. Anthropogenic climate change cannot be separated from the processes of capitalism and colonialism that set it in motion. Sylvia Wynter, in her book On Being Human as Praxis, interrogates this history to make room for possibility and hope. She argues that our inability to address the climate crisis stems from the ongoing erasure of humanity’s plurality of knowledge systems. The result is a self-induced entrapment within the workings of a singular system of knowledge – that of the Western natural sciences forced upon the world as a result of colonialism. But this also means there are so many other ways to envision humanity’s place in the world that lie beyond the constraints of this system.
A planet riddled with injustice doesn’t have to be how others find us. In fact, we’ve imagined the pieces of our world we’d like to be discovered by before: in 1977, NASA launched two phonograph records with the Voyager spacecraft containing sounds and images of Earth for extraterrestrials to find. With recordings of footsteps, morse code, crackling fires, and greetings in 55 different languages, the records are not only souvenirs of human life on Earth, but also reminders of the vast variety of ways of interacting with the world that have always existed.
Microplastics and radioisotopes remain for a long time, but the human systems that have put them there don’t have to. We may never erase the lasting imprints of our destructive presence, but we can still repair the practices and modes of thought that have led us here, and work towards more equitable relations with the others we live amongst.
