How the Empire of Plantae Marshaled in the Petrolocene

First was the seed… and the rest is history.

The few billion years of life on Earth has featured some dramatic events, not least of which is our current era which some deem the “Anthropocene”(an era defined by the collective actions of human societies). I, however, prefer calling it the “Petrolocene” — an era defined by the extraction, combustion and transformation of fossil fuels.

I felt it was now time to recontextualize the Petrolocene in the empire of plantae — the planet dominated not by humanity but by plant life.

Plants shepherded animals onto this earth. They provided us oxygen, food and even helped to filter our drinking water. Without plants we simply would not exist. Over millions of years, plants and plant-like lifeforms like cyanobacteria ended up transformed into what we now call “fossil fuels.” Kingdom Animalia, via humanity, then found a way to dig up these powerful substances which led to a significant transformation of this planet. Someday, as the sun sets on Animalia, Plantae will re-create itself and its home to shepherd in the next iterations of life.

The story doesn’t simply revolve around humanity; and this should give us humans hope. We may be the narrators now in our own languages, but the languages of the universe go well beyond humanity. A plant-centered narrative is also a much longer story with great vastness both before and after the human. We humanoids have always been in the gentle, wise and loving hands of Plantae; we ignore this truth at our own peril. A wiser path forward would embrace Plantae’s power for healing and renewal while also giving ample respect to the vast force that it possesses over us.