The seed banks, museums to edible earth, collecting of ancient pigments, and listening to the earth are a necessary romanticization of the thing beneath and between the cracks of the Anthropocene in all of its plastic and blockchainmail impenetrableness. A thin tributary of culture trickles forth from the bedrock of the cementing meta, the heavy suffocation of the virtual and the augmented.

The Anthropocene is not only this archeological crust: ocean garbage patches like a reversing Pangea, diapers, chew toys, lawn chairs, and surgical masks thrown into the stew. It is also the swarm of overlapping wi-fi signals, social media status updates, live streamed seminars and webcams, devices performing facial recognition, pings, and fornicating avatars. And before those, the pulsating and bisecting waves of late industrialization, our post-A.G.Bell post-Curie post-Edison post-Spencer post-Oppenheimer post-5G atmospheric agitation. 

This romanticization of the dirt and the deep is a brave and largely thankless endeavor, though a necessary meditation, rooting us to the ground, even if ancient, absent, and a distant memory. It is the philosophy that can stave off the end of our species. In our domestication of animals and house plants, we seek to make an individualized menagerie meant to serve as our own personal ark against this flood of products manufactured to smell like pine, lavender, ocean, laundry day and romance

Is the sudden and unquenchable thirst for kombucha and pre, pro, post, proto-biotics, our gut acting in a panic mode for the microbial wilderness that we have pushed to the brink of collapse? Does our stomach yearn for these lost microbes needing this reconnection to the earth instead of our manufactured illusion of self, manifested in reflected light and cheap calories? The interconnectivity of fungi in the forest and the tendrils of microorganisms in our stomachs reach for each other as a deep-earth neural network communicating in a language we may not speak but one they share and we clearly comprehend.

When our mysterious and invisible neighbors tire of us leaving our crap and business all over their property and decide to finally ingest us, to prepare us for their close fungal cousins to metabolize our corpses, our castles, and our neon kingdoms, we will be made whole again.