The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has given us a definition of European culture which resonates, in a sinister way, with the naming of the new epoch. “Culture,” he says, “can be interpreted as an intention to remove the otherness of Nature, which, alien and previous, surprises and strikes the immediate identity which is the same of the human self.” As an intention which converts the otherness of nature into the sameness of humanity, Levinas’s culture sounds alarmingly like Calgary, eating its way steadily toward the Rockies, converting foothills into dismal suburbs of itself. It is against such reduction to the Same that poetry works, introducing otherness, or wilderness, into consciousness without insisting that it be turned wholly into knowledge, into what we know, what we own. Within poetic attention, we might say, what we behold is always “alien and previous,” whether it’s an exceptional fossil or an “ordinary” rock or chickadee. In poetry there is no “been there, done that”; everything is wilderness. The arrival of the Anthropocene would be an acknowledgement that the intention of culture, as Levinas sees it, has been all too richly realized, that there is little hope for an other that remains other, for wilderness that remains wild.

- Don McKay, "Ediacaran and Anthropocene: poetry as a reader of deep time"