Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

The ephemera of the mayfly: a matter of perspective

The idea of chaos theory is a really pertinent (and well-chosen if I may say!) way to end this photo essay on extinction - reminding us that the apparent tragedy of extinction is really a matter of perspective, and can easily be diminished if we approach the issue from the perspective of a different life-cycle. The Carl Sagan video we watched in class was a good demonstration of this, but it got me thinking about whether we could approach the idea from the inverse scale, of the very short lifecycle. For example, the mayfly lives as a larvae underwater until a whole population hatches at once and they spend one day mating until they die. The name of the order of their species is testament to their fleeting time on Earth: Ephemeroptera.

Writers have drawn upon the short lifecycle of the mayfly to reflect on the transitoriness of human experience, for example George Crabbe in his satirical poem 'The Newspaper' from 1785:

In shoals the hours their constant numbers bring
Like insects waking to th' advancing spring;
Which take their rise from grubs obscene that lie
In shallow pools, or thence ascend the sky:
Such are these base ephemeras, so born
To die before the next revolving morn.

They mayfly is clearly being used as an analogy for the short-lived relevance of the daily news. In a similar way, human observation of the mayfly's single day is usually only conceptualised by reference to human experience, seen in the following explicit anthropocentrism in this news article:

"Watching a mass swarm of them bouncing in the air is like watching kids on a bouncy castle, and it is a peculiar feeling to ascribe a human exclamation to an insect, the only time I have ever done it: I couldn’t stop imagining them going 'wheee!'."

However, drawing upon my other notes on animal agency, these representational forms got me thinking about how well human thinking can really capture the animal experience. For example, the influential animal studies theorist Susan McHugh argues that the "aesthetic structure of metaphor" is unable to bear the weight of animal agency (488). Similarly, Cary Wolfe argues that humans need to stop treating animals as blank pages onto which we reinscribe our own meaning through analogy or representation (567). I wonder whether, if we learnt from animal studies and interrogated the radical alterity of the mayfly, we could develop a heightened appreciation of the intense temporality of their short-lived existence. This would perhaps enable us to develop the sense of perspective urged by both Sagan and the chaos theory discussed in this photo essay, which would ultimately encourage humans to take a more humble approach to our time and impact on the Earth.

- Amelia Loughland
References:

McHugh, Susan. "Literary animal agents". Modern Language Association. vol 124, no. 2, March, 2009, pp. 487–495.

Wolfe, Cary. "Human, All too Human: 'Animal Studies' and the Humanities". Modern Language Association. vol 124, no. 2, March, 2009, pp. 564–575.

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