Evelyne Alcide (b. 1969, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) Séisme (Earthquake), 2010 Beads, fabric Fowler Museum at UCLA, X2010.17.4; Museum Purchase, the Jerome L. Joss Endowment Fund

One of the great contradictions of the Anthropocene is that:

• human activity is reaching geological proportions, for example, that humans control more ammonia and mammalian mass than the rest of nature and

• that in turn is revealing the extent to which our existence depends on the Earth's biogeochemical processes, which then shows that

• we are a tiny, rather insignificant player in the grand drama of life: we are billions of years late to the party, which will continue to go on well after we are gone.

Back in the day, people used to think earthquakes and floods are acts of God. Scientific advances have disabused of those notions, but it's also obscured a truth hidden in that religious sentiment:

there's a vastly more than human planet whose stability (for our purposes) we have taken for granted.