See that young boy in the picture? That’s me at age six. The year is 1976. My father–at that time a newly minted assistant professor in a department of entomology–is standing with his Nikon camera taking the picture. This was one of his early research sites where he studied one of Michigan’s unofficial state animals–the black fly. I’m standing in my numbered shirt at the downstream end of a metal culvert through which a small, freshwater stream originating from mid-Michigan’s Rose Lake passes. This stream eventually empties into mid-Michigan’s Looking Glass River, which eventually flows into Michigan’s Grand River, which eventually flows into Lake Michigan, which eventually flows into the St. Lawrence Seaway, which eventually flows into the Atlantic Ocean, which eventually flows into the sky. Eventually.

What I’d like you to notice in this photograph is not the barely-moving stream, the shaggy-looking berm behind me, my scientist father, the invisible black fly larvae, or myself. Instead, I’d like you to notice the steely culvert I’m standing over. I know you can’t see all of it, but I think you can just see enough of it to begin considering the following proposal: much like Anna Tsing’s matsutake mushrooms, culverts might very well be one of the more emblematic totems of and for the Anthropocene.

For those unfamiliar with the the term, the “Anthropocene” is one of the proposed names for our current geological age as “the historical epoch of our planet during which human activity has become the dominant influence on climate, environment, geology and ecosystems” (Clarke & Haraway, 2018). Despite other proposals–e.g., Capitalocene, Plantationocene, and Chthulucene–the connective tissue common to all of these proposed names is pretty straightforward and blunt: without planning or intention, we live amidst an age in which humans have made a downright mess of our planet. If the Anthropocene is about humans making a mess, then culverts play contrasting roles in that mess. On the one hand, culverts disrupt. They tend to straighten what was once non-linear and enclose what was once open to the sky. On the other hand, culverts connect. They tend to ensure that stream water–as well as the various life forms and nutrients within that water–still flows despite the human obstacles put into its natural pathway(s). This dualistic nature makes culverts, well, rather slippery artifacts. In the hands of humans, culverts have become something both rational and irrational, logical and illogical, natural and unnatural.

Throughout my life, I’ve walked and/or driven over hundreds, maybe even thousands, of culverts. Chances are you have too. I’ve always known culverts, but hasn’t been until relatively recently that I’ve begun noticing them. Because of the notion of the Anthropocene, I’ve started thinking about culverts differently. In “Project Culvert” (tentative title), in the coming weeks and months I plan to devote a series of blogs to culvert exploration. The first of its kind, I suspect. Part anthropological and part philosophical, I hope to glean–among other hopes–some useful survival skills from this unexpected totem of the Anthropocene.