Field Station 4 is entitled “Confluence Ecologies,” a project through which the art and ecology collective Deep Time Chicago has been exploring the Mississippi River by way of southern Illinois’ rich natural and cultural history. But what on Earth is a “confluence ecology,” or the “Anthropocene,” and what does the northern metropolis of Chicago have to do with the rural downstate region over 300 miles away?

Asking “what on Earth” is of course a central part of the answer. As Earthlings of a certain size and historical trajectory, we have come to operate on local and embodied scales of intimacy, as well as global and abstracted scales of intercontinentality. Deep Time Chicago has an interest in the particular here and the peculiar now of the confluence region because we know (but don’t yet know enough) about how the particular and the peculiar link to Here to There, and Past to Future. We call this exploration “Confluence Ecologies,” not only because our research has focused on the region of southern Illinois where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers meet, but because our work has also examined the confluence of two great drives that have come to define and create the Anthropocene condition: the drive to intensify energy use and its extraction from the Earth (including fossil and nuclear fuels), and the desire to stretch and optimize our mobility to every corner of the planet.

The eco– of ecology and economy comes from the Greek Oikos, meaning “home,” but what the acceleration of energy and mobility have done is transform our home—our physical houses, towns, landscapes, and the planet—into something more akin to a factory. The intensification of our energy appetite and our never-ending urge to drive, fly, rail, and ship every kind of animal, vegetable, and mineral across the planet has completely collapsed the habits of time and space that our ancestors evolved with. This affects not only how people experience time and space, but it very materially changes the metabolism of the planet as a whole.

We know definitively that the rate of nutrient and element cycling, of erosion, of extinction, and even the patterns of the climate itself are changing at an accelerated tempo because of our desires for energetic power and long-distance movement. While this has been especially so over the past 70 years (a period called by some as the “Great Acceleration,” during which most of the measures of planetary churn like resource use, population growth, and ecological degradation have all exponentially increased), this most recent period of humanity has its own pre-history. For the Mississippi River—and especially its tributary, the Illinois—have played pivotal roles in the genealogy of transformation, not only as a contemporary player in the global economy, but also arguably as an exemplary site for the Anthropocene’s groundwork.

We need only consider a journey undertaken 350 years ago, in 1673, by the French explorers Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette. It was a five-month canoe along the Mississippi River and its watershed made possible by the regional knowledge of five French-Indian guides, as well as the local knowledge of countless more indigenous peoples. On the final leg of their trip, Jolliet and Marquette went up from the Mississippi to the Illinois River, and then further still to the Des Plaines. On that leg, they became the first European colonists to discover two crucial raw ingredients for the Anthropocene, both of which are made clear on this 1681 map drawn from an account of their journey:

(1) The first discovery of coal in North America, along the banks of the Illinois River, which was to feed the American’s insatiable hunger for energy intensification (marked on the map as charbon de terre). This was followed only days later by the discovery of: (2) a continuous water route between the northern Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. This was made possible by Mud Lake, an eight-mile wetland portage that connected the Mississippi watershed to the Great Lakes—and thus a gateway that accelerated transcontinental (and therefore global) transportation.

When French explorer Robert La Salle stood on the shore of Lake Michigan and surveyed the significance of this watercourse connection, he is said to have proclaimed: “This will be the gate of empire, this the seat of commerce.” That this was Chicago.

And this is where we find the inextricable enmeshment of the Midwest, a node in a network of other nodes that includes coal cities like Carbondale and transportation cities like Chicago as key hubs of the planet’s circulatory system in the Anthropocene epoch.

Every tributary is a capillary. Where waters mix and species meet, molecules come forth to then become with. In these confluences, there is a fundamental transformation of planetary metabolism afoot. This project is an attempt to begin to get our footing.