Sticktights and the Anthropocene

September, 2026

We know it’s September because our socks pick up sticktights when we walk shoeless through the house. Ouiser the wonder dog collects the seeds on her daily forays then scatters them around the house for our socks to find. Sticktights include an assortment of seeds, from cockleburs and burdock to tick trefoil and black snakeroot. Virginia tickseed are especially prevalent around our place this year. They turn the dog’s beard into a tangled mat and are like little knots in our smartwools. A highly effective seed dispersal mechanism is an inconvenience for its unwitting vectors.

Sticktights, along with the flowers of Jerusalem artichoke, goldenrod, and aster, signal the beginning of the end—the growing season wrapping up. Summer is passing the baton to autumn. It’s an amiable transfer, and not permanent. After a long rest, seeds will soften, sap will flow to treetops, buds will swell, and the cycle will begin anew as it has for millennia. 

A few thousand years is a very brief time in Earth’s history.  Seasonal changes have been around for 4.5 billion years, since this globe started spinning on a tilted axis and began orbiting the sun. The extremes in seasonal temperatures and weather have varied over the eons, largely dictated by heat trapping gases in the atmosphere. The higher the concentrations, the warmer the climate. 

Shifts in atmospheric gases have historically occurred slowly, but not so in the Anthropocene.  We have, in a matter of a couple hundred years, modified our thin ribbon of air so it resembles something not seen in over three million years. As humans, we’re adrift in uncharted waters. It’s our own doing, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Much of the excess CO2 in our atmosphere will remain for centuries, if not thousands of years. We’ve missed our chance to keep glacial ice intact and ocean currents moving, missed our chance to avoid calamities in agriculture, increased the likelihood of water shortages, and are on track for mass movements of people forced from coastal cities and regions no longer suitable for humans. 

These are not matters of opinion. Not all is lost but virtually everything is changed. The apocalypse is not certain but glimpses of it are. Hope lies in looking at the future with open eyes, learning to adapt, reducing further loss, protecting what can still be protected, letting go of control, and learning the art of stewardship. Finding that hope under a political administration focused on wars, world domination, and continued fossil fuel burning, where environmental protections are dismantled and the findings of the world’s leading climate scientists are denied, makes the work particularly challenging. 

Which brings me back to sticktights, the little hitchhikers that promise renewal with no assurance they will sprout in a recognizable world. They don’t acknowledge change or loss. They carry age-old instructions, and given rain, warmth, and adequate sunlight, they will do their best to carry on. Seasons, too, will continue to pass. Our job is to know what to expect, and how to react to their passage.