87 CHAPTER 4 Intertidal Poetry: Making Our Way Through Change Bridie McGreavy By all accounts, we are living in a time of amplifed, intensifed change in Earth’s material fows. These changes are due, in part, to high impact agricultural land uses and the burning of fossil fuels that mark our transi- tion into the era now commonly, and contentiously, referred to as the Anthropocene. 1 Across Earth’s major life support systems we are at or have crossed critical thresholds beyond which everyday life as we know it may not be sustained. We have blown past the proposed limit of 350 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide and have, in the course of writing the essay, now exceeded 400 ppm. This gaseous mate- rial layer traps excessive heat energy, accelerating global ice melt and sea level rise, causing marked changes in ocean chemistry and circulation. We are fushing massive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus into water- bodies, polluting aquatic ecosystems at the same time we pump, trans- port, and consume water in ways that disrupt how it has cycled on this planet for eons. 2 By looking at the 540 million-year-old fossil record, we also know that the current rate of species extinction is 100–1000 times B. McGreavy (*) Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine , Orono, ME, USA e-mail: bridie.mcgreavy@maine.edu © The Author(s) 2018 B. McGreavy et al. (eds.), Tracing Rhetoric and Material Life, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65711-0_4 bridie.mcgreavy@maine.edu