This essay considers the inverse to an Anthropocene characterized as an era of human-induced
loss of species and life forms on earth. The global practice of burying increasing amounts and kinds of waste in landfills precipitates the mixing of wildly heterogeneous materials, which diverse kinds of bacteria avidly metabolize. As they relentlessly feed on our detritus, bacteria both proliferate and, we suggest, diversify. However, this is not a numbers game, nor is it one which is solely or even primarily about interconnectivity, networking, and entanglement. The ontological provocation of the human waste-bacterial conjunction is the fact of our total dependence on life forms whose life-worlds and trajectories are likely to remain overwhelmingly unknown to us. If this offers a cautionary note about our own increasingly hyperbolic perturbations of the Earth’s constitutive strata, perhaps its more profound prompting is about the force of the stratifications and destratifications proper to the planet itself.