“We are fundamentally Earthlings,” writes Bjornerud in TURNING TO STONE. In the science fiction novella Story of your Life,[i] a linguist and a physicist attempt to initiate a dialogue with an extraterrestrial species hovering in spaceships above Earth. As the linguist studies the alien language, her perception of time changes. She experiences glimpses of the future and is able to save the world from annihilation. A changed relationship to time that saves the world in an existential crisis – this sounds like what we need right now. This is what geoscientists do: by learning the language of the rocks, they become more timeful.
In our climate and ecological crisis, we have the knowledge, technology and political frameworks to secure a future in which our children and grandchildren can thrive. The solutions that clear a path beyond the Anthropocene, where humans transform themselves from a destructive geological force to guardians and gardeners of the earth, are available. The solutions are not the problem, or rather, the solutions need to be at the level of the problem. At the fundamental level at which the climate and ecological crisis is occurring, we need to address the relationship between being and time.
What does it mean to be an Earthling in our time on Earth? What even does ‘our’ mean? Does it include the rocks? When I asked Marcia Bjornerud about the subtitle of her 2020 book Timefulness: how thinking like a geologist can help save the world, she confirmed that it wasn’t hyperbole: “most of the environmental problems that we are facing today have arisen because of ignorance of the intrinsic timescales of natural and geologic processes. We are just accelerating things beyond any kind of reasonable level at which the planet can maintain equilibrium.” Sad Planets, which we discussed last month, grapples with the feelings between the relationship between our world in data and the intrinsically sad proposition of being an Earthling, dislodged from the center of the universe by Copernicus. Four years after Timefulness, Bjornerud published TURNING TO STONE, a plea for geocentrism. For ordinary people,
“cosmological concepts are too abstract to understand in any visceral way; modern physics is largely nonphysical, at least in any normal human experience of the physical. In contrast, geology with its focus on tangible records of the distant past, offers a bridge between human experiences of the world and the awe-inspiring but cold and formidable emptiness of space. Learning to read the storylines of Earth’s history directly from rocks – understanding the plots and protagonists that shape the places where we live – can help to provide a feeling of ‘embeddedness’ in the cosmos, a sense of continuity and kinship with past and future. Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of geologic thinking is the practice of roaming freely across many scales in space and time. In doing so, we can see ourselves in miniature, part of a long lineage of creatures on a creative planet that has renewed itself for more than four billion years while keeping an idiosyncratic diary of its activities over time in the form of rocks.”(6-7)
Rocks are part of the stories of your life. It’s easy to see rocks, and our rocky planet, as an unchanging backdrop to our human activities. Adopting geologic habits of mind could help us understand our planet. “There are other, more challenging cognitive practices – indeed, deliberate retraining of the human mind – necessary for thinking like a planet. Among these are developing a radical reconception of time, and recognition that the boundary between past and present is highly permeable.”(50) This includes accepting “that all geographies are temporary.”(50)
Thinking like a planet – it sounds like Earth sciences are entering the dangerous territory of questioning the strict boundaries we are used to, between living and dead, between live organisms and lifeless objects, between the pathetic fallacy and pathetic facticity. Pathetic facticity may be crucial for scientists, using not just our thinking but our pathos to understand the world in which we live. Indeed, Bjornerud describes an experience she had with her colleagues at Svalbard: “it was undeniable that the austere landscape was alive, its rocks and water, ice and air in constant conversation. The terrain was animate, sentient and creative. It would just take me thirty years to say that out loud.”(5)
We humans are of the Earth, but this means Earth is our only point of reference. We forget how weird our planet is, and how intelligent – culminating in fantasies that we could ‘geoform’ other planets, repeating processes that have taken our own planet billions of years. And how do you even terraform a planet that does not have plate tectonics? Bjornerud writes, “This planet, I realized, is truly strange. We Earthlings take for granted the great variety of rock types that create the geologic infrastructure in which we live. But this is only because Earth is such a versatile and virtuosic cook, a planet that has learned to mix, distill, and recombine available ingredients in ways that no others have.”(64) Because of basalt, Earth has plate tectonics. But water, too, is integral to plate tectonics. And because of plate tectonics, we have earthquakes.
Bjornerud describes how ‘young’ the geosciences really are – plate tectonics, which is comparable to the discovery of relativity (or perhaps even Newton’s laws?) in physics, was only widely accepted in the late sixties. She describes how Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, suggesting that the best way to think of Earth is as a living being, was still controversial early in her career. In response to a professor sharply proclaiming it ‘pseudoscience’, she wonders “what was so threatening, so subversive, about having students just consider the idea that Earth could in some sense be alive?” “There is no bright line between the living and nonliving components of the Earth system. Everywhere on Earth, at every spatial and temporal scale, rock, water, air, and life are in intimate communion.”(164-5) I learned, for instance, that even minerals are subject to evolution and that life is integral in this evolution: “Today, mineralogists recognize that 40 percent of all mineral species on Earth are in some sense biogenic – produced either directly or indirectly through the action of lifeforms – and that as life has evolved on Earth, so have the minerals in the crust.”(166)
In TURNING TO STONE, Bjornerud tells stories of her life and how they interweave with stones, and with developments in the geosciences. The book offers an accessible overview of geoscientific topics, especially Bjornerud’s specialization of earthquakes. The phenomenon of earthquakes alone should be sufficient to overthrow our image of geology as slow, almost unchanging – an image that underlies much of the climate illiteracy in our society today. Because how can we, puny humans, have any significant influence on a planet that has been around for 4.5 billion years? Earthquakes show the gear shift of our planet when it comes to scales of time: descending slabs may move at a few inches per year on average on geologic timescales. But for our human reality this means that a part of the subducting plate “may get stuck or ‘locked’ for centuries before it lurches abruptly downward, sometimes by as much as a hundred feet in a matter of seconds, causing ‘megathrust’ earthquakes like the giant magnitude 9 events that unleashed devastating tsunamis in Sumatra in 2004 and in Japan in 2011.”(80)
Earthquakes have been around far longer than we have, but our understanding of them has changed. In this understanding, the Newtonian way of thinking has been replaced with a far more personalized approach: “Given the almost infinite number of possible combinations of rock types, fault geometries, hydrologic characteristics, and tectonic histories, no two earthquakes – like snowflakes – could ever be identical. We can abstract general principles about how and why they occur, but we will also miss something essential about them if we are too eager to strip them of idiosyncrasy and turn them into abstract, idealized models. In the case of understanding earthquakes, a preference for tidy idealization can even have deadly consequences.”(237) Rigid concepts, like in physics, can be an obstacle here. Only recently, for instance, have geologists discovered the phenomenon of ‘slow earthquakes’: “Although the failure to recognize the phenomenon of slow earthquakes was due in part to a lack of instruments to detect them, it was also caused by a limited concept of what an ‘earthquake’ was.”(238) And here we are, back full circle to the need for timefulness and why thinking like a geologist can help save the world:
“Our inaction on climate change is another manifestation of the same disregard for the power of the incremental. Some evolutionary psychologists suggest that we humans are so hardwired to react to immediate threats that we simply can’t make rational decisions over longer timescales. But I suspect this time-blindness is largely cultural, and most acute in the West. Certain western habits of mind have similarly shaped what is ‘seen’ and what is ignored in the sciences. The late discovery of the full range of fault behavior is an illustration of how an understanding of Earth has sometimes been hampered by the intellectual preferences of Western science, which from the time of the Enlightenment onward has been dominated by the culture of physics.”(238)
If only there was a philosopher who was able to unhinge some of these ingrained habits of thinking in and about science, about evolution, and about time – a philosopher who can help us make sense of this changing world, of change itself, and who once summarized his philosophy of time as “time is not space”. Next month, we will read about the most famous person in the world, the most dangerous philosopher of his time. Although through her own admittance such a biography is the most “un-Bergsonian” thing to do, we will read Emily Herring’s page-turner Herald of a restless world: How Henri Bergson brought philosophy to the people.[ii]
In the meantime, there are two related lessons I learned from TURNING TO STONE. The first is that learning about geology is a therapy for our ‘inherently sad proposition’ as discussed in previous month’s Sad Planets. When we hear about Earth science today, it is mostly about climate change. And who wants to learn about a science that only makes us sad and scared? But geology is beautiful, and we happen to live in the golden age of geosciences. Books like Bjornerud’s Timefulness and Reading the rocks, Stephen Porder’s Elemental and Melanie During’s The last spring of the dinosaurs[iii] serve as a reminder of the larger context in which the challenge of climate change occurs, the wonders of the planet we live on. Moodsplainers remind us that we should give hope and stay positive: I say, instead of seeking that hope by avoiding climate science, dive deeper into it: learn about sandstone, basalt, tuff, granite, dolomite and all the other intriguing characters that influence your life in ways you cannot imagine.
The second lesson, a short one, has to do with contingency. Why return to geocentrism? Because Earth is unique. I have to remind myself that it is a geoscientist, and not a philosopher of time speaking, when I read
“Can we ever revisit the past without seeing it through the lens of what happened later? Can we truly understand a bygone time in its own right, when other outcomes were still possible? Even when studying rocks, it’s hard to avoid the bias of presentism. The Lake Superior basalts formed a billion years ago, on an Earth when life was still entirely microbial. Trilobites were still 450 million years in the future; another supercontinent had to form and break up again before Pangea would even begin to take shape; there was no reason to imagine that such things as dinosaurs or primates would inherit the Earth. None of these things – though now literally set in stone – were then preordained; given the happenstances of planetary and biological evolution, Earth’s story could have unfolded quite differently.”(44)
Now too, Earth’s story can unfold quite differently, depending on what we do. “There are two ways for the Anthropocene to draw to a close: either we learn to be better Earthlings, blending into the background and no longer distorting biogeochemical cycles, or we go extinct.”[iv] How will our present climate and ecological crisis compare to the five previous mass extinctions? How far will we push back the next ice age? Which Earthlings will be there to witness it, besides the granite, basalt and quartzite rocks?
TURNING TO STONE is available from Macmillan. You can listen to my interview with Marcia Bjornerud on Spotify or through the podcast website.
[i] Chiang, Ted (1998). “Story of your life.” Stories of your life and others.
[ii] Emily Herring (2024). Herald of a Restless world: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People. Basic Books https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/emily-herring/herald-of-a-restless-world/9781541600942/?lens=basic-books
[iii] During, M. (2023). De laatste lente van de Dinosauriërs. to be discussed later in this series, under the header of ‘why hasn’t this Dutch book been published English yet?’ – along with Jessica den Outer’s Rights of nature (Rechten voor de Natuur), Lisa Doeland’s Apocalypsofie, and Chris Julien’s Everyday activism (Alledaags activisme)
[iv] Bjornerud, M. (2022) Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities. Princeton University Press, pp.12-13.
This series of book reflections and reviews is conducted by Mario Veen, an interdisciplinary philosopher and writer who is fascinated by global weirding. Mario is the host of the podcast Life From Plato’s Cave and the author of ‘Hoe Plato je uit je grot sleurt’ . Over the next twelve months, a new book review is published each month on Future Based. Additionally, two reading groups will be organized in the upcoming year to come together and discuss books, but more specifically: Climate Madness.
Previous installments:
Published: 22-09-2024
Editor: Lara Parodi