Timefulness

by Marcia Bjornerud

  illusion created by a malevolent demon or god.1

  Early in an introductory geology course, one begins to under-

  stand that rocks are not nouns but verbs— visible evidence of

  processes: a volcanic eruption, the accretion of a coral reef, the

  growth of a mountain belt. Everywhere one looks, rocks bear

  witness to events that unfolded over long stretches of time. Little

  by little, over more than two centuries, the local stories told

  by rocks in all parts of the world have been stitched together

  into a great global tapestry— the geologic timescale. This “map”

  of Deep Time represents one of the great intellectual achieve-

  ments of humanity, arduously constructed by stratigraphers,

  paleontologists, geochemists, and geochronologists from many

  cultures and faiths. It is still a work in progress to which details

  are constantly being added and finer and finer calibrations being

  made. So far, no one in more than 200 years has found an anach-

  ronistic rock or fossil— as biologist J.B.S. Haldane reputedly

  A Call for Timefulness 9

  said, “a Precambrian rabbit”2— that would represent a fatal in-

  ternal inconsistency in the logic of the timescale.

  If one acknowledges the credibility of the methodical work

  by countless geologists from around the world (many in the

  service of petroleum companies), and one believes in a God as

  creator, the choice is then whether to accept the idea of (1) an

  ancient and complex Earth with epic tales to tell, set in mo-

  tion eons ago by a benevolent creator, or (2) a young Earth

  fabricated only a few thousand years ago by a devious and de-

  ceitful creator who planted specious evidence of an old planet

  in every nook and cranny, from fossil beds to zircon crystals,

  in anticipation of our explorations and laboratory analyses.

  Which is more heretical? A corollary of this argument, to be

  deployed with tact and care, is that compared with the deep,

  rich, grand geologic story of Earth, the Genesis version is an

  offensive dumbing- down, an oversimplification so extreme as

  to be disrespectful to the Creation.

  While I have sympathy for individuals wrestling with theo-

  logical questions, I have no tolerance for those who inten-

  tionally spread brain- fogging pseudoscience under the aegis

  of ( suspiciously well- funded) religious organizations. My col-

  leagues and I despair at the existence of atrocities like Ken-

  tucky’s Creation Museum, and the disheartening frequency

  with which Young Earth websites appear when students search

  for information about, say, isotopic dating. But I hadn’t fully

  understood the tactics and far- reaching tentacles of the “Cre-

  ation Science” industry until a former student alerted me that

  one of my own papers, published in a journal read only by nerdy

  geophysicists, had been cited on the website of the Institute for

  Creation Research. Citation frequency is one metric by which

  the scientific world ranks its practitioners, and most scientists

  adopt P. T. Barnum’s view that there is “no such thing as bad

  10 Ch a pter 1

  publicity”— the more citations, the better, even if one’s ideas

  are being rebutted or challenged. But this citation was akin to

  a social media endorsement from an especially despised troll.

  The article was about some unusual metamorphic rocks in

  the Norwegian Caledonides whose high- density minerals attest

  to their having been at crustal depths of at least 50 km (30 mi)

  at the time the mountain belt was forming. Oddly, these rocks

  occur in lenses and pods, interleaved with rock masses that

  did not undergo the conversion to the more compact mineral

  forms. My coinvestigators and I showed that the nonuniform

  metamorphism was due to the extremely dry nature of the orig-

  inal rocks, which inhibited the recrystallization process. We

  argued that the rocks, with their low- density minerals, prob-

  ably resided unstably for some period in the deep crust until

  one or more large earthquakes fractured the rocks and allowed

  fluids to enter and locally trigger long- suppressed meta morphic

  reactions. We used some theoretical constraints to suggest

  that in this case, the spotty metamorphism might have hap-

  pened in thousands or tens of thousands of years, rather than

  the hundreds of thousands to millions of years in more typical

  tectonic settings. This “evidence for rapid metamorphism” is

  what someone at the Institute for Creation Research grabbed

  onto and cited— completely ignoring the fact that the rocks are

  known to be about a billion years old and that the Caledonides

  were formed around 400 million years ago. I was stunned to

  realize that there are people with enough time, training, and

  motivation to be trawling the vast waters of the scientific liter-

  ature for such finds, and that someone is probably paying them

  to do it. The stakes must be very high.

  For those who deliberately confuse the public with falsified

  accounts of natural history, colluding with powerful religious

  syndicates to promote doctrine that serves their own coffers

  A Call for Timefulness 11

  or political agendas, my Midwestern niceness reaches its limit.

  I would love to say: “No fossil fuels for you (or plastic, for that

  matter). All that oil was found thanks to a rigorous under-

  standing of the sedimentary record of geologic time. And no

  modern medicine for you either, since the great majority of

  pharmaceutical, therapeutic, and surgical advances involve

  testing on mice, which makes sense only if you understand that

  they are our evolutionary kin. You can cleave to whatever myths

  you like about the history of the planet, but then you should

  live with only the technologies that follow from that worldview.

  And please stop dulling the minds of the next generation with

  retrograde thinking.” (Wow! I feel better now.)

  Some religious sects embrace a symmetrical form of time

  denial, believing not only in a truncated geologic past but also a

  foreshortened future in which the Apocalypse is nigh. Fixation

  with the end of the world may seem a harmless delusion— the

  lone robed man with a warning placard is a cartoon cliché, and

  we’ve all come through several “Rapture” dates unscathed. But

  if enough voters truly think this way, there are serious policy

  implications. Those who believe that the End of Days is just

  around the corner have no reason to be concerned about mat-

  ters like climate change, groundwater depletion, or loss of

  biodiversity.3 If there is no future, conservation of any kind is,

  paradoxically, wasteful.

  As exasperating as professional Young- Earthers, creation-

  ists, and apocalypticists can be, they are completely forthright

  about their chronophobia. More pervasive and corrosive are

  the nearly invisible forms of time denial that are built into the

  very infrastructure of our society. For example, in the logic of

  economics, in which labor productivity must always increase tor />
  justify higher wages, professions centered on tasks that simply

  take time— education, nursing, or art performance— constitute

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  a problem because they cannot be made significantly more

  efficient. Playing a Haydn string quartet takes just as long in

  the twenty- first century as it did in the eighteenth; no progress

  has been made! This is sometimes called “Baumol’s disease” for

  one of the economists that first described the dilemma.4 That

  it is considered a pathology reveals much about our attitude

  toward time and the low value we in the West place on process,

  development, and maturation.

  Fiscal years and congressional terms enforce a blinkered view

  of the future. Short- term thinkers are rewarded with bonuses

  and reelection, while those who dare to take seriously our re-

  sponsibility to future generations commonly find themselves

  outnumbered, outshouted, and out of office. Few modern public

  entities are able to make plans beyond biennial budget cycles.

  Even two years of forethought seems beyond the capacity of

  Congress and state legislatures these days, when last- minute,

  stop- gap spending measures have become the norm. Institutions

  that do aspire to the long view— state and national parks, pub-

  lic libraries, and universities— are increasingly seen as taxpayer

  burdens (or untapped opportunities for corporate sponsorship).

  Conserving natural resources— soil, forests, water— for the

  nation’s future was once considered a patriotic cause, evidence

  of love of country. But today, consumption and monetization

  have become strangely mixed up with the idea of good citi-

  zenship (a concept that now includes corporations). In fact,

  the word consumer has become more or less a synonym for

  citizen, and that doesn’t really seem to bother anyone. “Citi-

  zen” implies engagement, contribution, give- and- take. “Con-

  sumer” suggests only taking, as if our sole role is to devour

  everything in sight, in the manner of locusts descending on

  a field of grain. We might scoff at apocalyptic thinking, but

  the even more pervasive idea— indeed, economic credo— that

  A Call for Timefulness 13

  levels of consumption can and should increase continuously is

  just as deluded. And while the need for long- range vision grows

  more acute, our attention spans are shrinking, as we text and

  tweet in a hermetic, narcissistic Now.

  Academe, too, must take some responsibility for promul-

  gating a subtle strain of time denial in the way that it privileges

  certain types of inquiry. Physics and chemistry occupy the top

  echelons in the hierarchy of intellectual pursuits owing to their

  quantitative exactitude. But such precision in characterizing

  how nature works is possible only under highly controlled,

  wholly unnatural conditions, divorced from any particular his-

  tory or moment. Their designation as the “pure” sciences is re-

  vealing; they are pure in being essentially atemporal— unsullied

  by time, concerned only with universal truths and eternal laws.5

  Like Plato’s “forms,” these immortal laws are often considered

  more real than any specific manifestation of them (e.g., the

  Earth). In contrast, the fields of biology and geology occupy

  lower rungs of the scholarly ladder because they are very “im-

  pure,” lacking the heady overtones of certainty because they

  are steeped through and through with time. The laws of physics

  and chemistry obviously apply to life- forms and rocks, and it

  is also possible to abstract some general principles about how

  biological and geologic systems function, but the heart of these

  fields lies in the idiosyncratic profusion of organisms, minerals,

  and landscapes that have emerged over the long history of this

  particular corner of the cosmos.

  Biology as a discipline is elevated by its molecular wing, with

  its white- coat laboratory focus and its venerable contributions

  to medicine. But lowly geology has never achieved the glossy

  prestige of the other sciences. It has no Nobel Prize, no high

  school Advanced Placement courses, and a public persona that

  is musty and dull. This of course rankles geologists, but it also

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  has serious consequences for society at a time when politicians,

  CEOs, and ordinary citizens urgently need to have some grasp

  of the planet’s history, anatomy, and physiology.

  For one thing, the perceived value of a science profoundly

  influences the funding it receives. Out of frustration with

  limited grant money for basic geologic investigations, some

  geochemists and paleontologists studying the early Earth and

  the most ancient traces of life in the rock record have cleverly

  recast themselves as “astrobiologists” to ride on the coattails of

  NASA initiatives that support research into the possibility of

  life elsewhere in the Solar System or beyond. While I admire

  this shrewd maneuver, it is disheartening that we geologists

  must wrap ourselves in the hype of the space program to make

  legislators or the public interested in their own planet.

  Second, the ignorance of and disregard for geology by

  scientists in other fields has serious environmental conse-

  quences. The great advances in physics, chemistry, and engi-

  neering made in the Cold War years— development of nuclear

  technologies; synthesis of new plastics, pesticides, fertilizers,

  and refrigerants; mechanization of agriculture; expansion of

  highways— ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity but

  also left a dark legacy of groundwater contamination, ozone

  destruction, soil and biodiversity loss, and climate change

  for subsequent generations to pay for. To some extent, the

  scientists and engineers behind these achievements can’t be

  blamed; if one is trained to think of natural systems in highly

  simplified ways, stripping away the particulars so that ideal-

  ized laws apply, and one has no experience with how per-

  turbations to these systems may play out over time, then the

  undesirable consequences of these interventions will come

  as a surprise. And to be fair, until the 1970s, the geosciences

  themselves did not have the analytical tools with which to

  A Call for Timefulness 15

  conceptualize the behavior of complex natural systems on

  decade to century timescales.

  By now, however, we should have learned that treating the

  planet as if it were a simple, predictable, passive object in a

  controlled laboratory experiment is scientifically inexcusable.

  Yet the same old time- blind hubris is allowing the seductive

  idea of climate engineering, sometimes called geoengineer-

  ing, to gain traction in certain academic and political circles.

  The most commonly discussed method for cooling the planet

  without having to do the hard work of cutting greenhouse gas

  emissions is the injection of reflective sulfate aerosol particles

  into the stratosphere— the upper atmosphere— to mimic the

/>   effect of large volcanic eruptions, which have cooled the planet

  temporarily in the past. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo

  in the Philippines, for example, caused a two- year pause in the

  steady climb of global temperatures. The chief advocates for

  this type of planetary tinkering are physicists and economists,

  who argue that it would be cheap, effective, and technologically

  feasible, and promote it under the benign, almost bureaucratic-

  sounding name “Solar Radiation Management.”6

  But most geoscientists, acutely aware of how even small

  changes to intricate natural systems can have large and unan-

  ticipated consequences, are profoundly skeptical. The volumes

  of sulfate required to reverse global warming would be equiva-

  lent to a Pinatubo- sized eruption every few years— for at least

  the next century— since halting the injections in the absence

  of significant reduction in greenhouse gas levels would result

  in an abrupt global temperature spike that might be beyond

  the adaptive capacity of much of the biosphere. Even worse,

  the effectiveness of the approach wanes with time, because as

  stratospheric sulfate concentrations increase, the tiny particles

  coalesce into larger ones, which are less reflective and have a

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  shorter residence time in the atmosphere. Most important, even

  though there would probably be a net decrease in overall global

  temperature, we have no way of knowing exactly how regional

  or local weather systems would be affected. (And by the way,

  we have no international governance mechanism to oversee and

  regulate planetary- scale manipulation of the atmosphere).

  In other words, it is time for all the sciences to adopt a

  geologic respect for time and its capacity to transfigure, de-

  stroy, renew, amplify, erode, propagate, entwine, innovate,

  and exter minate. Fathoming deep time is arguably geology’s

  single greatest contribution to humanity. Just as the microscope

  and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too

  minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens

  through which we can witness time in a way that transcends

  the limits of our human experiences.

  But even geology cannot exempt itself from culpability

  for public misconceptions about time. Since the birth of the

  discipline in the early 1800s, geologists— congenitally wary