Timefulness
Page 21
called “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light
of Evolution.”25 That title has become a useful polestar for
generations of natural science students. In the 1990s, popular
writers like Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore expanded
the scope of evolutionary thinking with the idea of “Univer-
sal Darwinism,” introducing the concept of the meme as the
cultural equivalent of the gene (though now the term has itself
[d]evolved to mean cat videos and images with all- uppercase
captions). Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin goes even further
and suggests that evolution is literally Universal: he posits that
natural selection acting on a population of precursor universes
176 Ch a pter 6
may be the explanation for the improbably well- tuned values
of fundamental physical parameters that allow the Universe to
exist stably over billions of years. Physical “constants,” like the
adaptive traits of organisms, may therefore have evolved over
time.26 While Smolin’s ideas are not universally (so to speak)
accepted in the cosmological community, it is fascinating to
see Darwinian thinking entering realms that once exempted
themselves from temporality.
While scientists see that everything in nature is connected
by the continuous thread of evolution, successive genera-
tions of humans are increasingly cut off from each other by
the technologies they use— and the cultural memes they trade.
We have few institutions in which people at all stages of life
can gather and experience a unified sense of human commu-
nity, what Sigmund Freud called an “oceanic feeling”27 and
philosopher and religious theorist Émile Durkheim termed
“collective effervescence.”28 We need spaces where, from
an early age, children see that they are on an ancient, sacred
path that stretches across time, that the richness of life comes
from the universal process of unfolding (e- volution), and that
growing up and growing old are to be celebrated, not feared.
Religious organizations have traditionally filled this role, but
we need to be deliberate about finding new venues— choirs,
community gardens, cooking schools, oral history projects,
bird- watching groups, sturgeon fishing clubs— that can serve
as “intergenerational commons.”
In my own career, I’ve forged deep friendships with people
generations older and younger than myself, from many coun-
tries and cultures, over our common passion for geology.
We’ve scratched our heads over strange rocks, marveled at
stunning vistas, linked arms to ford rushing streams, shared du-
bious concoctions cooked on tiny camp stoves. It’s interesting
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 177
to note that while prominent scientists in other fields tend
to make their most revolutionary contributions in their 20s,
geologists mature more gradually, often doing their most im-
portant work late in their careers, after a lifetime spent in the
company of rocks.
The evolution of geology as a discipline has been similar.
Simplistic Victorian ideas about the planet— the dogma of strict
uniformitarianism, the belief in fixed continents, the denial of
mass extinctions— have given way to a subtler, humbler under-
standing of an Earth that has many moods and miens, and still
harbors deep secrets. For me, geology points to a middle way
between the sins of narcissistic pride in our importance and
existential despair at our insignificance. It affirms a teaching at-
tributed to the eighteenth- century Polish Rabbi Simcha Bunim
that we should all carry two slips of paper in our pockets: one
that says “I am ashes and dust,” and one that reads “The world
was made for me.”
The Earth itself, with its immensely deep history, is a com-
munal heritage and universal mentor that may help us find a set
of shared values. Studying its past may cause us to reconceive
ourselves as fellow citizens of a profoundly mysterious planet
that we urgently need to know better. And with leadership from
the Secretary of the Future, we can learn to adjust our pace
to the tempos of the Earth, repeal the Anthropocene, and re-
instate uniformitarianism.
T H E F U L L N E S S O F T I M E F U L N E S S
Like many people who experienced childhood— or parent-
hood— in the past half- century, I love Maurice Sendak’s classic
book Where the Wild Things Are, an allegory about the power of
imagination to transport us to other worlds, to transcend time,
178 Ch a pter 6
and to save us from our worst selves. I think of Max’s voyage
when I teach “History of Earth and Life”— a course with the
audacious goal of telling the 4.5 billion- year story of the planet
in one academic term (at a clip of about 400 million years a
week). It feels as if I have embarked on a long trip with my
students. We tour alien landscapes, watch continents move,
witness biogeochemical revolutions, asteroid impacts, ice ages,
and extinctions, marvel at the profusion of Wild Things, and
finally begin to glimpse features that look a bit like home, like
Max’s room gradually shedding its vines and revealing his bed
and table.
We arrive at the present (if I’ve paced myself properly), with
a feeling of exhausted exhilaration, mindful that this world con-
tains so many earlier ones, all still with us in some way— in
the rocks beneath our feet, in the air we breathe, in every cell
of our body. Geology is in fact the closest we may get to time
travel. From our vantage point in the present, we can replay the
past at any speed and envision possible futures. This geologic
habit of mind— the practice of timefulness— is a fusion of wyrd
and sankofa (sensing the presence of the past), sati (holding a
memory of the present), and Seventh Generation thinking (a
kind of nostalgia for the future). It is something like the way
parents see their growing children, poignantly remembering
them at earlier stages while holding aspirational visions for who
they will become.
If widely adopted, an attitude of timefulness could transform
our relationships with nature, our fellow humans, and our-
selves. Recognizing that our personal and cultural stories have
always been embedded in larger, longer— and still elapsing—
Earth stories might save us from environmental hubris. We
might learn to place less value on novelty and disruption, and
develop respect for durability and resilience. Understanding
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 179
how historical happenstance is written into each of our per-
sonal lives might cause us to treat each other with more empa-
thy. And a timeful, polytemporal worldview might even make
us less neurotic about the fact of our own mortality by shifting
our focus from the finite length of our life to the rich anthology
of experiences that a lifetime represents. While other senses
may be dulled with a
ge, the sense of time— which can be de-
veloped only by experiencing it— is heightened. Understanding
how things have come to be the way they are, what has per-
ished, and what has persisted makes it easier to recognize the
difference between the ephemeral and the eternal. Growing old
requires one to shed the illusion that there is only one version
of the world.
As members of a technological society that can keep Nature
at arm’s length most of the time, we have an almost autistic
relationship with the Earth. We are rigid in our ways, savants
when it comes to certain narrow obsessions, but dysfunctional
in other regards, because we wrongly view ourselves as separate
from the rest of the natural world. Convinced that Nature is
something outside us, a mute and immutable thing external to
us, we are unable to empathize or communicate with it.
But the Earth is speaking to us all the time. In every stone,
it offers an eternal truth or good rule of thumb; in every leaf, a
prototype power station; in every ecosystem, an exemplar of
a healthy economy. In Aldo Leopold’s words, we need to start
“thinking like a mountain,” awake to all the habits and inhab-
itants of this ancient, complicated, endlessly evolving planet.
E P I L O G U E
In 1905, John Munro Longyear, a Michigan timber and mining
magnate who had made a fortune from the Proterozoic banded
iron formations of the state’s Upper Peninsula, was prospecting
in a remote part of northern Norway with an eye toward open-
ing a new iron range. But he needed coal for smelting, and as
it happened, the nearest coalfields were on Svalbard— vestiges
of an ancient tropical forest on those polar islands. He bought
the mining claim from a small company based in Trondheim,
set up the Arctic Coal Company, and established the town of
Longyearbyen, a bit of the Wild West in the Far North. (Those
unfamiliar with the origin of the name, joke that it refers to how
time seems to pass in that remote place.) When Longyear found
that the iron ore on the mainland was not worth extracting, the
coal mines in Svalbard returned to Norwegian ownership and
would remain open for more than a century. Today, some of
the long adits and tunnels deep in the mountains above Long-
yearbyen have been repurposed as one of the world’s largest
seed banks (see figure 12).
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a library for genetic diver-
sity, preserving the germ lines of old varieties of staple crops that
may be needed as new diseases evolve or environmental changes
necessitate rapid adaptation. In the event of catastrophic agri-
cultural failures, this snow- covered mountain in the Arctic may
be the bread basket of the world. Seeds are self- contained suit-
cases, packed and ready to travel across time even after decades
of dormancy. An abandoned mine in Svalbard, the place with
no official time, has become a portal into the future.
epilogue 181
F I G U R E 1 2 . The Svalbard seed vault
Our Holocene snow day is ending now, and tomorrow’s the
Anthropocene. We’ve all enjoyed the fantasy that we can keep
playing our self- absorbed and careless games— that when we
choose to come inside, our supper will be waiting for us, and
nothing will have changed. But no one is home to take care of
us. Now we need to grow up and navigate on our own, doing our
best with the Atlas of the Past to make up for so much lost time.
A P P E N D I X E S
A P P E N D I X I . Simplified Geologic Timescale
Beginning
( millions of
EON
ERA
PERIOD
years ago)
Geologic Highlights
Human history
Quaternary
3
( Holocene—10,000 years)
Ice Age (Pleistocene)
Cenozoic
Neogene
23
PETM (55 mil ion years ago)
Mammals diversify
Paleogene
65
Giant birds
Dinosaur extinction
Cretaceous
140
Atlantic Ocean opens
First flowering plants
Mesozoic
Jurassic
200
Mass extinction
Age of the reptiles begins
Triassic
250
Greatest mass extinction in
Phanerozoic
Earth history
Permian
290
Pangaea formed
Widespread coal swamps
Carboniferous
355
Mass extinction
First amphibians
Devonian
420
Paleozoic
Silurian
440
Widespread coral reefs
Mass extinction
First land plants
Ordovician
508
First fish
Cambrian
541
Modern animal phyla
appear
A P P E N D I X I . ( Continued)
Beginning
( millions of
EON
ERA
PERIOD
years ago)
Geologic Highlights
Neo-
565
Ediacaran organisms
proterozoic
800
Snowball Earth
“Boring Billion”: time
of unusual climatic and
Meso-
geochemical stability
Proterozoic proterozoic
1600
Baraboo mountains form
(Wisconsin)
P
R
2100
Banded iron formations are
Paleo-
E
precipitated as O2 accumu-
proterozoic
C
2500
lates in atmosphere
A
M
2800
Modern-style plate tec-
Neoarchean
B
tonics (subduction)
R
3200
Oldest rocks in Wisconsin
I
Meso archean
A
N
Archean
Oldest rocks in U.S.
Paleo-
3800
(Minnesota)
archean
Earliest evidence of life
(Greenland)
Eoarchean
4000
Oldest rocks on Earth
No rocks from this period
on Earth; known from
Hadean
4500
meteorites, Moon rocks,
and a few Australian zircon
crystals
Note: Intervals are not shown in proportion to duration.
A P P E N D I X I I . Duration and Rate of Earth Phenomena
A . L I F E S PA N S
Life Expectancy
Entity
( years)
Limiting Processes
Chapter(s)
Our solar
10 billion
Sun enters red giant
6
system
phase, engulfs planets
Total habitable
<
br /> ca. 5.5 billion
Began at close of
4, 6
time for Earth
(about 1.7 billion left)
heavy meteorite
bombardment period
3.8 billion years ago;
will end when Sun
becomes so hot that
water is boiled off
planet’s surface
Shield areas
Up to 4 billion
Erosion
4
of continents
Ocean basin
170 million
Ocean crust is
3
subducted when cold
and dense enough to
sink into mantle
Mountain belt
50–100 million
Relative rates of
3
(topographic)1
tectonics and erosion
Typical marine
In fossil record:2
Sea level variation;
invertebrate
10 million
climate change
5
species
Current species:3
Climate change;
100,000
ocean acidification
and anoxia
Typical land
In fossil record:
Climate change
5
vertebrate
1 million
Climate change;
species
Current species:
overhunting; habitat
10,000
destruction
1. Deeply eroded roots of a mountain belt with little topographic relief can survive for more billions of years.
2. May, R., Lawton, J. and Stork, N., 1995. Assessing extinction rates. In Lawton, J., and May, R. (eds.), Extinction Rates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp.
1–24.
3. Pimm, S., et al., 1995. The future of biodiversity. Science, 269, 347–350.
B . R E S I D E N C E A N D M I X I N G T I M E S
In geochemistry, residence time is the length of time a particular substance typically remains in a given site or reservoir. Mixing time is the length of time it takes such a reservoir to attain a uniform concentration of a particular substance. If the residence time is greater than the mixing time, the reservoir is well mixed with respect to
that substance, and its concentration will be uniform (e.g., salt in oceans, carbon in atmosphere). If the residence time less than the mixing time, the reservoir is not well mixed with respect to that substance, and its concentration will be nonuniform (e.g., carbon in oceans).
Typical Value
Chapter(s)
Residence Time
Water4 in:
2, 3, 6
Atmosphere
9 days
Soils
1–2 months
Rivers
2–6 months
Lakes