At Home in Deep Time
Marcia Bjornerud
Geology, with its focus on tangible records of the past, offers a bridge between human experiences of the world and the abstract existential perspectives of philosophy and physics. Becoming familiar with the narratives of natural history - the plots and protagonists that shaped the Earth - can provide a feeling of meaningful “embeddedness” in the cosmos and help us make peace with our embodied selves.
Among the sciences, geology has long been regarded as a second-tier discipline. While institutions of higher education would be considered incomplete without physics, chemistry or biology departments, many colleges and universities have no programs in geology or Earth sciences. Geology - the science certainly most relevant to Earthlings - is not deemed worthy of an Advanced Placement test, or a Nobel Prize. The roots of this attitude are complex. Geology is a relatively young discipline, emerging as a distinct field only in the mid-19th century, and lacking a unifying paradigm (plate tectonics) until the mid-20th. As an applied science that has been propelled largely by the ravenous pursuit of mineral and fossil fuel resources, it has no claim to the cool intellectual purity of physics and chemistry. As a historical, time-and place-bound science, it until recently has not been laboratory-based, carried out instead in the unruly natural world where precision and certainty are rarely attained.
But there may be subtler psychological reasons that geology has been treated as the unloved stepchild within the family of sciences. Apart from its obvious threat to creationist and “young Earth” worldviews, geology is radically transgressive because of its engagement with physical artifacts of the distant past challenges long-held ideas about the nature of matter, the mind/body divide and human exceptionalism.
The very fact that “embodiment” is a topic worthy of academic scrutiny reveals how deeply the illusion of disembodiment is rooted in western culture. This conviction is a strange amalgam of ideas -philosophical, theological, scientific, technological - that accreted in an almost physical way (a nice irony) over two millennia in western culture. The foundation of disembodiment is arguably Plato’s concept of ethereal “forms” - the view that the true essences of reality hover somewhere beyond our sensory experience of the world and that physical objects we can see or touch are imperfect replicas of these pure and inaccessible entities.
Centuries later, early gnostic Christians regarded all matter as not merely imperfect but as defiled, as the antithesis of the divine. As Christian monks and missionaries sought to purge every vestige of nature worship from the populations they converted, renunciation of the physical and corporeal became a moral doctrine. Old pantheons that were deeply embedded in the landscape were replaced by an abstract, non-localized God and a theology that depicted this world and our bodily selves as corrupt temporary dwellings where souls could lose their way en route to heavenly salvation. Although the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions in science later ruffled feathers in the church by displacing the Earth from the center of creation, they did not challenge the more fundamental credo that our minds and souls were something beyond the Earthly realm. The upstart science of geology was the first to do that.
The treatise that announced the arrival of geology as a distinct intellectual endeavor was Sir Charles Lyell’s monumental three-volume work Principles of Geology, first published between 1830 and 1833. It was a widely distributed and immensely popular work, depicting in vivid prose the emerging evidence for vanished worlds. Charles Darwin took the first volume with him when he left on the voyage of the HMS Beagle in 1831, and the book shaped his thinking about how small, incremental changes over time could drive biological evolution. Later, Darwin’s ideas would of course unleash the full wrath of those unwilling to see humans as anything less than divinely fashioned creatures.
But Lyell, trained as a lawyer, was a savvy rhetorician. Even as he made the case for an incomprehensibly ancient Earth, he took great care in Principles of Geology to draw a sharp line between the physical world whose secrets were being revealed and the intellectual and spiritual domain of humankind. In his analysis of Lyell’s influence on Victorian culture (in the journal Victorian Poetry, 2004), Michael Tomko considers Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam - an elegiac meditation on mortality in the context of materialist science. Tomko notes, “Lyell’s work is often read only as a source of overwhelming anxiety for Tennyson, as a baldly atheistic list of theories or a dreadful set of facts, rather than as a complex, culturally aware, religiously astute text” (p. 114). Whether or not Lyell himself believed it, he intentionally downplayed the potential psychological threat posed by the new geological worldview by “introducing a strict, impassable division between the natural and spiritual [which] provides a secure, interior, spiritual realm but also effectively eviscerates the body” (Tomko, p. 115).
Lyell’s tactical maneuver of keeping the human mind at a safe remove from physical phenomena was temporarily successful -allowing geology to enjoy two decades of unconditional love -because the first editions of Principles of Geology did not directly address biological evolution nor, especially, human origins. But Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Descent of Man (1871), and his lesser known but prescient The Expression of the Emotions in Man [sic] and Animals (1872) began to perforate Lyell’s “impassable division” by revealing how our bodies, minds, and behaviors can be traced to animal ancestry. Today, modern advances in archeology, genetics, neuroscience, psychology, and medicine make it increasingly difficult to argue for any clear line between our physical and mental selves. It is appearing more and more likely that we too are mere matter.
But perhaps a neo-Lyellian geological perspective can help us to embrace at last our embodied nature. As Lyell recognized, the salient lesson of the geologic record is the power of time to alter, erode, innovate, transmute, and recreate. If we feel diminished by the idea of having arisen from mere matter, maybe it is because we have underestimated matter.
Perhaps we don’t understand that 4.6 billion years ago, mere matter from stellar explosions coalesced to form a new star with fuel to last 10 billion years, illuminating a swarm of nascent planets. Or that the mere matter in one of those planets separated into a rocky mantle and an iron core, which in turn began to convect. Or that this roiling core, mere metal, soon began to generate a powerful magnetic field that has ever after shielded the planet from cosmic rays; meanwhile, the churning mantle refined itself through melting and remelting, yielding magmas of basalt and then granite, laying the foundations for mere continents. And that volcanoes conveying this molten rock to the surface also exhaled mere water and carbon dioxide that formed a mere ocean and atmosphere.
And maybe we have not appreciated that soon after that, some mere matter began to reproduce and continuously modify itself as it spread out across the mere planet. And that when the Earth was still in its childhood, some of those self-replicating organisms developed the sophisticated habit of photosynthesis. Using volcano breath and the light of the sun, they infused the atmosphere with free oxygen and have been feeding all the rest of us mere Earthlings for the subsequent 3.8 billion years. If we feel debased by the idea we evolved from microbes, then we misjudge the astonishing technological prowess and versatility of prokaryotes - and deny the fact that the teeming microbiome of bacterial cells in our bodies outnumbers our own animal cells. The lone ego is an illusion; each of us is plural, multitudes.
The rock record makes obvious how our bodies are part of a continuum from raw Earth to endlessly ramifying Life, an unbroken chain of living organisms that stretches back to the early days of the planet. How marvelous to know that our bones - minerals made of calcium and phosphorous, derived from rocks - can be mapped one-to-one onto those of almost every other vertebrate from amphibians to zebras. How amazing to realize that our blood is a distant memory of seawater. How good to feel in our marrow that we are fully native to this old, verdant, resilient Earth. Any alienation we feel is self-inflicted; any existential torment we may suffer over our origins amounts to ignorance and disrespect for our forebears.
Geology is a strange blend of the pragmatic and philosophical. It is responsible for more than its share of environmental sins, but it also offers breathtaking vistas of vast timespans. While other sciences, particularly astrophysics, offer glimpses of the cosmic, their focus is on objects too abstract and far away for us to grasp in any literal way. Modern physics - the science of the physical world - is largely non-physical, immaterial, theoretical.
The practice of geology is, in contrast, very physical, concerned with tangible objects - rocks, fossils, mountains, ice - and involves direct bodily engagement with the landscape. While laboratory sciences strive to keep the bodies of investigators separate from the objects of study, with white coats and enclosed experiments, geologists must enter into the terrain to fathom it. In fieldwork, geologists develop a visceral sense of scale by traversing topography on foot; pace length and eye height are still used as measuring tools in creating rough maps. And one’s evolving understanding of the geological backstory of a particular area is inevitably entangled with personal experience of that place - the weather, one’s companions, where the group paused for lunch.
Although not everyone can or should become a geologist, geologic habits of mind - a sense of temporal proportion, an instinct for our place in Earth’s story - may serve all Earthlings as an antidote to the dangerous illusion of disembodiment. Environmental misconduct and existential malaise both stem from a distorted sense of who we are as a species in the context of the natural world. Modern anomie arises out of disconnection from history and natural history, and it is intensified by the loss of physical engagement with the world owing to our increasingly virtual interactions with people and things.
The remedy is to reclaim our pre-Platonic kinship with the Earth and all its denizens, animate and inanimate. Learning the narratives of natural history and getting to know the protagonists by name can provide a feeling of meaningful embodiment and embeddedness in the cosmos. This is the essential premise of Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic” (in his 1949 Sand County Almanac) which
enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land... it changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellowmembers, and also respect for the community as such.
(P- 204)
As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes (in Orion Magazine, 2017), a first step toward achieving such a shift in perception is to adopt a conscious “grammar of animacy”: “Kin are ripening in the fields; kin are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come back soon. Our words can be an antidote to human exceptionalism, to unthinking exploitation, an antidote to loneliness.”
Thinking like a geologist - or a botanist or ecologist - can simultaneously ground us and elevate us. Paradoxically, these Earth-bound, very physical sciences yield transcendent insights. Matter, both living and non-living, has accomplished many astonishing things over the past four billion years. Our own material minds have now learned to read the archives of those eons. Why would we even consider disavowing such a long and distinguished heritage of embodiment?
For Sources and Further Reading
Bjornerud, M. (2006). Reading the rocks: The autobiography of the earth. New York: Basic Books.
Bjornerud, M. (2018). Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2015). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teaching of plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.
Von Humboldt, A. (2014). Views of nature (M. Person, S. Jackson, & L. D. Walls, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (Original work published in 1807).
