Marcia Bjornerud rocks!
OK, yeah, lame jokey plays on words, I know...
I have about 6 other book ts currently in play, all of them excellent. But, a new piece in the New Yorker by my journalistic hero Kathryn Schultz turned me onto this.
Divert.
I will have much to say. This will take a while. For now, let me simply note that
Dr. Bjornerud personifies the word "scholar," in its best sense.
And much more. We are lucky to have her.
SO, LET'S BEGIN WITH NEAR-THE-END IN MIND
…I want students to perceive of themselves as Earthlings, wholly dependent on the planet’s sacraments—and to realize that any rational society would align its practices with those of the system that sustains it.
If I do not always succeed, perhaps I can be forgiven. By the time students come into my classroom, they have long since absorbed prevailing societal conceptions about the relationship between humans and Earth. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously defined culture as the constellation of stories that groups of humans tell themselves about their place and purpose in the world. In the United States, where capitalism has become the de facto religion, the stories we tell about who we are mostly exclude Nature. The natural world is simply a passive backdrop against which the “real” stories unfold. So when I try to convince students that the soils they’ve never thought about, the natural landscapes that are obscured by urban infrastructure, the rocks they assume to be deaf and dumb, are actually in charge of everything, it’s no wonder that they look away, unconvinced.
In the Western world, our shared rituals are no longer sacred but merely transactional—buying, selling, influencing, tweeting, endorsing, sponsoring, lobbying, and above all, consuming. At this point, it is hard to find our way back; our worship of novelty is in fundamental opposition to the “eternal return.” Most of our technology is predicated on subverting the Earth’s rituals rather than participating in them; we cannot become “contemporary with the gods” if we believe we’ve replaced them. The cosmos is now the global economy, and the titans who rule it believe they are exempt from natural law. Some of them imagine that humans are destined to live on Mars—that we could transform a planet with no oceans or soils or tectonics into an Earth-like Eden in a matter of decades—or that we will, for some unexplained reason, be better off in the “metaverse.” Even if we could homestead on a new planet, or wanted to live in a virtual world, we would still be us—the same flawed creatures expelled from the first Eden.
We understand far more about Earth than we did when I first became a geologist, yet we seem no closer to wisdom about ourselves. When I finished my PhD, my advisor gave me a biography of Charles Van Hise,3 the structural geologist who mapped the Baraboo Hills and would have known this very outcrop. The volume sat on my bookshelf for thirty years before I finally read it and became a Van Hise groupie. Van Hise was a colleague of T. C. Chamberlin, the eponym of our Svalbard valley, who also served as University of Wisconsin president. Both geologists felt called to public service because they believed that science would lead society into a more enlightened age. Van Hise used his post as university president to advance strikingly progressive causes: not only public education but also conservation, women’s suffrage, and limits on corporate power. He was a friend of Wisconsin’s populist governor “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, and together they promoted the utopian “Wisconsin Idea”: a vision for workers’ rights, income redistribution, and access for all citizens to the resources of the university. Today, that would be labeled a socialist agenda. Van Hise believed it was the path that a scientifically advanced society would logically follow.
I’d love to spend an afternoon with Van Hise on this outcrop and catch him up on what we know about the geology of the Baraboo Hills, rock deformation, and plate tectonics, but I’d be reluctant to tell him how far we are from his vision of the future. And I wouldn’t share with him my conclusion, based on my own career in academe, that knowledge and rational thought alone cannot leverage social change—without an accompanying cultural revolution. Free-market economics has permeated too deeply into Western habits of mind, making behaviors that are considered pathological at the individual level acceptable at the scale of society as a whole. In fact, the so-called dark triad of personality traits linked with borderline psychopathy—self-centered grandiosity, calculated exploitation, and lack of emotion5—are, in the corporate world, just good business sense.
I sometimes wonder whether, at this point in the history of human civilization, it would be possible to create a fresh new kind of secular spirituality free from both the narrow orthodoxies of traditional religions and the venal dogmas of capitalism. The primary texts would be the rock record and the book of nature; lullabies would reassure infants that they were in the care of a wise old planet; children would grow up knowing about planetary superheroes like carbon-gobbling dolomite and plate-moving eclogite; holidays would celebrate sandstone aquifers and stable granitic continents; the central principles would be wonder, gratitude, connectivity, collectivity. After a few generations of such reacculturation, an egalitarian ethos would emerge as we came to think of ourselves as Earthlings with deep bonds of kinship with one another, and all components of nature. Humans would aspire simply to blend in. Within this worldview, amassing disproportionate wealth, oppressing other humans, or degrading the environment would be seen as both unnatural and immoral. My utopian reveries are interrupted by a cynical voice in my head: Yeah right, fat chance…
Bjornerud, Marcia. Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks (pp. 266-269). Flatiron Books. Kindle Edition.
Particularly engrossing for me were her personal candor regarding her sometimes fractious private life from her childhood through her current time (early 60's now, a widow, and a tenured professor), and her experiences with the often carnivorous, often predatory, and misogynistic culture of post-secondary academia—especially acute in the male-dominated sciences such as geology.
I also loved her discussions about Norway, ancestral home of her forbears. I have some Scandinavian musician friends. Only one from Norway. Ole Borud.
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More to come. I also bought Marcia's prior book. I'm never gonna get caught up.
Equally fine. to wit,
BAD AIR DAYS
The study of mass extinctions became a distinct and fashionable subdiscipline within paleontology in the decade after the end-Cretaceous impact was proposed. To those who embraced the newly “legalized” catastrophism, it seemed likely that all mass extinctions could eventually be blamed on extraterrestrial impacts. A brilliant paleontologist Jack Sepkoski of the University of Chicago, who was the first to recognize the potential of Big Data in paleontology, believed he had detected a 26-million-year cycle in extinction frequency through an analysis of thousands of fossil catalogs. In a strange kind of neo-uniformitarianism, he speculated that episodic die-offs might be linked with Earth’s periodic passage through the spiral arms of the galaxy, which could destabilize the orbits of comets.22 This inspired eager searches for evidence of large impacts at the times of other mass extinctions, and moved the study of impact cratering from a fringe field into the geologic mainstream. But three decades later, no other major biological crisis has been convincingly linked with the crash landing of a comet or asteroid. We are left with the sobering fact that sometimes things can go horribly wrong for life on this planet, for reasons completely internal to the Earth system.
Besides the end-Cretaceous cataclysm, the other great extinctions include, chronologically (1) the Late Ordovician event about 440 million years ago, which was the first major pruning following the Cambrian explosion; (2) a closely spaced pair of die-offs in the late Devonian Period (about 365 million years ago), by which time macroscopic life had moved onto land; (3) the end-Permian holocaust 250 million years ago, the mother of all mass extinctions, which John Phillips aptly marked as the close of the Paleozoic Era; and (4) the Late Triassic event, a cruel blow just 50 million years after the Permian debacle. Depending on how one measures the severity of these massacres (by numbers of species or genera or families vanquished), the dinosaur extinction is the fourth or fifth in rank.
Although the victims and the circumstances of these calamities differ in detail, they share some striking similarities (appendix III). All—including the end-Cretaceous event—involved abrupt climate change, and all, with the exception of the Devonian event (when tropical seas turned cold), are linked with rapid warming. Second, all involved major perturbations to the carbon cycle and carbon content of the atmosphere, either by unusually effusive volcanism (Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous) and/or through an imbalance between carbon sequestered by the biosphere and carbon released from stored hydrocarbons (Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic). Third, all entailed rapid changes in ocean chemistry, including acidification that devastated calcite-secreting organisms (Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous) and/or widespread anoxia (dead zones), which asphyxiated almost everybody except for sulfur-loving bacteria (Ordovician, Devonian, Permian). All the extinctions, in fact, were followed by a period of time—hundreds of thousands to millions of years—when microbes alone thrived while the rest of the biosphere struggled to get back on its feet (or into its shells). The great mass extinctions challenge any conceit that we are the triumphant culmination of 3.5 billion years of evolution. Life is endlessly inventive, always tinkering and experimenting, but not with a particular notion of progress. For us mammals, the Cretaceous extinction was the lucky break that cleared the way for a golden age, but if the story of the biosphere were written from the perspective of prokaryotic rather than macroscopic life, the extinctions would hardly register. Even today, prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) make up at least 50% of all biomass on Earth.23 One might say that Earth’s biosphere is, and always has been, a “microcracy,” ruled by the tiny. When larger, arriviste life-forms falter, infinitely adaptable microbes, whose evolutionary timescales are measured in months rather than millennia, are always eager to move in and reassert their long-held dominion over the planet.
Perhaps most importantly, none of the mass extinctions—even the relatively “clean” Cretaceous disaster—can be fully attributed to a single cause; all involved rapid changes in several geologic systems at one time, which in turn triggered knock-on effects in still others. In some respects, this is reassuring; it means that it takes a “perfect storm” of convergent causes to destabilize the biosphere. Nevertheless, many of the malefactors—greenhouse gases, carbon-cycle disturbances, ocean acidification, and anoxia—are uncomfortably familiar to current residents of Earth. And if a looming catastrophe has multiple origins, there will be no precise predictions and no silver-bullet solutions.
The story of the atmosphere reminds us that the sky over our head is not the only, or ultimate, one to shelter the Earth. When there is change in the air, even after long periods of stability, it can blow through with breathtaking suddenness, as Svalbard’s withering glaciers attest. In the aftermath of these winds of change, upheavals in biogeochemical cycles ripple through ecosystems at all levels. Organisms that have invested everything in the old world order will suffer or even be extinguished while microbes quietly clean up the mess and decree a new set of rules for the survivors. Tinkering with atmospheric chemistry is a dangerous business; ungovernable forces can come out of thin air.
Bjornerud, Marcia. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (pp. 122-125). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
UPDATE: Finished it. Lovely writing. Laser acumen. Great technical / scientific stuff. This is one fine scholar and astute, empathic citizen.
apropos of our current cultural-socioeconomic polarizations, e.g., as they manifest in issues such as "
anthropocene" climate change, I'll just leave you with this for now.
'eh?
As I finish updating this post, we have 57 days until Election Day.
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