Yet most of us Anthropocene Earthlings are barely aware of the rich legacy of natural history that envelopes us. We are like squatters living amid the remains of earlier empires, worlds defined by different geographies, governed by alternate rules, inhabited by other residents. Consider the variety of ancient realms represented by a few North American cities: Milwaukee lies on a teeming coral reef; Minneapolis is perched on the edge of a vast volcanic rift; Montreal and New York City rise from the roots of great mountain belts; San Francisco sits, unsteadily, on rocks churned in an ancient subduction zone; Mexico City, also precarious, on the bed of a vanished lake. All vividly remember other versions of Earth.
We self-absorbed humans, meanwhile, mostly ignore the stories that lie just beneath our feet, believing them to be irrelevant, subordinate to our own reality, reducible to the convenient cubbyhole of “prehistory.” If we bothered to notice it, Earth’s crinkled crust would reveal how the past not only persists but in fact shapes the present. The rock record would show us that earlier iterations of the world are no less real for having occurred before we happened onto the scene. Rocks would remind us that we too live in geologic time, that our own moment will one day be long ago.
When we do pay attention to rocks, it is usually because of their utility, not their long memory. Although we humans like to think that we are in charge of our own destiny, the technological ages of humankind—Stone, Bronze, Iron, Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, and yes, even Digital—have always been dictated by rocks, and our own short-lived empires have risen and fallen in the pursuit of their riches. The science of geology has of course been entangled with all of this looting, but along the way, as geologists hammered at rocks, they began to understand that each gold vein and coal seam was part of a grand illuminated manuscript recording the history of the world. In an ironic twist, geology’s richest discovery is arguably an intellectual and philosophical one—an understanding of Deep Time.
Like all creatures on Earth, we need to use the planetary materials at hand to make a living, and our species has been exceptionally clever at appropriating those materials for our own purposes. As our technological prowess has grown, however, our respect for these works of time has declined. We rarely pause to consider that rocks and minerals have their own life stories—that they are emissaries bearing messages from across eons.
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It occurred to me later that that house on a Croatian hillside embodies the way we in the modern world thoughtlessly scavenge the monuments of the geologic past. Our cities are just scaled-up versions. Every asphalt roadway and concrete structure contains fragments, often still readable, from the chronicles of prior geologic regimes, irreverently blended and reconstituted. The metals in our cars, phones, and computers, having been separated from their source rocks, are more akin to individual letters in a shredded manuscript, but still whisper of their deep geologic origins. All the coal, oil, and natural gas we’ve burned—the photosynthetic memories of earlier ecosystems—hovers now in the air, the ghosts of combustion that haunt us in the Anthropocene.
Does it matter whether or not we acknowledge the histories of nonliving components of nature? Not every rock in Earth’s time-wrinkled crust can be treated as a precious artefact, and we Earthlings have no option other than to use what the planet provides. But simply developing an awareness of the deep history that enfolds us—and the immense amount of time embodied in the planet’s generous gifts—can foster a perceptual shift with radical psychological and practical implications.
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Becoming familiar with Earth’s monumental autobiography, and getting to know the characters and plots that fill the vast expanses of geologic time, forces one to abandon the notion that the only stories that matter are those with human protagonists. Once free from that deep-seated prejudice, one begins to see even the nonliving components of the Earth, including rocks and rivers, atmosphere and ocean, not as dumb matter but rather as part of a dynamic, animate, evolving—and self-documenting—collective.
Although there is a tendency to think of biological evolution as a steady march of progress, with primitive organisms being systematically replaced by more sophisticated ones, the fact is that when new lineages of organisms have emerged, they have simply joined the other branches on the Tree of Life. Bacteria and archaea, the progenitors of all subsequent life-forms, are still very much with us, as are myriad other microorganisms and invertebrates, as well as fish, amphibians, and reptiles, all living together in the wide crown of the tree with Johnny-come-lately species like us.
Similarly, old rocks are not merely relics of the distant past but active participants in current events and ecosystems, thanks to the way that Earth has crumpled rocks of all ages into the crust. Rocks young and old take part with equal vigor in present-day earthquakes. Strata that formed as desert dunes a hundred million years ago lap up today’s rain, having found new careers in middle age as aquifers. Schists that remember the dawn of Life carry on intimate discourse with modern microbes and root systems, on their way to becoming soils of the future. Basalts that were erupted as lavas eons before Homo sapiens appeared now attempt valiantly to absorb our carbon emissions.3 In other words, even the oldest rocks are responsive to new conditions, taking note of changes in the air, interacting in real time with the present.
This view of Earth’s rocky crust as dynamic and reactive—an ancient archive with comments to make about the current state of the world—suggests that we need a radical reappraisal of the way we live, farm, and build infrastructure on it. Even over human timescales, rocks and landscapes are not static but instead inherently mutable, and their capacity for shape-shifting will only increase in the face of anthropogenic changes in the surface environment. Yet most training for designers and engineers is still predicated on the view of rocky matter as timeless and inert. This reflects certain aesthetic preferences that were adopted early on in the history of Western science.
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There is a new and powerful generation of engineers and entrepreneurs who believe that humans can simply opt out of time—not appreciating the irony that their worldview is in fact an antiquated misconception from a bygone era. These are the moguls who think that “colonizing” Mars is not only possible but in fact right and inevitable, who advocate for stratospheric sulfate injection as an instant solution to the long-brewing climate crisis, and who actually seem convinced that they personally will be exempted from dying.5 At the same time, in another irony, obsolescence is a constant threat in their world, where someone who has been in the business for two decades is regarded as an ancient sage.6 All of these delusions are symptoms of temporal dysmorphia, or more bluntly, time illiteracy.
This condition is harmful to any human but particularly pathological when it afflicts the rich and influential. Spewing sulfate into the upper atmosphere to correct for a century’s worth of fossil fuel burning is considered by geoscientists to be madness, sure to have a torrent of unintended consequences not only for global weather patterns but also geopolitical stability.7 Time illiteracy seduces otherwise intelligent people into believing a planet with no soil, oceans, or active tectonics could become an Earthlike Eden in a matter of decades—somehow overlooking the fact that even if we could homestead on a new planet, we would still be us: the same flawed creatures expelled from the first Eden.
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The spiritual solace we crave may lie in the records of deep time that are our common heritage as Earthlings. The rocky archives have been patiently awaiting our notice. In them, we may find reassurance in the persistence of earlier worlds all around us; a sense of wonder at how extraordinary their preservation is; gratitude for the way they permeate the present with mystery, gravitas, and the promise of continuity. A spirit of evolutionary camaraderie may come from the knowledge that we have shared the arduous journey to the present with so many other long-lived lineages and have kin everywhere in nature. Accepting that we too live in geologic time can free us from narcissism. Letting go of the illusion that only the present is real, allowing the undulations of time to wash over us, may carry us with less fear into the future.
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