The underland keeps its secrets well. Last December scientists revealed their discovery of a vast “deep life” ecosystem in the Earth’s crust, twice the volume of the world’s oceans, containing a biodiversity comparable to that of the Amazon, and teeming with 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms – hundreds of times the combined weight of all living humans. Only in recent decades have ecologists traced the fungal networks that lace woodland soil, joining individual trees into intercommunicating forests via a “wood wide web” – as fungi have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. The notion of discovering a new mountain in Britain is laughable, but in Derbyshire in 1999 cavers broke through into a cavern now named Titan, since confirmed as the biggest known natural chamber in Britain, large enough to hold St Paul’s Cathedral four times over. It was as if another Ben Nevis had been found, somewhere near Chesterfield. A thousand feet below ground in northern Italy, I rappelled into a huge rotunda of stone, cut by a buried river and filled with dunes of black sand. Traversing those dunes on foot was like trudging through a windless desert on a lightless planet.
The underland’s impenetrability to vision and its obstructiveness to entry have long made it a means, across world cultures, of alluding to what cannot easily be seen or said: trauma, memory, grief, death, suffering, the afterlife – and what Elaine Scarry calls the “deep subterranean fact” of pain. Deliberately to place something in the underland is often a strategy to shield it from view. Actively to retrieve something from the underland often requires effortful work, physical or psychoanalytical.
For nearly two decades I have been writing about the relationships of landscape and the human heart. I began on the summits of the world’s peaks, wishing to solve a personal mystery (why I was so drawn to mountains when young that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them) but also a historical one (why the western imagination underwent a revolution of perception concerning mountains in under 300 years, from superstitious fear to secular worship). From that high ground, over the course of five books and 2,000 pages, I’ve followed a downwards trajectory, exploring the storeys of matter that lie beneath the surface of both land and mind. “The descent beckons / As the ascent beckoned,” wrote William Carlos Williams in a late poem.
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“Deep time” is the phrase coined by John McPhee in 1981 to denote the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch in all directions from the present moment. It echoes James Playfair’s description of the “abyss of time” he glimpsed while viewing a strata unconformity at Siccar Point in 1788, when geology was first emerging as a science. McPhee and Playfair’s phrases both evoke a temporal vertigo. For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.
There is a perilous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does human behaviour matter when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of deserts or oceans, morality looks absurd, crushed to irrelevance. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin.
We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking action not apathy. The shock of the Anthropocene requires a new time literacy, a rethinking of what the geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls “our place in time”. This is already happening. Deep time is the catalysing context of intergenerational justice; it is what frames the inspiring activism of Greta Thunberg and the school climate-strikers, and the Sunrise campaigners pushing for a Green New Deal in America. A deep-time perspective requires us to consider not only how we will imagine the future, but how the future will imagine us. It asks a version of Jonas Salk’s arresting question: “Are we being good ancestors?”
- Robert Macfarlane writes about his new book Underland: A Deep Time Journey
The underland’s impenetrability to vision and its obstructiveness to entry have long made it a means, across world cultures, of alluding to what cannot easily be seen or said: trauma, memory, grief, death, suffering, the afterlife – and what Elaine Scarry calls the “deep subterranean fact” of pain. Deliberately to place something in the underland is often a strategy to shield it from view. Actively to retrieve something from the underland often requires effortful work, physical or psychoanalytical.
For nearly two decades I have been writing about the relationships of landscape and the human heart. I began on the summits of the world’s peaks, wishing to solve a personal mystery (why I was so drawn to mountains when young that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them) but also a historical one (why the western imagination underwent a revolution of perception concerning mountains in under 300 years, from superstitious fear to secular worship). From that high ground, over the course of five books and 2,000 pages, I’ve followed a downwards trajectory, exploring the storeys of matter that lie beneath the surface of both land and mind. “The descent beckons / As the ascent beckoned,” wrote William Carlos Williams in a late poem.
[---]
“Deep time” is the phrase coined by John McPhee in 1981 to denote the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch in all directions from the present moment. It echoes James Playfair’s description of the “abyss of time” he glimpsed while viewing a strata unconformity at Siccar Point in 1788, when geology was first emerging as a science. McPhee and Playfair’s phrases both evoke a temporal vertigo. For deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons, instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth.
There is a perilous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does human behaviour matter when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of deserts or oceans, morality looks absurd, crushed to irrelevance. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin.
We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking action not apathy. The shock of the Anthropocene requires a new time literacy, a rethinking of what the geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls “our place in time”. This is already happening. Deep time is the catalysing context of intergenerational justice; it is what frames the inspiring activism of Greta Thunberg and the school climate-strikers, and the Sunrise campaigners pushing for a Green New Deal in America. A deep-time perspective requires us to consider not only how we will imagine the future, but how the future will imagine us. It asks a version of Jonas Salk’s arresting question: “Are we being good ancestors?”
- Robert Macfarlane writes about his new book Underland: A Deep Time Journey
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