Daphne Chouliaraki Milner

How can the study of geology help us appreciate the interconnectedness of micro and macro systems on Earth?

Marcia Bjornerud

Having taught geosciences for more than 30 years, I’ve realized that the most essential thing we can teach our students is the capacity to zoom in and out of scales in time and space, to look at a rock sample under the microscope and make inductive inferences on a regional scale. The geologic mindset requires this polyfocal capacity because all Earth systems are operating at these scales, too. Feeling comfortable traveling back and forth across scales is really central to the geologic worldview.

DCM

I love the word “polyfocal” because it also accurately describes the work that we’re trying to do at Atmos. Climate storytelling has for so long been restricted to one focus, but to fully understand the climate crisis, we need to nurture intersectional, polyfocal thinking. What’s an example of a seemingly small geological process that has a profound macroscale impact on our planet?

MB

Microbes are in charge of global biogeochemistry. The Earth is, in many ways, a microcracy. It’s ruled by the very tiny. We, macroscopic creatures, think we’re the top of the food chain. But the reality is that we are not in charge. The pandemic made that very clear. 

Another example—which is perhaps the most important in all of our planet’s history—would be that microbes changed the atmosphere. In the first two and a half billion years of Earth, the atmosphere was dominated by volcanic outgassing. Then, some early single-celled organisms learned to photosynthesize. And by around a couple of billion years ago, they had been doing that long enough that oxygen started building up in the atmosphere. That changed all the geochemical rules and made it possible for different strategies of metabolism to be possible. It changed what kinds of minerals could form on Earth because oxygen allows for different ways of combining elements into new minerals. 

There were many, many, many billions and trillions of very tiny microbes. Collectively, they achieved global revolution.

DCM

In your latest book, Turning to Stone, you reflect on the ways in which rocks intersect with our lives. I wondered whether you could describe some of those intersections and some of the most surprising overlaps that you’ve discovered?

MB

One of my motivations for writing the book is that our Western attitude toward nature is at the root of our environmental problems: this idea that nature is the passive backdrop for the real action; that we’ve invented the world; that the world is limited to human commerce and culture; that nature’s inert, insensate. This habit of mind has come to us, sadly, from the sciences, alongside the idea that we need to objectify anything we’re studying, that we need to be dispassionate and analytical.

As a scientist, I realize I can’t do that anymore. I care about the things I study. And actually, I think that’s true for most scientists. We wouldn’t stick with it if we didn’t love our subjects. So why are we pretending that these things are separate from us? That we can be dispassionate and detached from them when, in fact, we do care about them? 

I have thought a lot about the Western attitude toward the natural world and wondered at what point we began to think we had outsmarted it. I think it was the Enlightenment, and though I can hardly speak ill of the Enlightenment, that new mindset combined with the industrial revolution started a process of seeing nature as a resource rather than something with its own deep wisdom. There are environmental consequences, but I would say there are also spiritual consequences. If we think the world is only what we’ve made, then that’s terrifying. The world is a mess, but there is a much richer and wilder and older natural world out there that we’ve forgotten about.

DCM

I agree, and I think that this binary thinking is reflected in our language, too. In the West, the narrative we have developed around rocks is that they are static and inanimate. It’s even embedded into our language—stone dead. Even describing someone as a rock implies that they are immobile, unmoving. I wonder, from your experience, how studying geologic processes can help us rethink some of these narratives.

MB

My field is structural geology, which has to do with rock deformation—rocks literally changing shape. We use the approaches of fluid mechanics to study tectonics, mountain building, fault zones. 

Rocks, even in the solid state, can be considered fluid—not as a state of matter, but as something that flows. Plates move. Mountains grow. They’re ephemeral things. They haven’t always been there. They form, and then they erode away. Rocks are literally animate things in the science that I study. So it’s not too difficult for me to think of them that way. It’s just they’re moving in ultra-slow motion most of the time, until they lurch in an earthquake. 

DCM

In Turning to Stone, you make the case that rocks have eventful lives. How might our lives be enriched by understanding their histories and our heritage on this very old planet?

MB

I’m perhaps in the minority, but I do find solace in knowing that the Earth is old and that the rocks around me have been here for a long time. Some people find that diminishing, but to me, it’s comforting. I would be terrified if we lived on a 6,000-year-old Earth, as some of the young Earth creationists say, that hasn’t been tested and shown to be as resilient as it is. 

There are many different kinds of rocks, and to me, they have different personalities. They also literally have different properties in the way that they respond to wind, rain, or ice. It’s like a pantheon of ancient gods in that I can look at these different rock types that, in some way, personify different personality characteristics. I’ve become less embarrassed to talk about that. 

“Microbes are in charge of global biogeochemistry. The Earth is, in many ways, a microcracy. It’s ruled by the very tiny.”

Marcia Bjornerud
Geologist

DCM

Have you got a favorite type of rock?

MB

I do have an affinity for metamorphic rocks. They’re the ones that formed in one environment and then found themselves, usually through tectonic upheaval, somewhere else, maybe deep in the crust. So, a sedimentary rock might find itself deep in the guts of a mountain belt, which causes it to transform into something else because of the extreme pressure and temperature. If we want to read something from that, these rocks teach us about the capacity to adapt and change and become something new under difficult circumstances. 

DCM

In Timefulness, you emphasize the importance of understanding and respecting Earth’s deep geological time. You describe a timeful mindset in the book as broadening our sense of timescales through an awareness of Earth’s geological billion-year history. How can we adopt such a mindset? And how might it reshape the way we understand our relationship to the past and the future?

MB

Our technologies keep us trapped in the moment in a consumptive cycle of the next briefly famous meme. Corporations benefit from making us never-satisfied consumers of short-lived content. I don’t think this is the normal way that humans have experienced time in human history. It’s an aberration—and I would say, a pathological one. 

In the past, I think people were more acutely aware of mortality, more comfortable with acknowledging the finitude of lives, and keenly aware of the importance of remembering ancestors. They cared about leaving a legacy into the future. Today, many of us in the West are narcissistic about our time. We somehow feel that the past doesn’t matter, despite the knowledge that terrible colonial crimes were committed. In the process of detaching from our histories, we’ve also detached ourselves from this sense of continuity.

We can start repairing our relationship with the past by recognizing that we live in geologic time—and that there isn’t a disjunction between the past and now or the past and the future. In fact, there’s great comfort in being able to read a landscape and understand the rocks around you as records of earlier versions of the place. It’s not that everybody should become a geologist or even take a geological class, but the habit of remembering that this now is just one of many nows is important.

DCM

We talk a lot about historical literacy, cultural literacy, media literacy, and political literacy—and with good reason. But what I don’t think we discuss enough is the importance of time literacy—the awareness and understanding of time in both its short-term and long-term dimensions—and why it’s imperative that we understand ourselves as a continuity of our ancestors. Why is time literacy so crucial in today’s world? 

MB

That’s a wonderful point. One reason is that people have no sense of proportion about, say, our carbon dioxide emissions. Many [climate skeptics] say, “Well, Earth’s climate has changed dramatically in the past.” Yes, that’s absolutely true. Long before humans, there have been high amplitude climate changes. But the point is we weren’t there. And during the last 10,000 years, the Holocene has been unusually stable, and that’s the time during which human civilization has risen. We’ve been the beneficiaries of that stability.

So, just understanding what our little 10,000-year timeline looks like, relative to earlier times of climate instability, is one very specific example of why time literacy matters. Understanding the rates of change—for instance, the asymmetry between how quickly we can consume groundwater from a given place versus how long it takes that groundwater to recharge. But people don’t have any conception of groundwater flow rates. It’s considered obscure.

There should be a focus in schools on understanding temporal proportions about events that happened in the geologic past relative to the rapidity of change today. That’s why I wrote Timefulness. So often, there’s this tendency to crunch and condense everything that came before us into the category of “prehistory,” which is a ridiculous idea. People have no depth of field, no understanding of how long ago different historical and natural events happened, and no idea of how long phenomena like the mass extinctions of the past took—and how long it took to recover from them. These are timescales that we don’t like to contemplate too much, but we should.

DCM

How can a timeful mindset, one that connects a deep understanding of the past with a thoughtful awareness of the future, challenge the short-term thinking that is driving so many crises, specifically the climate crisis?

MB

I don’t know if it can. I’ve become more pessimistic, sadly, since I wrote that book, given what’s happened in the U.S. again. 

One of the points I make in Turning to Stone is that we’re in a golden age in geosciences. Today, we can understand the climate system in pretty high resolution at the 100,000- to million-year timescale. It’s a real frustration that, in this time when we know more about the way the Earth’s system works than ever before, our political and economic systems are not designed for long-term thinking.

In other words: We’ve got the science now, but the implementation is thwarted by the incentive systems of the economy and the political realm. Two to four years is about the best we can hope for, at least in this country. We keep getting jerked back and forth. One administration put climate policies in place, but then they are reversed by the next one. Long-term planning is not baked into the way we make societal decisions. I have to think that part of the answer is education and cultural change. But that’s very slow. 

All I’m trying to say is we need to think on longer timescales. We need to be infusing that everywhere: into education, into policy, into the economy.

DCM

How does storytelling, in books like Turning to Stone and Timefulness, enhance the accessibility of geology to a broader audience? And why do they matter?

MB

I hope they do enhance accessibility. Unfortunately, the Earth sciences are not well-represented in most school curricula, certainly not in the United States. 

It’s a tragedy that the average Earthling never gains a rigorous understanding of the place they’re going to spend their lives. I and other people who are trying to break open the Earth sciences to ordinary people are trying to make up for that gap in our educational system, which is at the root of so many of our problems. I have to think that if more people really understood the implications of their individual and collective actions, then we could’ve held fossil fuel companies accountable much earlier for what they are doing. We would’ve insisted, before everything became so politicized, on government policies that would steer us in a different direction.

The fact is the Earth is complicated. It’s not something that can be reduced to a quick, superficial, soundbite-like story. That’s why we need to find stories that have some resonance, that have some kind of arc that people can relate to.

DCM

I want to go back to something that you said at the beginning of our conversation. You said that the West’s construction of humans and nature as a binary has a spiritual cost. What exactly is that spiritual cost? What does it look like?

MB

Loneliness. This feeling of being bereft of something we cannot even articulate. To me, that’s the greatest cost. 

When we don’t see ourselves as embedded in nature, we focus so much on strife between ourselves. But when we see ourselves in miniature, in the context of nature, looking down on the human collective, then we say, “Now I’ve got everything back in proper proportion.” That may be a simplistic explanation, but I’m describing that sense of seeing yourself as you really are and not this narcissism—both individual and collective—that we’re stuck in. It’s toxic, and it’s making everybody sad and mean-spirited.

I’m a deeply agnostic person, so I don’t have a glib religious answer, but I think that there is some kind of spiritual connection to nature that has been corroded for most people, and they really yearn for a way back.

DCM

What is the most profound piece of wisdom that you’ve learned from studying rocks? What can they teach us about our interconnectedness and what it means to be part of something bigger than ourselves?

MB

The main lesson I would say is that we live on a creative, resilient, generous planet. 

Interestingly, we didn’t appreciate just how unique our planet is until we looked out in space and started getting detailed information about our near neighbors in the solar system: Venus and Mars and the moon. Now we’re looking out into deep space and seeing exoplanets and finding that actually, Earth-like planets are extremely rare.

I’m currently teaching a course about Mars. I’m asking my students to write an open letter to Elon Musk about how Earth and Mars diverged developmentally more than three billion years ago, and the hubris in thinking anyone could ever make Mars even marginally habitable in a matter of a couple of human generations. Our planet has a uniquely innovative nature: ceaseless in experimentation and invention of so many different creatures, rocks, landforms.

In the arc of my own career, I’ve seen a change in the narrative—even in hard-nosed, scientific journals—from Earth being seen as an ordinary, middle-sized planet around a middle-sized star that’s just one of billions out there, to Earth being seen as quite unusual. It has all this water, it has a plate tectonic system, and it has maintained habitable conditions for billions of years. The amazing thing is not that Earth happened to start with the right conditions, but that it maintained them over those timescales. That is extraordinary on a galactic scale.