Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Save the World “offers a new way of thinking about our place in time, showing how our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and how our actions today will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations” (book jacket blurb). In the following exchange, TAPA members Tom Hoffman and Jo Parker discuss their reactions to the book.
Tom: This has been one of my favorite books the last few years. I learned about it when I heard Bjornerud speaking about it on a Long Now podcast. She does a fantastic job of outlining the history of our planet. I’m in awe of all the incredibly unlikely things that happened in its 4.5 billion years of history that led to…me. It truly is a wonder we are here at all. The flip side is that it is all so fragile––it could all go away. We are not guaranteed the conditions we enjoy now. It makes me really sad to see the damage we’ve done in my lifetime alone. For example, the planet has its own way of regulating CO2 in the atmosphere with weathering of rocks and locking that CO2 away as calcite. The system has worked over thousands of years, but it can’t keep up with all the fossil fuels we are burning. The excess just ends up in our atmosphere, as shown by the Keeling curve with its steady upward slope. Climate change is the result. Some cultures, unlike our American culture, have recognized that we are so out of balance. Bjornerud’s description of the native American practice of survivance and their fights to save our environment––despite centuries of mistreatment by the American government––is a tragic irony. Jo––those were some of my initial big takeaways. What were your thoughts?
Jo: Tom, what struck you about the book is such an important point: humanity’s unlikely development over earth’s 4.5 billion years—and the damage we’ve done to our planet despite the miniscule amount of time we’ve spent on it. This past summer I had the pleasure of hearing Marcia Bjornerud in conversation with Maikin Scott (WHYY) at the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philly. When I saw the announcement, I must admit that I hadn’t heard of Bjorenrud, but the title of the presentation—“Reading the Rocks: How Geology Tells the Earth’s Story”—immediately caught my attention. I found myself scrawling down significant phrases on the Q&A notecard I’d been given: for example, “Rocks are not nouns but verbs”; they are “time travelers” and “story-tellers.” I was so inspired by the talk that I picked up Timefulness. Once again, her title caught my attention (she seems to be good at that), and as I read what she meant by the term, I began to understand the meaning of her subtitle, How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Timefulness, according to Bjornerud, constitutes “a clear-eyed view of our view of our place in Time, both the past that came long before us and the future that will elapse without us” (17). As humanity continues to pursue present-day gain and convenience at the expense of our future, the idea of embracing timefulness particularly resonates with me.
Tom: Oh, I am so jealous. I would love to see her in person––she’s a real rock star (sorry–– couldn’t resist). One of the other parts of her book that I really loved was her takedown of the Elon Musks of the world. They are so entitled and brimming with hubris that they think they can recreate a living planet out of Mars. Bjornerud correctly points out that they have absolutely no understanding of the 4.5 billion year process it took to get here. We can’t take care of the one planet in the Universe we know harbors life. Why would we think we could make another one? It is shocking that Trump has taken Elon in his confidence for the moment, so we will be stuck with his kind of arrogance for at least the next few years––or until Musk falls out of favor. Because of my organizing background, I immediately jump to, “Well, so now that we know this information about Earth, what are we gonna DO about it?” Unfortunately, I doubt we can give a copy of the book to everyone in the country, LOL. We can however work to build Third Act into a large organization that has some clout. I was struck, given the weird weather we are having, that climate was so rarely mentioned during the presidential campaign. As environmentalists, we have to accept responsibility for that deafening silence. It indicates the lack of power of the environmental movement. This is one thing that draws me to Third Act. With so many folks of our age and hair color, we should be able to build the power to get climate back to the table.
Jo: Tom, I agree that’s frustrating that catastrophic climate change wasn’t addressed during the campaign, particularly as I think it would have struck a note with young voters, such as the two who spoke at our Silver Wave event in Philly. The current political landscape makes me more and more aware of the importance of the geological thinking that Bjornerud recommends: “Recognizing that our personal and cultural stories have always been embedded in larger, longer—and still elapsing—Earth stories might save us from environmental hubris” (178). Bjornerud tells a story of her own hubris when, trying to dislodge a delicate, “watermelon-colored” tourmaline crystal from an abandoned mine, she accidentally smashed it “with one errant blow” and realized “that in one avaricious second I had carelessly destroyed an exquisite thing that had witnessed a third of Earth’s history” (128). I can’t help but think that this story serves as a microcosm of the macrocosmic planetary destruction in which humanity is currently engaged because our greed trumps (pun intended) our care for our planet. I wish that I could give a copy of the book to every climate denialist—but they probably wouldn’t break away from their misinformation platforms to read it.
Tom and Jo: We highly recommend this book to our Third Act members. If you don’t have an independent local bookshop in your area, we recommend that you shop through bookshop.org, which supports such bookshops.