For The Wild - Earthly Reads： Marcia Bjornerud on Turning to Stone S1_3

00:00:00.000 hey for the wild community ayana here welcome to the third episode of our new book study series

00:00:14.920 earthly reads where we'll learn alongside some of our most beloved authors after listening to

00:00:21.440 the shorter conversation head over to for the wild dot world slash book study to learn more

00:00:27.220 and to purchase access to the full course.

00:00:29.860 We'll be offering significantly more content

00:00:32.140 and access to live, recorded conversations

00:00:35.140 with the authors on our website.

00:00:37.820 We hope to see you there.

00:00:43.360 If we could just take ourselves out of ourselves

00:00:47.340 long enough to see humanity in proper proportion

00:00:51.440 in space and time, we'd be happier.

00:00:55.640 We'd treat each other better.

00:00:57.220 we'd actually have much more joy.

00:01:03.000 And so I'm just trying to give people some glimpse of this great wild world of rock

00:01:10.700 that is out there, just patiently waiting for us to be receptive to it again.

00:01:27.220 Hello, and welcome to For the Wild. I'm Ayanna Young. Today, we are speaking with returning

00:01:34.800 guest, Marsha Bjornrud, about her book, Turning to Stone, Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks.

00:01:42.100 Well, Marsha, thank you so much for spending some deep time with us today.

00:01:47.400 Well, I'm happy to be back with you, Ayanna.

00:01:49.560 As we begin, I'm wondering if you can give us a little background about yourself for

00:01:54.980 our audience and maybe speak to the location you wrote Turning to Stone from and where you are now.

00:02:03.040 Well, I'm a geologist and specifically a structural geologist. I study how mountains grow

00:02:07.820 and I'm in Wisconsin, which might not occur to people as the ideal place to study mountains. But

00:02:14.640 in fact, we have some deeply eroded ancient mountain belts that afford windows into the

00:02:21.000 process by which tectonics can construct great mountain belts. I came into the field of geoscience

00:02:30.400 almost accidentally. I think actually like many geologists, I didn't really have any exposure

00:02:37.020 to the field in high school. And when I was growing up, frankly, I never had any mentors,

00:02:44.760 women who were scientists that I could look to, and I did not consider myself a scientist.

00:02:49.420 but I took an introductory course in geoscience as a college freshman and realized what great

00:02:57.560 explanatory power it had, and I was hooked. So it's a field that has continued to nurture me

00:03:03.640 well into late middle age, and I'm very grateful that I somehow accidentally stumbled into this

00:03:11.600 remarkable field that is, in fact, in a golden age. My own career in geology has coincided with

00:03:20.300 the blossoming of new methods and new conceptual frameworks that are allowing us to understand the

00:03:26.540 earth in four dimensions in ways we never have. Gosh, I'm just imagining what it is to

00:03:34.620 slow down and really think about the history of growing mountains. And I wonder if that was

00:03:42.080 part of your desire to write this book, or what sparked you?

00:03:46.760 Yeah, so I've written several other books. And with this one, I really wanted to take readers

00:03:53.840 deeper into the physiology of the solid earth. The idea that the earth is this strange,

00:04:01.520 animate creature, the actual crust and lithosphere and mantle are in motion and are recycling

00:04:11.260 themselves. And of course, they're interconnected with the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere

00:04:16.480 system. But I wanted to expose interested readers to the current scientific understanding of the

00:04:23.580 way the planet works. And I made a couple of false starts. I did not set out to write a memoir,

00:04:31.760 but I was struggling with finding a narrative framework for taking people into some fairly

00:04:38.520 technical scientific territory. And my early attempts just turned out to be too textbooky,

00:04:44.140 and I realized probably no one would stick with me. And an editor that I had been in contact with

00:04:51.220 actually planted in my mind the possibility that I could write something like a memoir, and initially

00:04:56.160 I really had a viscerally negative reaction to that. I'm a fairly private person, and I thought

00:05:02.980 my own story is not the point, but slowly as I continued to struggle with this book idea, I

00:05:08.660 realized I could use my own story of development as a scientist as a way of welcoming people who

00:05:17.880 are not familiar with the field in, and showing how my deepening understanding of the planet

00:05:24.800 has evolved at the same time that the field itself, as I mentioned earlier, has become

00:05:31.380 more sophisticated.

00:05:33.400 So that's how I kind of struck on this hybrid.

00:05:36.940 And it is a strange kind of genre-defying book, I have to admit, between my own story

00:05:43.020 as a scientist, and then deep dives through the lens of particular rock types that I was living on

00:05:49.120 or obsessed with at different times as a way of telling the story of how the planet works.

00:05:56.340 Gosh, I'm so happy you wrote this book. It gets me out of my personal way of thinking on a day-to-day

00:06:03.280 basis. And I think the personal stories you weave throughout it make it that much more relatable

00:06:10.100 and easy to flow into the stories that may not be as common for some of us as we're not thinking

00:06:19.460 about rocks all the time. Well, as I said, I came into science not thinking of myself as a science

00:06:26.020 type. I think I actually had a kind of negative experience in middle school in science courses

00:06:35.980 that had put me off. And so I really surprised myself as a first-year college student, even

00:06:42.800 being attracted to a scientific field. And I think I had to, from the start, really

00:06:48.600 find my own way of feeling safe in science classrooms. And part of it was observing

00:06:56.740 the anthropology of the science. As a kind of outsider who was also very fascinated by the

00:07:05.700 content, but not feeling like I was completely one of the crowd in the classroom. So I think that

00:07:14.140 has, ironically, that feeling of being an outsider has helped me later as a writer. I can remember

00:07:20.880 feeling not welcomed in to the group and has helped me translate for people who don't have

00:07:28.440 the technical background, some of the peculiar ways of seeing and thinking that are typical of

00:07:36.040 the geosciences in specific. But another thought I have is that I'm a mother, I've grown children

00:07:43.360 now, but I think observing how children learn, it's quite possible to talk with children about

00:07:49.360 very sophisticated things. You just have to really understand the framework of their

00:07:55.360 perception at any given age. And I'm not condescending to readers in making this

00:08:02.140 comparison. I just think that even very subtle, nuanced, technical ideas can be conveyed in some

00:08:09.380 way if we are empathetic to the people we're trying to convey them to, that really understand

00:08:15.300 that we have to abandon our technical vocabulary and certain shortcuts and unpack the ideas in a

00:08:22.880 way that a receptive, ordinary person can grasp. So I've really held myself in my books to high

00:08:31.340 scientific standards of rigor. I really think that that's important. And I don't think it's

00:08:38.740 antithetical to also making it accessible. So that's what I've tried to do. And I think,

00:08:44.560 sometimes more successful than other times? The more that I have aged and the more time

00:08:53.300 I've had on this earth, I actually think that simple and accessible tellings of ideas and

00:09:02.660 ways of being are beautiful and very deep, actually. I think when I was younger, it's not

00:09:10.100 that I wanted to complicate things, but I think I clung on to an identity of intellectualism or

00:09:15.700 big words or sounding a certain way. But as I've moved throughout the world in different places

00:09:23.940 and trying to communicate with people and storytell about the earth, I noticed that it's not about

00:09:29.380 being smart or not smart or being interested or not interested. It's that how do we communicate

00:09:35.880 with people like what actually are the ways that people at this moment in time and maybe that

00:09:41.880 there's you know I'm sure there's threads that we could get into over history of how humans will

00:09:47.020 attach themselves to stories but I'm just much more interested in simpler storytelling I love

00:09:55.960 when more people from different ways of thinking can all come together and agree or or disagree

00:10:04.400 but I guess really what it is, is just engage with thought together. Like that is just such

00:10:10.520 an exciting thing for me. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And yeah, I guess I'm also

00:10:15.800 really interested in the way you write about the land and the decisions throughout history.

00:10:20.820 For instance, you write, quote, struggling farmers in the sandstone terrain of Western Wisconsin

00:10:26.160 faced a Faustian reality. The bedrock beneath the fields was worth more than the years of hard won

00:10:33.680 harvests. Many of them chose to sell their land for sand mining. In some counties, the topography

00:10:40.080 changed almost overnight. The rolling hills were deleted with ruthless efficiency as frac sand

00:10:47.880 operations stripped away vegetation and gouged out the golden bedrock that rabbled on, just as the

00:10:56.140 lumber barons had done a century earlier. An observer making long-term ethnographic observations

00:11:03.080 might discern a pattern. First, native people of the forest were forced off the land so the

00:11:09.560 sand-loving white pines could be cut. Then the sandy soil was lost to erosion, the sandstone

00:11:15.840 aquifer was tainted, and when it seemed that nothing else could be subtracted or diminished

00:11:21.460 further, the hills themselves were hauled away. The history of this place has always been

00:11:27.300 dictated by sand, end quote. Oh yeah, so I'd just be really interested if you could describe this

00:11:35.540 history more and the interplay of forces that are at work on the landscape. Yes, that's from the

00:11:41.640 first chapter which describes the area northwestern Wisconsin where I grew up on these beautiful

00:11:46.620 Cambrian golden honey-colored sandstones. And I use sandstone as this kind of stand-in for my

00:11:55.760 pre-geologic self too that I was aware of of the rocks but didn't really understand their

00:12:03.200 semiotics at that time but in retrospect I see how the human history of that place and the abuses

00:12:12.700 and uses of the land were completely dictated by the sandstone bedrock in so many ways and so I

00:12:22.320 use that as an exemplar. It's just one very specific place in the 20th century, but it's true

00:12:27.940 of every place. Whether people think about the rocks beneath their feet or not, they are in charge

00:12:34.500 of our destinies and our economies and our collective well-being or not. So for me,

00:12:43.120 sandstone is a beautiful metaphor for the sort of blurred memories of childhood too. It's made up of

00:12:48.680 bits and pieces of largely indistinguishable quartz grains, just like it's hard to remember

00:12:56.320 any particular days of childhood, but in aggregate, you do have impressionistic memories.

00:13:02.820 But then once every 10 or 20,000 grains in most quartz sandstones, there'll be a tiny crystal of

00:13:10.640 a mineral called zircon, which does have a very sharp memory. And I use that as those few

00:13:18.280 moments that do remain somehow intact in the sea of blurred grains of memory of our

00:13:29.400 childhoods. So I use sandstone both as this metaphor for what we recall of our childhood

00:13:38.480 selves, but also as this kind of fable about how geology is destiny for almost any place on earth.

00:13:48.280 Thank you.

00:14:18.280 i have been a part of many campaigns to stop mining projects and in one way it's a really

00:14:32.340 heartbreaking reality and in the other way it's just a reality and it's and that doesn't mean

00:14:38.660 that things can't be stopped but it's that this is the the machine that in some ways we all feed

00:14:45.820 into that wants to take the rock for various reasons. And in your book, you discuss the

00:14:52.280 complicated relationship that many geologists and perhaps even the field of geology has with the

00:14:58.460 oil and gas and mineral industry. And I wonder if you could speak a bit more about this.

00:15:06.260 Yeah, it is really a tension in our field. Many people go into the geosciences because they're

00:15:12.820 attracted to beautiful, wild, rocky places, and then find that their career options sometimes

00:15:21.900 compromise those places. It's less true than it was in the past. Many of the students we have here

00:15:27.980 are going on into conservation fields, being part of government agencies that protect natural

00:15:37.080 places. But still, geology is very much wrapped up with extractive industries, oil, gas, minerals.

00:15:45.000 I don't know how to really reckon with this sometimes. Much of what we know about the

00:15:52.000 evolution of life on Earth, the way to read the rock record, and even things about mountain

00:15:59.140 building that I study have come from research that was done by oil and gas companies and mineral

00:16:05.080 exploration companies. So we are deeply entangled in a problematic way with the extractive

00:16:11.260 industries. On the other hand, ironically, this research has led to this astonishing panoramic

00:16:19.580 understanding of Earth through time that perhaps we would not have had if there wasn't a lot of

00:16:25.360 money being put into the study of bedrock for economic reasons. So it's a real irony that I

00:16:32.240 do struggle with. I chose not to go into the commercial part of geosciences. I've spent my

00:16:40.120 career as an academic, but I have friends who have had very productive and satisfying careers

00:16:45.960 working for mineral companies or oil and gas companies and have felt that their scientific

00:16:50.900 curiosity was actually fed by the astonishing resources they had around them to explore

00:16:59.020 the crust of the earth. So it's, yeah, I don't have an easy answer to that. We need to know

00:17:08.140 how to find things we require. And, you know, there's a real hard truth about the green energy

00:17:16.800 transition. It is going to require mining of new kinds of commodities that we've not

00:17:22.280 previously mined in an intensive way. And I think everyone needs to recognize that and we need

00:17:29.000 to find some kind of rational approach to mining where it can be done with minimal impact we can't

00:17:39.420 be against every mine but surely we can make judicious decisions about where not to mine

00:17:45.940 when ecosystems that are very sensitive or close to extinction are threatened

00:17:52.660 mm-hmm yeah I'm with you there I mean I wish that we didn't have to mine I wish we didn't have to

00:18:01.460 exploit the earth for our needs and desires and addictions but we seem really far from being able

00:18:12.320 to do that and our desires only get stronger I also see what you're saying about the field of

00:18:19.140 geology. I studied in the field of forestry for many years. And so much of what was taught was

00:18:26.660 guided and shaped by the forestry industry, where a lot of the money came from. It's where a lot of

00:18:34.220 the study and scientific knowledge had come from, because it was funded. So yeah, it's an

00:18:41.920 interesting telling of the forest when it's being taught through the lens of industry and

00:18:49.760 extraction, even quote unquote, sustainable forestry, which of course I do think there

00:18:57.280 probably is some, I mean, I know there is, I've seen it, but it's, it's usually pretty small

00:19:03.360 scale. And I have seen small scale mining. And I think the biggest issue I see with even small

00:19:12.020 scale mining, especially along clean, necessary to life waterways is the cleanup. Humans can be

00:19:21.300 really sloppy and messy and things spill um and not just tailings ponds like the gas barrels that

00:19:33.140 are used to fill up machines spill like even just changing the oil on an excavator spills like

00:19:41.280 there's just so much there's just so much small and big overflow to being industrious at all

00:19:49.260 Yeah. And companies have pretty short lifespans. And here in Wisconsin with some of the frack sand

00:19:55.240 mines, they just went out of business and they, you know, they left town. And you can have

00:20:00.940 laws that are supposedly governing remediation, but if a company is bankrupt and has left

00:20:08.220 the premises, there's very little recourse that can happen. So that's the really sad irony

00:20:15.420 that capitalism and geologic effects of it

00:20:21.920 are on completely different timescales.

00:20:25.680 Capitalism is about maximizing profits this year

00:20:28.580 and the long-term effects are not the concern

00:20:33.640 of the companies that may not be around

00:20:35.620 for more than a couple of years.

00:20:38.540 Oh yeah, it's amazing how much the land changes hands

00:20:44.480 of companies and then of course with the switching of companies there's no accountability and then

00:20:52.120 even the way that laws are set up there's no accountability and then it falls back on either

00:20:58.200 the country which really actually falls back on the tax paying people and it's yeah the the whole

00:21:05.720 setup is just really horrifying and i'm sure you know very well of that so many of these laws were

00:21:13.880 written in the 1800s and they somehow still apply to today's mining practices, which are

00:21:20.780 obviously entirely different than they were a couple hundred years ago. We're in a pickle

00:21:26.520 because we also, and I say we as a global society in a sense, only have a stronger and stronger

00:21:36.660 desire for minerals. It's really hard. The green new wave and we have green technology,

00:21:42.900 but they need minerals and they need fossil fuels to get those minerals. And it's like,

00:21:48.740 oh gosh, I feel the anxiety and I don't necessarily feel confused, but I feel the

00:21:57.460 confusion of what we're doing. I don't really think how we're moving forward makes sense.

00:22:04.160 The hunger for minerals, the growing hunger for minerals.

00:22:07.600 Well, I think the only way we can sort of break the pattern of what we've been doing is if we very deliberately try to replicate biogeochemical cycles and make a circular economy, make sure things are fully recyclable, modular, reparable, and are designed for long lifespans.

00:22:30.800 But all of those things are challenging because they run counter to short-term profits in most cases.

00:22:37.020 You've probably heard of biomimicry, looking to the natural world in plants and animals for design inspiration. There are plenty of ideas in the geologic realm as well. And one of the biggest is this concept of biogeochemical cycling.

00:22:55.300 It's the way that Earth has maintained a reasonably habitable surface environment for at least 500 million years.

00:23:03.260 If you go back further, a couple of billion.

00:23:06.940 And it's absolutely central to being able to sustain ourselves in the long term.

00:23:14.560 People are employing some geomimicry principles with different ideas about carbon sequestration.

00:23:21.360 I'm sure you've heard of maybe Climeworks.

00:23:24.260 It's, I think, a Swiss company, but they're doing their pilot project in Iceland, and they're using Earth's long-term carbon sequestration strategy, which is the formation of calcite, the main mineral in limestone, through the weathering of basalt and trying to kind of accelerate this natural process so that we could store some of the CO2 emissions that we've done over the last century and a half

00:23:53.440 in solid form over the long haul as calcite.

00:23:57.880 So they're injecting carbon dioxide from industrial operations

00:24:02.500 directly into the hot basaltic rocks in the subsurface in Iceland

00:24:06.500 and forming some calcite in real time,

00:24:10.100 which is a solid mineral substance that can store CO2.

00:24:15.480 It has CO2 in its formula.

00:24:18.300 It's a mineral.

00:24:19.940 So there are examples of geomimicry that people are trying on

00:24:23.240 small scales. The question is, can we really scale these up? And are they going to be

00:24:30.440 attractive in a world that measures everything in terms of profitability?

00:24:37.380 Wow, that's really fascinating. And yeah, our world measures things in profitability, but

00:24:43.540 also the companies that are quote unquote making profits are completely subsidized and don't pay

00:24:50.440 a lot of taxes so it's like it's like what even is profitability it's all hooey socializing the

00:24:58.880 cost privatizing the profits yeah so i don't know i think about that when you know we're in these

00:25:06.380 moments where we're trying to create solutions we're like oh but this solution doesn't make

00:25:10.500 money it's not as if a lot of these minds make money it's not as if you know there's just so

00:25:15.380 much that if it wasn't getting all the support of the government and taxpayer dollars through these

00:25:20.440 backdoor ways wouldn't actually be making money either. And I also understand it. It's like,

00:25:26.680 we're trying to keep industries alive because that keeps people fed, that keeps people employed,

00:25:33.920 that keeps people busy. It makes sense even on a psychological level that we're in this

00:25:39.240 pattern that we have to keep feeding because we don't know how to get out of the pattern.

00:25:44.000 and so I think before I used to probably well I don't not probably I was had a lot more rage

00:25:50.200 and I was really angry frustrated and just so much heartbreak and confused over why we made

00:25:59.620 and I say we as in like all of us who are somehow implicated in this system

00:26:05.100 that we would make decisions like this but I also from a human level like have a lot of compassion

00:26:12.860 I'm really interested in the way you discuss trends in scientific thinking and the growth

00:26:19.040 in our knowledge. There's a quote that you write, can we ever revisit the past without seeing it

00:26:25.240 through the lens of what happened later? Can we truly understand a bygone time in its own right

00:26:31.360 when other outcomes were still possible? Even when studying rocks, it's hard to avoid the bias

00:26:37.560 of presentism. The lake superior basalts formed a billion years ago on an earth when life was still

00:26:45.480 entirely microbial. Trilobites were still 450 million years in the future. Another supercontinent

00:26:53.220 had to form and break up again before Pangea would even begin to take shape. There was no

00:26:59.140 reason to imagine that such things as dinosaurs or primates would inherit the earth. None of these

00:27:05.820 things, though now literally set in stone, were then preordained. Given the happenstances of

00:27:12.940 planetary and biological evolution, Earth's story could have unfolded quite differently.

00:27:19.340 End quote. That just puts so much in perspective and also so much out of perspective

00:27:26.980 at the same time. And how is our knowledge situated within history?

00:27:32.540 yeah i mean i struggle with this question of how to tell earth story every year when i teach a

00:27:42.060 course called history of earth and life i'm gearing up to teach it starting in january again

00:27:46.540 it's the whole grand saga of earth's history and evolution of life in 10 weeks we're in a

00:27:54.220 trimester system so it's it's a challenge to squeeze everything in but i need to have some

00:27:58.860 kind of narrative arc to it. And I really do wonder sometimes, what is the story? Is it of

00:28:05.740 resilience? And yes, it is, because the earth has been through a lot of things, and yet there's this

00:28:10.940 unbroken chain of life from at least 3.8 billion years ago to the present. On the other hand,

00:28:16.060 there's cataclysm and disaster and pathos. So there's so many threads to the story. And

00:28:24.380 that quote that you read I was trying to underscore that when we tell this earth story we tend to

00:28:32.140 think of it as the march the inevitable march toward think the way things are now but if you

00:28:39.460 take yourself back at different points in earth's history things really could have turned out very

00:28:45.280 differently a different path could have been taken and through this endless process of ramifying

00:28:50.560 branching things could be very different here 4.5 billion years after the planet formed and that is

00:28:59.420 a dizzying kind of idea there were these inflection points in earth history that were

00:29:04.180 moments of uncertainty we can see in retrospect where the story could have gone very very differently

00:29:20.560 Thank you for listening to the third episode

00:29:27.140 of For the Wild's Slow Study Series, Earthly Reads,

00:29:31.140 with Marsha Bjornrud.

00:29:33.020 This was the first 30 minutes of an over-hour-long conversation

00:29:36.400 between Ayanna and Marsha.

00:29:38.500 To hear the full episode, join our book study,

00:29:41.100 where we will gather with authors like Marsha,

00:29:44.260 as well as Adrienne Marie Brown, Tricia Hersey,

00:29:46.840 Prentiss Hemphill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Celine Simon for an even deeper dive

00:29:52.720 into their recent writings. To learn more, please visit forthewild.world

00:29:58.160 slash bookstudy or join us on Patreon. The music for this series is from the

00:30:04.780 compilation Staying, leaving records aid to artists impacted by the Los Angeles

00:30:09.660 wildfires. The musicians featured in this episode are Zyla, Mizu, Marine Eyes,

00:30:16.320 David Moses, and Tristan Delige.

00:30:20.480 For the Wild is made by Ayanna Young,

00:30:22.960 Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson,

00:30:25.520 Jackson Kroof, Kylea Lofton,

00:30:28.380 and Zandashe Brown.

00:30:29.880 Thanks for listening.

For The Wild - February 10, 2025

Earthly Reads： Marcia Bjornerud on Turning to Stone S1_3

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