00:02:31.580Wonderful. Okay, so today we'll be touching on a lot of themes from your most recent book,
00:02:39.020Timefulness, How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. So to begin, I thought I'd
00:02:44.420read a short excerpt from your time researching in the Arctic. Quote, lost in my thoughts on the
00:02:50.620long walks back to camp each day, my mind washed clean by the sound of wind and waves. I have
00:02:57.300sometimes felt as if I stood at the center of a circle, equidistant from all stages of my life,
00:03:03.120past and future. The sensation spills over to the landscape and rocks, immersed in their stories.
00:03:09.940I see that the events of the past are still present and feel they could even be replayed again one day in a beautiful revelation, end quote.
00:03:20.200I love imagining this icy tundra landscape through your eyes.
00:03:25.480And I wonder if you could share what drew you to this field and introduce this idea of geological thinking.
00:03:32.900Well, like many people, I knew very little about geology when I entered college.
00:03:37.700It's unfortunate that earth science is viewed by many people as a kind of lesser intellectual
00:03:44.820discipline than the other sciences, especially physics and chemistry and biology.
00:03:50.440So it was only when I took an introductory course primarily to fulfill a general education
00:03:56.460requirement in lab science that I discovered geology.
00:04:00.640And then it was as if I realized this was the thing that had been waiting for me all
00:04:06.200So I'm not alone in that kind of discovery of the field. For me, geology is like the etymology
00:04:14.140of the world. There's just such huge explanatory power in the lens of geology.
00:04:21.880I love thinking back all the way to your school days and where that seed was watered. And now
00:04:30.420I'd like to explore the notion of deep time from a geological perspective, which, as you note,
00:04:36.200is sorely missing from Western culture, mainstream narratives, or our education system, and so forth.
00:04:42.380Now, in your writing, you often describe Earth's 4.5 billion year history as a dramatic story of development
00:04:49.420that is, contrary to popular belief, full of dynamic twists and turns.
00:04:54.920So could you acquaint us with the story of our shared geologic past,
00:05:00.560particularly in regards to the shifting temporal speeds of Earth's processes,
00:05:05.280whether that be tectonic plate movement, the weathering of mountains, or the geochemistry of the oceans.
00:05:11.720Geology as a discipline has been almost too successful in inculcating people with the idea that the Earth is so old and so slow
00:05:22.620and that geological processes are incremental and almost imperceptible.
00:05:27.320And so what I've tried to do in my writing is convey the sense that we too live in geologic time. Yes, the earth is very old, but it's still in process. It's a dynamic place that does have many tempos.
00:05:44.320tempos. Most of them, thank goodness, are slow from a human perspective. So there's plenty of
00:05:50.040time for us to adapt. But some of these tempos are startlingly quick. Earthquakes, for example,
00:05:56.720you in California know quite well, are much faster than we'd like. And so the earth is not only a
00:06:04.000slow-moving entity, it's also very nimble. And certainly climate change is another example
00:06:10.740of a case where Earth changes, geologic processes can happen on something very close to human
00:06:18.620timescales. And so that's the more complex, nuanced message that I'm trying to get through,
00:06:24.460that there are many moods that Earth has and many processes that operate over vastly different
00:06:31.420magnitudes of time. I really loved your description
00:06:37.660of mountain building in timefulness, how thinking like a geologist can help save the world.
00:06:44.100It was so beautiful to read, so I'd really recommend folks to pick up that book and dive
00:06:50.520in a bit deeper. Well, this brings me to the Anthropocene, the geologic epoch characterized
00:06:56.720by our human impact on Earth's climate and ecosystems. A piece in The Atlantic titled
00:07:02.100How the Concept of Deep Time is Changing, notes that, quote, a single mine in Canada's tar sands
00:07:08.960region moves 30 billion tons of sediment annually, double the quantity moved by all the world's
00:07:15.480rivers combined, end quote. And that, quote, the weight of the fresh water we have redistributed
00:07:21.440has slowed the earth's rotation, end quote. So in the roughly 10,000 year era of the human,
00:07:29.260Could we say that geological time has started moving at the speed of human time?
00:07:35.580Or in other words, how might we understand the unprecedented scale and pace of transformation we're seeing today in the context of the greater geological record?
00:07:46.400Yeah, and so the idea of the Anthropocene is now in circulation, I think, quite widely in the public.
00:07:52.920Internally, in geology, there are some rather arcane arguments about exactly how to define it.
00:08:00.000But I think most geoscientists, including myself, think there is a compelling argument for saying we have crossed the threshold into some new regime in which human accelerated processes really do change the geologic rules so profoundly that we're probably in a new interval on the geologic timescale.
00:08:22.000it's certainly not something to be proud of. Some people have said, well, isn't this rather
00:08:26.340an arrogant, self-aggrandizing designation? But I say, no, it's like a scarlet A for Anthropocene
00:08:34.100that we are wearing. It's not something to be proud of that we're altering the planet
00:08:38.960at rates that are nearly unprecedented in the geologic past.
00:08:43.160Yeah, I definitely do not see it as something to be proud of. And it's quite amazing just to
00:08:51.020witness the terraforming of this planet so quickly, especially with industrial techniques
00:08:57.600in the past few hundred years. It's shocking, really, to see how quickly we either are
00:09:05.800intentionally changing things like, you know, mining and just land shaping, but then also
00:09:12.420changing things like the Great Barrier Reef. And I feel like that's like an indirect way that we
00:09:18.580are shifting timescales and spaces. Yes. And to me, those are the more terrifying things that we
00:09:25.560naively think that we can rearrange landscapes and profoundly alter biogeochemical cycles and that
00:09:34.260maybe we can anticipate what all the consequences can be. And that's absolutely not true. The Earth
00:09:40.020system is so complex. There's so many moving parts, many of which perhaps most of which we
00:09:45.020still don't understand. And the short and long-term consequences of all these rapid changes
00:09:51.840are beyond our scientific compass at this point. I'm really happy in a strange way that you're
00:10:00.620saying that because I too believe that we couldn't possibly understand the complexity
00:10:06.860of Earth's systems. And I wonder, with all of the predictions coming out of the scientific
00:10:14.660community around climate change, how much can we rely on those models and those hypotheses when we
00:10:22.380understand how little that we actually can understand about the complexity of these systems?
00:10:29.040That's a profound and important question. I think most geoscientists, and in particular,
00:10:35.740climate scientists, I'm not in that sub-discipline within geology, but certainly I pay attention
00:10:40.300to the professional conversations, are humbled by the complexity of the climate system
00:10:47.820and the ways in which powerful feedbacks, especially positive feedbacks, those that
00:10:55.180amplify small changes, have in the geologic past resulted in large magnitude rapid climate change.
00:11:04.480So it's true that we don't know everything. And if anything, that incompleteness in our knowledge should make us want to use the precautionary principle, which is do as little harm to the stability of natural systems as possible, given the ample evidence that they can do very unpredictable things.
00:11:27.520So the system is complex. We have an increasingly nuanced understanding of climate. Many climate models have been tested and calibrated and recalibrated against each other and against the geologic and ice core record of past climate change.
00:11:45.620But no, we don't know everything. And I think humility, again, is the stance of most climate scientists at this point, that it is a complex beast and changing it in even small ways can lead to really unfortunate consequences that we can't predict at this point.
00:12:05.060Mm hmm. Yeah, I can really see that. And sometimes I feel like I've just strapped on to the roller coaster. And I'm just gonna see what happens in so many ways, you know, I can try to understand and read as much as I can. But I agree that the unpredictability and uncertainty is so vast, that preparing is is challenging.
00:12:29.420but I think that the humility part is what we actually can prepare for in ourselves and the
00:12:36.380doing of less harm. Those two things really make sense regardless of what the outcomes are.
00:12:41.960So thank you for speaking to that. Now, we know that we can no longer ignore the magnitude of
00:12:49.820our effect on the planet. And this brings me to the central tenet of your book, the importance
00:12:55.580of developing a consciousness of timefulness.
00:13:24.480Well, the word, which I think I made up, maybe others have used it before, but in my use of it, it's an intentional counterpoint to two things.
00:13:33.860First would be mindfulness, which is probably a good thing for individuals to practice, especially in these anxious times, of being present and thoughtful about the now.
00:13:46.260But I don't think mindfulness, if it means myopic focus on the now, is a good stance for a society. And that's, I think, in general, our society is far too focused on a very short time frame.
00:14:00.280The other thing that timefulness sort of rhymes with is, of course, timelessness, which we often hold up as an aspiration, that we should be outside time, beyond time, but that is ultimately impossible and, I would argue, a kind of sterile idea.
00:14:18.120Everything evolves. Everything has had many forms and iterations in the past. And in that sense,
00:14:26.700it's time full. All objects, people, cultures, languages, rocks, landscapes are full of the
00:14:34.300time that it has taken for them to take the form they're in now. And for me, as a geologist,
00:14:41.620There's a real joy in being able to look out across a landscape and read it, to understand its past, to have it speak to me in some way across millennia or even millions of years, and for that knowledge to somehow resonate with my young human brain.
00:15:03.480So I think this idea of timefulness is both essential for our society, which is so unable to look ahead even a few years and make plans, but also for us as individuals to make peace with our own mortality.
00:15:23.080And I think those two things are wrapped up in subtle and important ways.
00:15:27.140This moment when all of our lives have been put on pause because of the coronavirus is an interesting one because I think it highlights some of the things that the book is about. Certainly our lack of preparedness, the fact that in only two weeks, our economy can basically collapse entirely, underscores our society's lack of a capacity for long-term thinking.
00:15:52.740There's really no reason in an affluent society like ours that we couldn't set aside some kind of buffers for ourselves in cases of events like this.
00:16:04.940We're really no better than a subsistence culture, maybe even worse, because we really are suddenly, our entire way of being has been disrupted in a profound way that could have consequences that linger far into the future.
00:16:20.240I also am interested, once we all come through this crisis, and it certainly is an important, it's a serious public health crisis, but I'm curious to see what effect it does have on our anthropogenic footprint, especially carbon emissions.
00:16:37.500It'll be really fascinating to see how much reduction in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions there are during this time.
00:16:47.360It'll give us some important benchmarks for how we might be able to take action in the future.
00:16:53.500Yeah, in terms of the CO2 emissions, what I've been finding absolutely incredible is how quickly the skies have cleared.
00:17:00.400it's almost unimaginable to me that we actually are slowing down because in so many ways
00:17:09.000I have prayed for us to slow down but there were so many reasons why it could never happen
00:17:15.560and now I'm saying it can happen and people can adapt and we can evolve quickly we don't need
00:17:23.620what we thought we needed especially those of us who are privileged in affluent countries and
00:17:29.120to see the resiliency of just the sky itself, you know, not even looking at other aspects of
00:17:35.540the ecosystems. It's so amazing. Yeah, it's just, it's just unbelievable to me. And I'm going to be
00:17:43.520super interested to see in the geologic time scale of what this lowering of CO2 emissions,
00:17:50.600what will it will look like. And I really also hope and pray that when the coronavirus crisis
00:17:57.780does teeter off that we don't go back to business as usual and we don't just start to pollute and
00:18:05.220release as much carbon as we have been I hope that we can see that through this time we actually can
00:18:10.500make huge changes and I also agree with you in terms of how unprepared we are and how our
00:18:17.580especially this dominant culture's view of of deep time or are preparing into the future I mean
00:18:24.520there just is none there. It's really about just the next quarter's bank account earnings. It's
00:18:29.960really not about forward thinking and, and how that plays into mortality is also huge. Just
00:18:36.520thinking, yeah, we all are going to die. So how do we live now? How do we really show up in this
00:18:42.400time? Yeah, gosh, it really sends me into a vortex of thought. So thank you for bringing
00:18:49.600all of those pieces up. There's something deeply wrong with an economic system that's predicated
00:18:55.920on the idea that it can only be healthy if the fires are stoked to the maximum with resources
00:19:03.860at all times. So let's hope that some wisdom comes out of this time that people as anxious
00:19:10.400and isolated and afraid as they feel now, when it's over, will actually look back on this time
00:19:16.540and think how wonderful that my kids could play out in the streets
00:24:53.420May this body be a bridge for the healing
00:24:59.780are we are made from the land may the rich us teach us oh great weather cleansing to bring
00:25:10.620to bring from our peace to this land we are we are born from the water
00:25:19.300now as you've spoken about in the past i'm also interested in how a practice of timefulness
00:25:29.440might provide greater healing around our relationship with time.
00:25:33.800So I'd love if you could speak more on our culture's temporal illiteracy
00:25:38.820and how feeling into the deep well of time might feed us spiritually and psychically.
00:25:44.840How are we able to be more present in our humanity
00:25:47.900when we cultivate an appreciation for the more than human time
00:25:52.120beyond the dominant mode of capitalism, what you call the island of now?
00:25:57.040Yeah, I think so many ills ranging from environmental ones, which are the obvious, but to more subtle psychological ones stem from our lack of a sense of deep rootedness. And I'm not a religious person myself, but certainly in the past, religion played that role.
00:26:17.360People felt a deep connection to their ancestors and the practices that they followed, and that satisfied that real need for a sense of where one has come from and what will continue after one is gone.
00:26:32.020As people fall away from some of these traditional religious traditions, I do think that there can be comparable solace and reassurance and meaning in connecting with natural history and embracing rather than dismissing or ignoring our earthiness.
00:26:56.020earthiness. We are earthlings, and we've emerged from this particular place. We are entirely shaped
00:27:03.420by the rest of the biosphere, by the solid earth that is the foundation for everything.
00:27:09.240And recognizing that, for me anyway, is some sort of spiritual comfort. And I think that
00:27:18.260science has not always been ready to maybe enter that realm. But I know for a fact that most of my
00:27:29.720colleagues in geology really do gain some kind of existential meaning from what they do. It's not
00:27:34.980just an academic pursuit or an intellectual game. It is some kind of more personal worldview.
00:27:43.080And I'm trying to share that with others. Thank you for doing that.
00:27:48.260I love this excerpt from the last chapter of your book in which you write, quote,
00:27:53.320we need spaces where from an early age, children see that they are on an ancient,
00:27:58.680sacred path that stretches across time, that growing up and growing old are to be celebrated,
00:28:05.000not feared, end quote. So could you share more on the necessity of multi-generational institutions,
00:28:12.140practices, and spaces? Yes, I think one artifact of our very technological age is increasing
00:28:20.900isolation of the generations. We really define ourselves by the technologies we use,
00:28:27.440and inevitably, people who are not as adept with those technologies become almost0.76
00:28:34.100laughable, comic, or pathetic characters. And so understanding that we all go through
00:28:42.980different life changes is such an important part of being human, but the technological world around
00:28:50.500us makes that harder and harder. And sadly, the coronavirus has made this harder and harder as
00:28:55.500the generations are physically not supposed to be interacting with each other. So this is a
00:28:59.740temporary thing, but only exacerbates the problem. So I think the siloing of generations is a very
00:29:06.780dangerous thing. It feeds into other types of what I call chronophobia. It's fed by the
00:29:13.980capitalistic messaging that aging is bad, being old is bad. And so it's entangled with so many
00:29:40.500embrace more their being native to Earth. I would love to see
00:29:45.140holidays that are, for example, celebrations of
00:29:48.940carbonate rocks that sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere for the long haul. We should have
00:29:55.420songs that we sing to children that celebrate biogeochemical cycles that keep everything on
00:30:02.500an even keel. So I'm trying to get some of my folks singing friends to come up with a new
00:30:11.480kind of songbook of time literate and earth literate melodies that maybe could unite us
00:30:18.460cross-generations and cultural chasms. Well, I'd love to hear that when that comes out.
00:30:27.600That sounds great. And now thinking about the lessons that geology has to share,
00:30:35.160I'd be curious to dig in deeper to what our planetary history can tell us about current
00:30:40.220day climate chaos. You've said that the Earth's history has seen moments of novelty and disruption
00:30:47.840as well as long periods of durability and resilience, given the harbingers of change
00:30:54.440we're seeing today from biodiversity loss to the collapse of fisheries and growing dead zones in
00:30:59.680the ocean. How does this compare to past mass extinction events or other geologic periods
00:31:06.240when biogeochemical cycles have gone awry? What do these cautionary tales of the past
00:31:12.500tell us about the possibility of recovery. Well, over the long term, there's certainly
00:31:19.200great cause for optimism. The biosphere on Earth has never completely been vanquished,
00:31:24.660even though there have been large magnitude instabilities and five great mass extinctions
00:31:32.560that we know of in the last 500 million years. So we've recovered each time. But the sobering news
00:31:40.260is that after some of these, the recovery has been very slow, like on the order of millions
00:31:45.520of years, which is clearly not the kind of timeframe that most humans are comfortable
00:31:51.660contemplating. So earth is resilient, life is resilient, but when things go badly wrong,
00:32:01.240they can stay bad for quite a long time. Now, trying to compare some of the great mass extinction
00:32:07.180events of the past with what we're in now, which many people, of course, are calling the sixth
00:32:12.500mass extinction, is a bit difficult because of the denominators. When we look at the geologic
00:32:18.760record, we often, if we're looking at things that happened hundreds of millions of years ago,
00:32:24.500the plus or minus values on our dating of the rocks can be on the order of tens of thousands
00:32:30.340of years. So we're not always able to tell the difference between something that might have
00:32:35.920happened on a, say, 50 million year timescale or 100,000 year, sorry, 50,000 or 100,000 year
00:32:43.580timescale. And that's a big difference to humans. And when we look at what's happening today,
00:32:49.380we just have such a short window of time. The denominator is in years and the numbers that we
00:32:55.680come up with when we're trying to calculate extinction rates for certain groups of organisms
00:32:59.540really depend on how many years are in that denominator, how many extinctions per year
00:33:06.000or per decade. So there's a lot of imprecision there. So rather like what we were saying about
00:33:13.500uncertainty with climate, I think humility and do as little harm as possible is the best stance
00:33:21.520Because the geologic record does show us that instability and damaging biogeochemical equilibrium can be something that takes a very long time to recover from.
00:33:34.720And typically, the victims in these mass extinction events were the largest and most specialized organisms of the time.
00:33:43.720the dinosaurs, for example, whereas much smaller creatures and certainly microbial life is always
00:33:51.400doing just fine through some of even the biggest upheavals. So those are sobering
00:33:59.560facts about past mass extinction events on earth and should give us pause before we disrupt some
00:34:09.480of these processes that are going on in the background that most people don't even think
00:34:14.780of. I think of them as the housekeeping crew that keeps everything neat and tidy. They're in the
00:34:20.380background. People don't even know that they're absolutely essential ecosystem services for all
00:34:27.500of us, and we disrupt them at our peril. Absolutely. Just to go a little bit deeper
00:34:34.600into this, I'm wondering how does the earth find an active state of balance or equilibrium as we're
00:34:41.500talking about this recycling and recovery? How does the earth find that? What does that look like?
00:34:47.600That's a profound question. It is interesting that for the most part, earth is at an equilibrium.
00:34:56.100There are times of abrupt change and then a new equilibrium sets in. And it's mostly that
00:35:02.260And biological processes, tectonic processes like volcanism, which exhales gases into the atmosphere, and then the processes of erosion and weathering are all about commensurate with each other in terms of tempo over the long term in geologic time.
00:35:21.840And that to me is a remarkable thing. You can imagine a planet, even one that didn't have life, where tectonic processes were maybe much faster than the processes of erosion and weathering. I guess Mars would be an example that it's really not active tectonically anymore, but there is absolutely no erosion going on there.
00:35:43.480And so we have these big ancient fossilized volcanoes that have been sitting there for more than a billion years, and nothing's happening to them because there's nothing to erode them away.
00:35:53.300Whereas on Earth, we don't have any landscapes that are that ancient. Earth is constantly remodeling its surface. And so the tectonic forces from the internal heat engine of the Earth are remarkably well balanced by the external forces of erosion that are driven by gravity and solar energy.
00:36:15.500There's no reason those have to be that commensurate with each other. That's remarkable. And then life has evolved to be more or less able to keep up with both of those sorts of forces.
00:36:27.020So we have this remarkable planet where very different kinds of processes are sort of tuned to each other. And in terms of the actual geochemistry of the Earth's ocean atmosphere system, that's largely mediated by microbes.
00:36:44.660They can reproduce so quickly, as we know with the coronavirus, they can constantly adapt to new conditions. If there's an opportunity to harvest some sort of resource from the environment, a microbe will figure out how to do that. And another microbe will figure out how to use the waste products of that first microbe.
00:37:05.260And so there's this just beautiful economy that is established and can, for as long as all other things remain the same, can maintain itself over the long haul.
00:37:18.280But then something happens, the meteorite strikes, or some part of the system is radically changed, and then there can be a ripple effect through the entire system until a new kind of equilibrium is achieved again.
00:37:35.260This is one of the great questions about how the Earth works. Many of your listeners will probably have heard about the Gaia hypothesis that James Lovelock, an atmospheric chemist who's British and 100 years old this year, came up with in the 1980s.
00:37:53.280He posited that Earth was, in some sense, a superorganism that had the capacity, like a living being, to modulate its own internal body chemistry.
00:38:04.480This is an attractive idea. It's proven a little bit difficult to really test scientifically, but I think it's a useful conceptual framework for looking at the Earth, even if that's not literally true.
00:38:17.580the idea of planetary equilibrium, or what biologists call homeostasis, the capacity to
00:38:25.200keep your blood sugar, say, within a certain level, is a useful way of looking at the Earth
00:38:30.960over long periods of time. And so this is really a remarkable planet. And I feel frustrated with
00:38:40.300rhetoric about the idea of terraforming Mars and creating a new place for humans to occupy.
00:38:48.000I think that that sort of thinking just reveals profound ignorance of the deep, complex, and
00:38:55.980ancient biogeochemical cycles that have kept this planet so hospitable for such a long time.
00:39:01.880Sister, you are not too far for holding
00:40:08.220Can the roots intertwine like the redwood tree
00:40:12.440Somewhere deep in the soil, in the soul of the earth
00:40:15.740This topic also raises questions for me around
00:40:19.980the billions of dollars poured into research and development of outer space
00:40:24.440I think of initiatives like Elon Musk's SpaceX striving to create a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species, or breakthrough Starshot created by Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg, who plan to invest more than $100 million in space exploration.
00:40:45.420In light of all the environmental and social crisis we face at this moment on Earth, what are your thoughts on space exploration and terraforming other planets like Mars?
00:40:58.120Yeah, as a geoscientist, I'm fascinated by what we've learned about our neighboring planets in space, Mars and Venus and Mercury and the Moon, not a planet, but because it sheds light back on how remarkable the Earth is.
00:41:13.520And we can do a lot of that exploration by robots.
00:41:16.360In fact, they're a lot more reliable and a lot less expensive to send out into space.
00:41:21.800But as I said, the idea that we could somehow engineer another planet by fiat over a couple
00:41:31.060of generations or shorter timescale is so diluted.
00:41:37.640I just don't understand how anyone could imagine that we could manage another planet that has a completely different evolutionary history than ours.
00:41:52.120It's hard for me to even start. The hubris of it is incredible.
00:41:56.520And it drives me a little crazy that every time there's a panic about there not being enough young children, becoming interested in science, that we need to pour more money into space exploration is so wrongheaded.
00:42:11.660If people think space is warm and inviting, I can't imagine why they wouldn't be more interested in the deep histories of Earth.
00:42:20.940Many people say that thinking about geologic time is alienating.
00:42:26.520space is not warm and cozy. So I don't know. I'm sorry. I have just such a visceral negative
00:42:34.120reaction to these ideas. They capture people's imagination in a really dangerous way. I think
00:42:41.740they are just hubristic in the extreme. The same amount of money could be put into real solutions
00:42:49.520to our energy problems, finding truly carbon neutral energy sources. And it's just a
00:42:59.280very unfortunate thing that some very wealthy people with a lot of political power
00:43:05.200are diluting the public into the idea that these could even be possibilities.
00:43:12.360I'm really with you. You said it much more articulately than I would say it. So thank you
00:43:19.780for speaking to that. I definitely have some strange thoughts around space exploration,
00:43:26.760especially at this time when we need support here on earth. We really do.
00:43:33.160It's not usually exclusive. We can continue to do space exploration. I really am fascinated by
00:43:38.280cosmic scale processes too, but we don't need to send people. And we certainly should not be
00:43:44.980spending huge amounts of resources creating colonies. The very word is rather abhorrent
00:43:52.240anyway, but it's just not going to be plausible that we are going to establish a second planetary
00:44:01.060base for humanity. We are earthlings and we emerge from this place. It's a beautiful planet.
00:44:08.280let's learn to take better care of it. I just wish Elon Musk and others could take a really
00:44:14.300rigorous introductory year of geoscience and especially history of Earth. And I would hope
00:44:21.420that they might change their minds. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, okay. I'm going to be
00:44:28.460sending some energy into that wish. Yeah. Well, I'd like to return to a note that we started
00:44:35.780around geological thinking and in your book, The Invitation to Develop a More Polytemporal
00:44:42.480Point of View. And you speak so beautifully about animating our geologic past, but I'm also
00:44:49.040interested in stretching our sense of temporal direction forward and folding the future into
00:44:56.020what Donna Haraway calls the thick present. This reminds me of the indigenous principle of
00:45:02.180seven-generation thinking and how we must, informed by these ethics, honor not only those
00:45:07.960who came before, but those yet to come. So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on building
00:45:14.400our collective capacity for this kind of polytemporal thinking or the potential of
00:45:20.220bringing this perspective into other spheres like governance or public policy.
00:45:25.960Well, as I talk about in the book, I borrow one of Kurt Vonnegut's suggestions, which is
00:45:31.040to have a department in the executive branch that is the Department of the Future, have the
00:45:37.280Secretary of the Future, whose job it is to always be reminding policymakers that we should be
00:45:45.380thinking of the coming generations. We really have nothing like this at present. The window of time
00:45:51.940for political decision-making in this country is at most two years. That's the congressional
00:45:59.180election cycle and biennial budget cycle. Anyone who is trying to think over longer timescales just
00:46:05.380doesn't get reelected because some of the decisions that would follow from thinking
00:46:11.340on those timescales are politically unpopular. So somehow we need to build infrastructural
00:46:18.900mechanisms into our political system, into our economy that reward long-term thinking and
00:46:26.100discourage this myopic now preoccupation, and at least having someone whose job expressly it was
00:46:35.420to think about the future is a start. And I do think, I'm obviously not very objective, but I
00:46:42.720think that having serious earth science in the schools is something that over the long term
00:46:50.240could start to make a difference. It's really shocking to me that even very educated people
00:46:56.180have almost no clue about how the earth works. And this is just an artifact of the development
00:47:02.700of geology relative to other sciences. Physics really was on the ascendancy in the 19th century
00:47:09.520and the early 20th century. Chemistry, early 20th to middle 20th century. Biology, middle to late
00:47:15.98020th century. And geology is a late bloomer. We're in our golden age now, but the public
00:47:23.120perception of the earth sciences is really kind of Victorian. And it's a civic tragedy because
00:47:31.520we have a voting public who just doesn't understand the implications of their behaviors
00:47:37.680for the natural world and for their own well-being as residents of nature.
00:47:45.980So I have to think that a profound reorganization of our priorities in the educational system is
00:47:52.840part of it. Compensating people like teachers whose work is all about the future, compensating
00:48:00.380them better, revering them as important contributors to the civic good. So I guess I'm calling for a
00:48:07.580whole-scale cultural change as well as policy changes that can be implemented on the shorter
00:48:15.620term while waiting for the culture to change. And certainly the one policy change that would
00:48:20.860alter things overnight is a carbon tax or some kind of price on carbon. Then behaviors would
00:48:26.920instantly change. The incentives would be so different, and we would see a completely
00:48:34.140transformed economy if we could just find the political will to do that.
00:48:39.620It doesn't seem like it should be that hard. It's like we can do all.
00:48:44.380in some ways yeah it's so simple and yet you know we we make other things happen just looking at
00:48:51.020this two trillion dollar bailout you know things can happen quickly when the powers that think
00:48:57.280they are decide that that's what they want to do yeah so i mean this may be again as we said it may
00:49:03.760be a template for change it just making it feel equally urgent is the question can we do that
00:49:11.600Mm hmm. Yes, I'm with you there. Now, I know, earlier in our conversation, we were discussing this idea of not ever being able to understand the complexity of this earth and not fully, at least in preparation for this interview, I was interested in the way you spoke about the vast explanatory power of geology as a field, a kind of etymology of everything.
00:49:40.640and I think about the importance of the natural sciences as one of the lenses through which we
00:49:46.600can better understand the world and ourselves, kind of what you were talking about with having
00:49:50.860it in schools. But attention also arises for me in what I might describe as the scientific impulse
00:49:57.380to graft human logic onto everything, to know everything. And this is more of a personal
00:50:03.080philosophical question, but I wonder how you think about or hold the realm of the unknown,
00:50:08.940the vast sphere of the more-than-human earthly processes that we can't possibly see, sense, or
00:50:16.080experience? Well, I think that for me, one of the attractions of geology is that awareness that
00:50:23.700one's knowledge is always incomplete. And I think I've made peace with that. I think early in my
00:50:29.700career, and maybe this is what turns some people off the field, is that fact that you can only go
00:50:37.180so far, the records of the past have been in part eroded away or buried and are irretrievable
00:50:46.120in some ways, and yet you can see part of it. And to me, that's fine. It creates a sense
00:50:52.940of mystery and it motivates one to keep going and seek out any remaining clues that can
00:51:02.300be found. So that's something about geology that people have to make peace with, or they probably
00:51:08.140won't stay in it. And it comes back to that idea of humility, too, that as one really immerses
00:51:15.760oneself in Earth's story and begins in some way to have a glimpse of what a billion years
00:51:22.640is and what can transpire in a billion years, there's a real awe that emerges from that,
00:51:31.560that I, again, think is an important counterpoint to our human narcissism, both
00:51:38.600individual preoccupation with our own mortality, but our collective obsession with all things human
00:51:45.880that takes us out of our heads and reminds us of our deep roots in something much bigger.
00:51:53.380I like the quote that I use at the end of the book that is attributed to a Polish
00:51:58.000rabbi from the 17th century, Simcha Bonim. And it is that we should always carry two slips of paper,
00:52:07.340one in our left pocket that says, I am ashes and dust, and one in our right that says,
00:52:13.360The world was made for me. And I think geology somehow reminds us that both of those things are true. We are here now experiencing this glorious planet in its 4.5 billion year state, but we're not the first and we're not the last residents. And let's just make peace with that.
00:52:35.240I love that. And yes, I'm so in support of getting out of our own little lives, our own, and not just even our own lives, but our obsession with human, everything human. And it's just so narrow. It's so, yeah, it doesn't allow us.
00:52:57.960Yeah. And it's narrow and it's the cause of so much anxiety. If this is all there is,
00:53:06.280people have this sense that that's not enough. And so I think enlarging our sense of who we are
00:53:12.840can be a source of psychological and spiritual peace. I remember a quote from an anthropologist,
00:53:23.760I think, Clifford Geertz. He defined culture, something like this, the constellation of stories
00:53:31.960that a group of people tell about their place and purpose in the world. And in the West,
00:53:40.580especially now that many people have detached themselves from traditional religious practices,
00:53:48.820The stories we tell about ourselves are mainly about technology and capitalism.
00:53:55.680And the natural world is just a backdrop.
00:53:58.220It's just this passive scenery against which all the real action takes place.
00:54:05.640To me, that's a big part of our problem.
00:54:08.440The scenery is going to start directing the play very soon.
00:54:12.260And perceiving nature in that way also separates us profoundly from who we really are.
00:54:20.680So these stories that we tell about who we are and that all that matters is the human-created world are so damaging psychologically and environmentally and ultimately economically as well.
00:54:33.160You said that so beautifully. And I really couldn't agree with you more on that, that these limiting stories that we tell ourselves and this obsession with everything human, it is detrimental to everything around us, the environment, ourselves.
00:54:53.640And I think you really hit on something, too, with the fulfillment and that anxiety of not feeling a sense of belonging or purpose. And that, to me, the sense of belonging and purpose comes from getting outside of the human-centered world and realizing that it is such a huge story, a much, much bigger story than I could even wrap my mind around.
00:55:23.640that uncertainty but the beauty in knowing that I as just one human is just a very small part
00:55:33.000in this play and that the natural world is not a backdrop but actually the the star of the show
00:55:40.680it allows me in that humility to actually find purpose and fulfillment and don't feel the
00:55:46.260pressure that I have to somehow be everything or humans have to be the thing that allows me to feel
00:55:53.220like there's a reason for me to be alive you know there's just so much that goes into that and I
00:55:58.620think that the separation from our ancestral rituals that were in so many ways for most of us
00:56:05.020really relating back to the earth and the cycles of the earth when we lose that connection and we
00:56:10.640try to find connection and purpose in technology or capitalism we're always going to fall short
00:56:17.980I don't think we'll ever be able to find that deep sense of stillness and peace and that