Marcia Bjornerud

It is also not the “end of nature” but, instead, the end of the illusion that we are outside nature. Dazzled by our own creations, we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted. As a species, we are much less flexible than we would like to believe, vulnerable to economic loss and prone to social unrest when nature – in the guise of Katrina, Sandy, or Harvey, among others – diverges just a little from what we expect.

Those who believe that the End of Days is just around the corner have no reason to be concerned about matters like climate change, groundwater depletion, or loss of biodiversity.3 If there is no future, conservation of any kind is, paradoxically, wasteful.

A retrospective of how scientific perceptions of the Earth have changed over the past three centuries reveals a strong correlation between Western political and social views and contemporary scientific “truths.” This connection should make us suspect that our understanding of the planet at any historical moment is at best incomplete and at worst hopelessly wrapped up with our own self-image.

We tend to think of the water cycle as a relatively short-term phenomenon; the average molecule of water stays in the atmosphere for about nine days; the residence time of water even in the largest lakes, like Superior, is a century or two; deep groundwater may be stored for a millennium. But there is a 100 million-year water cycle that involves the interior of the Earth, and adding water to the mantle is in fact the critical step in the recipe for continental crust.

Over human timescales, however, our disruption of geography will haunt us. Soil lost to erosion, coastal areas claimed by the sea, and mountaintops sacrificed on the altar of capitalism won’t be restored in our lifetime. And these alterations will set in motion a cascade of side effects – hydrologic, biological, social, economic, and political – that will define the human agenda for centuries.

More pervasive and corrosive are the nearly invisible forms of time denial that are built into the very infrastructure of our society. For example, in the logic of economics, in which labor productivity must always increase to justify higher wages, professions centered on tasks that simply take time – education, nursing, or art performance – constitute a problem because they cannot be made significantly more efficient.

Fathoming deep time is arguably geology’s single greatest contribution to humanity. Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences.

Over human timescales, however, our disruption of geography will haunt us. Soil lost to erosion, coastal areas claimed by the sea, and mountaintops sacrificed on the altar of capitalism won't be restored in our lifetime. And these alterations will set in motion a cascade of side effects--hydrologic, biological, social, economic, and political--that will define the human agenda for centuries.

Antipathy toward time clouds personal and collective thinking.

This impression is a glimpse not of timelessness but timefulness, an acute consciousness of how the world is made by - indeed, made of - time.