Outcroppings

It was at some moment in the Pleistocene that humanity crossed what the geologist-theologian Pierre Tielhard de Chardin called the Threshold of Reflection, when something in people "turned back on itself and so to speak took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations; and simultaneously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the concentrated simplicity of its faculties. And all this happened for the first time." Friars of another sort--evangelists of the so-called Environmental Movement--have often made use of the geologic time scale to place in perspective that great "leap forward" and to suggest what our reflective capacities may have meant to Mother Earth.

Charles Mingus: Meditation on Inner Peace

David Brower , for example, the founder of Friends of the Earth and emeritus hero of the Sierra Club, tirelessly travelled the United States for thirty years delivering what he himself referred to as "the sermon," and sooner or later in every talk he invited his listeners to consider the six days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been four and a half billion years. In this adjustment, a day equals something like seven hundred and fifty million years, and thus "all day Monday and until Tuesday noon creation was busy getting the earth going." Life began Tuesday noon, and "the beautiful, organic wholeness of it" developed over the next four days. "At four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At three minutes before midnight, man appeared. At one-fourth of a second before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark raving mad."
Holding up a photograph of the world--blue, green and swirling white--Brower would say: "This is the sudden insight from Apollo. There it is. That's all. We see through the eyes of the astronauts how fragile our life really is." Brower once computed that we are driving through the earth's resources at a rate comparable to driving an automobile a hundred and twenty-eight miles an hour--and said that we are accelerating.

In like manner, geologists will sometimes use the calendar year as a unit to represent the time scale, and in such terms the Precambrian runs from New Year's Day until well after Halloween. Dinosaurs appear in the middle of December and are gone the day after Christmas. The last ice sheet melts on December 31st at one minute before midnight, and the Roman Empire lasts five seconds. With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, these use these repetetive analogies to place the human record in perspective--to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time. They often liken humanity's presence on earth to a brief visitation from elsewhere in space, its luminous, explosive characteristics consisting not merely of the burst of population in the twentieth century but of the whole millenial moment of people on earth--a single detonation, resembling nothing so much as a nuclear implosion with its successive neutron generations, whole generations following one another once every hundred-millioneth of a second, temperatures building up into the millions of degrees and stripping atoms until bare nuclei are wandering in electron seas, pressure building up to a hundred million atmospheres, the core expanding at five million miles an hour, expanding in a way that is quite different from all else in the universe, unless there are others who also make bombs.

Charles Mingus: Myself When I'm Real

The human consciousness may have begun to leap and boil some sunny day in the Pleistocene, but the race by and large has retained the essence of its animal sense of time. People think in five generations--two ahead, two behind--with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice. The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it. At least, that is what geologists wonder sometimes, and they have imparted the questions to me. They wonder to what extent they truly sense the passage of millions of years. They wonder to what extent it is possible to absorb a set of facts and move with them, in a sensory manner, beyond the recording intellect and into the abysmal eons. Primordial inhibition may stand in the way. On the geologic time scale, a human life is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information. Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways. They see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s into the sky. They see the thin band in which are the all but indiscernible stratifications of Cro-Magnon, Moses, Leonardo, and now. Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneosness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.

In geologists' own lives, the least effect of time is that they think in two languages, function on two different scales.
"You care less about civilization. Half of me gets upset with civilization. The other half does not get upset. I shrug and think. So let the cockroaches take over."
"Mammalian species last, typically, two million years. We've about used up ours. Every time Leakey finds something older I say, 'Oh! We're overdue.' We will be handing the dominant-species-on-earth position to some other group. We'll have to be clever not to."
"A sense of geologic time is the most important thing to suggest to the non-geologist: the slow rate of geologic processes, centimeters per year, with huge effects, if continued for enough years."
"A million years is a short time--the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth."
"If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever."
--John McPhee
Outcroppings