In this conversation at Atmos, Daphne Chouliaraki Milner talks with geology professor Marcia Bjornerud about rocks, Earth’s geological billion-year history, and the importance of time literacy—a deep awareness of and respect for time that most people lack. “It’s a real frustration that, in this time when we know more about the way the Earth’s system works than ever before,” says Bjornerud, “our political and economic systems are not designed for long-term thinking.” Bjornerud argues that humans need to think on longer timescales if we want any chance of tackling the many crises we’re in, especially the climate crisis, and must stop viewing the natural world as a “passive backdrop” with finite resources.
Marcia Bjornerud: Having taught geosciences for more than 30 years, I’ve realized that the most essential thing we can teach our students is the capacity to zoom in and out of scales in time and space, to look at a rock sample under the microscope and make inductive inferences on a regional scale. The geologic mindset requires this polyfocal capacity because all Earth systems are operating at these scales, too. Feeling comfortable traveling back and forth across scales is really central to the geologic worldview.
MB: I have thought a lot about the Western attitude toward the natural world and wondered at what point we began to think we had outsmarted it. I think it was the Enlightenment, and though I can hardly speak ill of the Enlightenment, that new mindset combined with the industrial revolution started a process of seeing nature as a resource rather than something with its own deep wisdom. There are environmental consequences, but I would say there are also spiritual consequences. If we think the world is only what we’ve made, then that’s terrifying. The world is a mess, but there is a much richer and wilder and older natural world out there that we’ve forgotten about.
DCM: I agree, and I think that this binary thinking is reflected in our language, too. In the West, the narrative we have developed around rocks is that they are static and inanimate. It’s even embedded into our language—stone dead. Even describing someone as a rock implies that they are immobile, unmoving. I wonder, from your experience, how studying geologic processes can help us rethink some of these narratives.
More picks about time, geology, and nature
Picture This: A Tectonic Revolution
“With one map, Marie Tharp revealed the raw, rifted depths of the Atlantic—and changed what we thought we knew about the Earth.”
The Shape of Time
“Lessons from a queer garden.”
Wild Clocks
“Attentive to the loss of age-old ecological relationships as ‘wild clocks’ fall out of synchronization with each other, David Farrier imagines an opportunity to renew the rhythms by which we live.”
The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet
“Earth’s crust teems with subterranean life that we are only now beginning to understand.”
The Great Forgetting
“Earth is losing its memory.”
Deep Time Sickness
“In Mexico, people who are ‘tocado’—’touched’—reveal that geological traumas, like earthquakes, can destabilize our concepts of health, identity and even time.”
