The Geological Sublime

Some change is perceptible—the acute, the elating, the destabilizing. But the grand, literally world-shaping sort of change happens on a scale that humans simply cannot experience. This is deep time. As Lewis Hyde points out, though, climate change is rending the human experience in a way that allows deep time to seep through. Now, with the geologic knocking on our door, he looks back to examine how the concept of deep time first emerged, and how Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution rests on its massive shoulders.

How are we, who plant our corn in spring, who live with four-year election cycles and thirty-year mortgages—how are we to position ourselves in relation to the inhuman forces that have been shaping the earth for four and a half billion years and now seem to be accelerating? How, in short, shall we approach the climate crisis when the needed sense of proportion can be baffled by floods of geological time? As for the early theorists who first opened time’s floodgates, my question has been whether they left us tools or stories that might help guide the present, urgent work. How did Lyell and Darwin imagine and engage with deep time, and how might this be of service today?