UK Edition
Review
This 4-billion-year history of earth is astounding
Helen Gordon's new book Notes from Deep Time is an extraordinarily ambitious journey through our planet's past
This is a book about rocks, fossils, plates, quakes, water and ash. It’s about what these things tell us about our planet’s deep history, a story that will, the author reckons, tell us something about ourselves.
To call this a “history” does not do justice to Helen Gordon’s ambition. Her adventures in the deep time of Earth hark all the way back to its beginnings as a barren ocean planet, 4.4 billion years ago, while keeping one foot firmly planted in the depleted and desertified plaything we’re left with today. In between (and setting aside five extinction events), there has been life, a great deal of it, most of it vegetal. Did you know, 374 million years ago there was a tree, Xinicaulis lignescens, whose every vertical fibre behaved like a whole tree? Its mature trunk must have resembled the Eiffel Tower.
Gordon tells many good stories in her own words; she also hunts down many of the earth sciences’ great and good. She is fascinated by obsessive people – people “who devote their lives to one specific subset of knowledge”. The book is a wonderful stitching together of trips and talks and trawls through the geological literature. Still, I puzzled over this remark. Was Gordon saying that writers – our last amateurs – were actually normal, and that people who spent their lives concentrating on something in particular were, well, weird?
If so, fair enough. We bemoan the demise of expertise, but the obverse is just as worrying: we no longer take amateurs seriously enough. What can Gordon, a former Granta editor, tell us about geology, palaeontology, physics and geography? Well, quite a lot, it turns out. While she’s racked up the requisite interview hours and not a few air miles, it’s her own voice that cuts through most clearly as she attempts to extend our sympathetic capacities to encompass phenomena such as rocks and gases, radioactive decay and the collisions of tectonic plates.
I wasn’t sure, when I first opened this book, that I wanted to establish a personal relationship with the planet; it sounded like a recipe for madness. And sure enough, there’s a man in here called Donald Dowdy who believes there’s the image of a dove hidden somewhere in the pattern of the LA freeway system that serves to restrain the forces of the San Andreas Fault. Without a great deal of study and concentration, discussion and, above all, honesty, the attempt to rationalise, “to find patterns, to bring the barely comprehensible processes of deep time into a comprehensible framework”, can all too easily lead us into superstition, conspiracy theory, and checking the house prices in Glastonbury.
For the most part, therefore, Gordon focuses on the coherent, the testable, the scientific – even the boring. Maps, lists, charts, timelines: all turn out to be vital bridges, with spectacular views, by which we cross the imaginative gulf separating little us from our very old, very long-lived, very fragile planet. In the end, rational explanations are always stranger and more satisfying than fanciful alternatives. Dazzled as I was by some very well-turned popular science, I reckoned Dowdy could keep his dove.
Words struggle to encapsulate the planet’s abyssal history, which is why geologists use so many of them – and why physicists despise them for it. Gordon, who confesses that “for a writer with a background in literary publishing – a sphere where people who perhaps spend too much time thinking about language tend to congregate – geology had an immediate appeal,” then cites the verses of Tennyson (a geologist’s favourite) and the bons mots of John McPhee (who came up with “deep time” in his 1981 book Basin and Range). But my favourite one-liner here is one of Gordon’s: if you want to witness the effects of the inexorable motions of continents, “just go for a walk on the South Downs (the African plate crashing into the Eurasian plate)”. It’s the collision of continental plates that released nutrients crucial to the evolution of life. And life, in turn, has transformed Earth’s geology, not just once but many times – an observation that steals the thunder from the idea, much put about these days, that humans have altered the planet to the point where we have ushered in “the Anthropocene”, a new geological epoch.
The Anthropocene idea spent more than a century innocently tucked away in the somewhat messianic writings of the Crimean geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, only to wake and infest every climate-inflected PhD dissertation of the past decade. We are living, we are told, (unctuously and ad nauseam) in the Anthropocene.
There’s a lot, geologically, to be said for the idea. Think of all that weird metallic landfill we’re leaving behind us, all that strontium and platinum, that coltan and niobium! But the Anthropocene is also the cultural container for some topical anxieties. If our influence is now writing itself into the very rocks (and it is), if we’re the cause of a sixth extinction event (and we are), and if our continued survival as a civilisation hangs upon what we do in the next 30 years (and it does), what then should we do?
Gordon interviews the US historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, and together they measure the widening gap between our understanding of large, abstract events and our everyday ways of thinking, “predicated on the span of individual human lives and the inevitability of death.” Nothing wrong with this – but I did find myself wondering why I myself should worry about deep time, deep ecology, or deep-anything-else, trapped as I was – as we all are – in the anxious shallows of mortality.
Don’t we have enough to worry about? Daily, the broadsheets and bulletins insist we spread our compassion like margarine across the entire naughty world, accepting responsibility (if not fault) for every atrocity littering the place. Every day from now until the COP26 climate conference in November, we’re going to be expected to wrap our heads around the apocalypse we have fashioned from our pleasant planet. Notes from Deep Time sidesteps the maundering and finger-wagging that comes with Anthropocene thinking, and shows us how much sheer intellectual and poetical entertainment there is to be had in the idea. And what does the Anthropocene idea do, after all, but put humans back at the centre of the world? As Gordon cannily observes, “at some level we can’t help finding that attractive – even if the price for that return is environmental disaster.”
Notes from Deep Time is published by Profile at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop