![]() ![]() ![]() Timefulness was longlisted for the 2019 PEN/E.O. Paradoxically, this Earth-bound, very physical science can yield transcendent insights. ![]() Thinking like a geologist can simultaneously ground us and elevate us. This matters because environmental wrongs, social conflicts and existential malaise are all rooted in a distorted sense of humanity’s place in the history of the natural world. But as a society, we are time illiterate, lacking a sense for the durations of the chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous intervals of climate instability, and the intrinsic timescales of ‘natural capital’ like groundwater systems. Developing and calibrating the geologic timescale - reconstructing Earth’s past from the raw rock record - is one of humanity’s greatest, but least appreciated, intellectual achievements. ![]()
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