Our first meetings' materials didn't depart from the class', but our discussions have been our own. So today, for instance, we went on a wild tangent (well, I did...) about the relatively short history of geology and how the things geologists analyze will have appeared to people before that. What we see as fossils of extinct species couldn't have been that at a time when (in monotheistic worlds) it was thought all species were created by God at the beginning and lived on, so they must be something else - "sports of nature," perhaps. Fossilized fish and shells on mountaintops had more to say. These were evidence of the Flood, when the waters rose higher than all land formations, and contained a message: human sin has vast consequences. These are things some of which I've learned about recently, some of which I've known for a long time but haven't had occasion to call to mind. Greetings, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, it's been too long!
So even as there's no precedent for understanding ourselves as a geological force, we were almost a "geological agent" in the sense in which Anthropocene theorists talk about it. Indeed, the very existence of mountains might have been a sign of such indirect agency. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, we all know from Handel's Messiah, and every mountain and hill made low (his source Isaiah 40:4), thinking it a metaphor. But its literal meaning is that the roughness of the earth's surface is part of its fallen state - the state our sin has brought it to, and mercifully temporary.
Geology's naturalistic account of topography, supplemented by the ideas of evolution it inspired, forms the background for our thinking of ourselves as a planetary force today - a bridge too far, since human agency is unthinkable on the geological scale. Or maybe not; maybe it's only the irrecovability that's unthinkable. The idea that the results of our shenanigans - even the very worst - will eventually be smoothed out by some force greater than us might have deeper roots.
What's this got to do with R&A? We'll see. But this is a student with a richer understanding of western tradition than many, so excavating together in this tradition may prove fruitful in all sorts of ways.
