Compounding the problem is the perception that geology is about old, inert objects rather than processes, activity, and change. So the first step is to dispel the notion that minerals, rocks, and landscapes simply are and instead get to seeing them as records of becoming. Once one grasps this, it is obvious that the world is animate, industrious, and constantly communicating with us - if we could jut learn how to listen. ...
[I]t strikes me as strange that the same public that finds the idea of geological time so alienating perceives the cold and formidable emptiness of space as somehow inviting. ... A combination of vainglory over our own accomplishments and deep-seated fear of our insignificance makes it difficult to embrace our mundaneness, our Earth-rooted nature. ... The rock record makes obvious how our bodies are part of a continuum from raw earth matter to endlessly ramifying life, an unbroken chain of living organisms that stretches back to the early days of the planet. How marvelous to know that our bones - minerals made of calcium and phosphorus, themselves derived from rocks - can be mapped one-to-one onto those of almost every other vertebrate, from amphibians to zebras. How amazing to realize that our blood is a distant memory of seawater. How good to feel in our marrow that we are Earthlings, fully native to this ancient, verdant, resilient earth. ...
I prescribe becoming an Earthling as a cure for a wide range of social ills, including angst, anomie, bigotry, boredom, consumerism, delusions of grandeur, hubris, impatience, neurosis, pettiness, self-absorption and other unspecified varieties of spiritual malaise.
Despite my longstanding enchantment with patterns of sand and sea, I think I'm only just learning to appreciate geology as not only intertwined with the history of life, but as itself dynamic in a way the editors of this series would have us call animate.
"Becoming Earthlings," in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations (Libertyville, IL: Center for Humans and Nature Press, 2021) , 5 vols, vol 1, Planet, 13-20
