Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn "The primal interanimistic life-ways of our world never dealt with any notion of ascendancy or spiritual evolution. There is no primal or pre-civilized story that depicts an epic collective destiny that human beings must arrive at in some future age, and after countless trials and 'lessons learned.' Nature or the life-world is always presented as a timeless and perpetual home, not a temporary stage to be overcome or left behind. Instead of dreaming of evolving, we should be involving ourselves with the many persons and powers around us, creating respectful interaction systems and healthy alliances." Robin Artisson, An Carow Gwyn Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey "Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: millennia, epochs and aeons instead of minutes, months and years. Deep time is kept by rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Seen in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains rise and fall. We live on a restless Earth...... .......We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us. Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD), social media 08/02/24 *** DARK MATTER Among the relics of the Anthropocene will be the fallout of our atomic age, the crushed foundations of our cities, the spines of millions of intensively farmed ungulates, and the faint outlines of some of the billions of plastic bottles we produce each year – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain. There are many reasons to be suspicious of the idea of the Anthropocene. It generalizes the blame for what is a situation of vastly uneven making and suffering. The rhetorical "we" of Anthropocene discourse smooths over severe inequalities, and universalizes the site-specific consequences of environmental damage. The designation of this epoch as the "age of man" also seems like our crowning act of self-mythologization – and as such only to embed the technocratic narcissism that has produced the current crisis. But the Anthropocene, for all its faults, also issues a powerful shock and challenge to our self-perception as a species. It exposes both the limits of our control over the long-term processes of the planet, and the magnitude of the consequences of our activities. It lays bare some of the cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other beings now, as well as between humans and more-than-humans still to come. Perhaps above all, the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands. What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk, "Are we being good Ancestors?" But to think ahead in deep time runs against the mind’s grain. Try it yourself, now. Imagine forwards a year. Now ten. Now a century. Imagination falters, details thin out. Try a thousand years. Mist descends. Beyond a hundred years even generating a basic scenario for individual life or society becomes difficult, let alone extending compassion across much greater reaches of time towards the unborn inhabitants of worlds-to-be. As a species, we have proved to be good historians but poor futurologists. While we have devised abbreviations for marking out deep time in the past – BP for "before present;" MYA for "million years ago" – we have no equivalent abbreviations for marking out deep time in the future. No one speaks of AP for "after present," or MYA for "million years ahead." The Anthropocene requires us to undertake a retrospective reading of the current moment, however – a "palaeontology of the present" in which we ourselves have become sediments, strata and ghosts. It asks that we imagine a single figure: a hypothetical post-human geologist who – millions of years into the future, long after the extinction of our species – will examine the underland for what it reveals of the epoch of anthropos. This imaginary figure – our archivist, our analyst, our judge – is the contemporary version of the "last man" presence that haunted nineteenth-century extinction narratives, or of Thomas Macaulay’s "New Zealander," sitting by the banks of the Thames in a London that has been overwhelmed by nature, ruminating on ruination. Down at the chaos of the mine’s production face, I think of the puzzles we are creating for our future geologist. I wonder how, millions of years on, she will interpret the fossil presence of the lizard-like mining machines of Boulby, manufactured in the Anthropocene and embedded in the strata of a 250-million-year-old seabed. How will she distinguish them as machines rather than as organisms? And what of the drift itself – the faint impress that this 600-mile maze will leave in the layers of halite and sylvite? Geologists and palaeobiologists speak of "trace fossils." A trace fossil is the sign left in the rock record by the impress of life rather than life itself. A dinosaur footprint is a trace fossil. The enigmatic doughnut-shaped flints called "paramoudra" are thought to be the trace fossils of a burrowing worm-like creature that lived vertically in the seabed during the Cretaceous, its breathing organs just above the level of the silt. Boreholes, funnels, pipes, slithers and tracks are all trace fossils – stone memories where the mark-maker has disappeared but the mark remains. A trace fossil is a bracing of space by a vanished body, in which absence serves as sign. We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself. **** UNDERLAND: A DEEP TIME JOURNEY by Robert Macfarlane Time Song: Journeys in Search of a Submerged Land Julia Blackburn has always collected things that hold stories about the past, especially the very distant past: mammoth bones, little shells that happen to be two million years old, a flint shaped as a weapon long ago. Shortly after her husband’s death, Blackburn became fascinated with Doggerland, the stretch of land that once connected Great Britain to Continental Europe but is now subsumed by the North Sea. She was driven to explore the lives of the people who lived there—studying its fossil record, as well as human artifacts that have been unearthed near the area. In Time Song, Blackburn brings us along on her journey to discover what Doggerland left behind, introducing us to the paleontologists, archaeologists, fishermen and fellow Doggerland enthusiasts she meets along the way. She sees the footprints of early humans fossilized in the soft mud of an estuary alongside the scattered pockmarks made by rain falling eight thousand years ago. She visits a cave where the remnants of a Neanderthal meal have turned to stone. In Denmark she sits beside Tollund Man, who seems to be about to wake from a dream, even though he had lain in a peat bog since the start of the Iron Age. As Doggerland begins to come into focus, what emerges is a profound meditation on time, a sense of infinity as going backward and an intimation of the immensity of everything that has already passed through its time on earth and disappeared. >Author Website< >Amazon Link< ISAAC YUEN, Life Lessons from the Odd and Ancient If you’ve been feeling adrift on the sea of life lately, it might be best to seek guidance from an elder. You may wish to fish one out of the drink, like Captain Hendrik Goosen did one salty morning off the coast of South Africa in 1938, but be sure to verify its credentials first, as curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer did after spotting the creature’s four fleshy fins and puppy dog tail. Surprised at being consulted after four hundred million years, the coelacanth may be inclined to impart its accrued wisdom onto receptive devotees. It may decide to reveal its technique for weathering the world’s turnings even while others succumb to voguish whims, stretching lobes into limbs and hands into wings—ventures, it surmised, which lead only to premature ruination and speciated partings. The venerable fish may choose to convey its knowledge not so much in words, for its brain is too fat-addled to form them and its mouth is more for hinging wide than speaking long, but rather through the shimmers of its chain mail carriage, adamant against change, against sorrow. Delve deep. Hold fast. Stay true, even if the world has forsaken you. * Should such teachings prove remote and less than revelatory, you may wish instead to commune with a more terrestrial spirit. You are likely to find one poised at a nearby sidewalk contemplating bird songs and diesel fumes, for the gingko feels equally at home in both Zen monasteries and downtown urban cores. Learning his life story may leave you awestruck by his gumption in rejecting paradise and forging his own way a quarter billion years ago. “There is nothing new under the sun,” swayed Cousin Cycad and the other conifer relations, “green and evergreen is all there is and all there shall ever be!”—to which teenage Ginkgo, self-assured even back in the Permian, responded by unfurling his maiden mane of luminous gold, astounding an age oblivious to sheddable showiness or autumnal melancholy. Nothing since has matched the audacity of that initial feat, not even the subsequent waves of floral trends that have come to drown the earth in gaudy shades and racy shapes. The flowering plants dare not try, knowing that their faunal collaborations, though fruit-bearing and crowd-pleasing, pale against the gingko’s clarity of vision, distilled within the sculpted lobes of each fan-shaped leaf. Gingko art is immanent and inimitable, and is always performed alone. * By now you may think that to live geologically is to live solitarily, and you may be right, for there are many outlastings throughout one’s longlasting. To avoid such forlornness, some ancients have chosen to radiate freely. Take turtles. Like wizened jazz masters, turtles pride themselves on their solid fundamentals and knack for improvisation: a shell standard plus flippers to scull-scull the seas; a shell propped on piano legs to stride highlands and drylands; a shell tipped with siren tongues and beaky maws to snatch passing curios and curious passersby. But while the shell is a turtle essential, it limits not the turtles’ potential; from carapaced conformity arises unexpected diversity, so in the event that one turtle type strays away onto islands where surly goats appear to steal its shrubs, onto beaches where suspect resorts appear to steal its nights—chelonian reunions shall still abound, replete with red-eared slidings and yellow-bellied stackings, rowdy with alligator snappings and leatherback belchings, proudly proclaiming to all the world that turtles exist, that they are very old, that they stand united in turtlehood. * Perhaps for you, simply living long and living known is not enough. Perhaps you crave counsel on how to charge ahead with confidence and certainty. For this you should confer with sharks, who learned long ago to streamline their lives and hone their skills to carve out a niche anywhere, from the muddiest bottom to the loftiest apex. While sharks, like coelacanths, are laconic creatures, personal encounters may still prove illuminating, for they shed their teeth everywhere they nibble and network. Examine these enamel calling cards to glean customized life philosophies. The flattened cusps of zebra sharks preach persistence, for muscular determination will grind down barriers between you and your dreams. The needlepoints from shortfin makos urge you to seize those prime opportunities, silvery and slippery as they are, and never let them go. The great triangles from great whites suggest that the key to tackling life goals is to saw them off into chunks so that each task becomes digestible, even without chewing. But beware, for not all sharks are success sharks. Some, like the basking varieties, possess vestigial teeth that yield vestigial advice, like now is a grand time to get into door-to-door encyclopedia sales, while their laze-about lifestyles set a poor example for those seeking direction, like you, dear reader, still wondering whether this essay leads anywhere (be patient, like the part-carpet, part-shark tasseled wobbegong). Others, like the cookie-cutter shark, may leave you feeling internally nauseated and externally perforated, renowned for gouging rounds out of the unsuspecting torsos of bony fishes, doughy seals, and rubber-coated submarines. Still, one should not judge it too harshly; if you were born into the world as a cigar with a mouthful of bandsaws, you would be wise to make do with your God-given gifts. Besides, infamy may be a desirable trait, and reputation may last as long as teeth. * Still, no matter how notorious you become, one day you shall be gone, like the ammonites, who in shuffling off this mortal coil left behind many iridescent ones. Your grandest legacies will seem trivial when pitted against trilobite doings, which were even earlier and greater than ammonite acts. There is no sense trying to live up to trilobites, by the way; simply accept they were among the first to see everything and spread everywhere, having evolved new eyes to find their way, from the shallowest shore to the deepest abyss. Those still keen to flee their collective shadow by leaving the sea and climbing skyward should know it is a futile exercise, for trilobites stamped their marks on Earth’s highest peak long ago, back when Oklahoma was near Morocco, and they managed to do it without crampons or oxygen masks, just by summiting smartly, long before Everest harbored any ambitions of becoming a mountain. It is a good thing that trilobites are proactive but not boastful. Otherwise we would hear no end of past exploits, which would lead to laments of past regrets, as those trapped by their calcareous glories are wont to dwell. * Realizing that nothing one does will amount to much may prove disconcerting for those on the path of constant self-betterment. But instead of questing for future fame and fortune, perhaps one can learn to cinch down to the present. For such insight you may wish to query a clown, for the fool takes stock by peering straight into the absurd heart of life. Take the red panda, a living fossil stuffed into adorable attire, lonely in lineage but showy for company, a prissy groomer always game for some tramping and traipsing. All it claims for wants is some bamboo for munching, a tree or two for dangle-footed napping, and an occasional pumpkin for pouncing practice. (Save the video of this for your blackest and most insignificant-feeling day). Even as it diminishes in the cloud forests of western China and across the Himalayas, balancing over precipices real and existential, its masked face betrays no sign of worry. Perhaps the red panda does not grasp its fate. Or perhaps it grasps all fates, all fadings, accepting them entire, and so regards each second as an eon, reveling in the honeyed warmth of the morning sun, the bright savor of each spring shoot, the wrapped bliss self-supplied by its ringed and russet tail. If we can heed this guide and embrace doom like it does by standing tall with arms raised in the most open and heart-melting of poses we shall have secured a very great secret. >Life Lessons from the Odd and Ancient - Isaac Yuen, The Hopper< Isaac Yuen is a Hong Kong-Canadian writer. His books include "Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World" and "The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination" co-written with Michaela Vieser. Access his website Ekostories by Isaac Yuen Nature | Culture | Art >here< finding humility in our geologic past MARCIA BJORNERUD Explore the notion of “timefulness” and healing our relationship with time, the marvel of mountain-building, the necessity of multigenerational spaces, and mass extinction events of the geologic past. Mountains rising and oceans swelling, Earth’s 4.5-billion-year story has been punctuated by the cyclical turning of processes, a dynamic, balancing act of breakdown and repair. In this episode of For The Wild, we dive into the folds of deep time with professor, author, and geologist Marcia Bjornerud, exploring the wealth of knowledge etched into the landscapes around us. How might we understand the unprecedented scale and pace of transformation we’re seeing today in the context of the geologic record? And what does our planetary story reveal about the adaptive capacity of life? Peering through the lens of geology, this episode offers an invitation to tap into the realms of more-than-human time, connect with ancient ones, and re-engage with our shared earthly history. Marcia Bjornerud is Professor of Geosciences and Environmental Studies at Lawrence University. Bjornerud’s research focuses on the physics of earthquakes and mountain building, and she combines field-based studies of bedrock geology with quantitative models of rock mechanics. She has done research in high arctic Norway (Svalbard) and Canada (Ellesmere Island), as well as mainland Norway, Scotland, New Zealand, and the Lake Superior region. She received a BS in geophysics from the University of Minnesota and MS and PhD degrees in structural geology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We are earthlings and we’ve emerged from this particular place. We are entirely shaped by the rest of the biosphere, by the solid earth.” >FOR THE WILD ~ PODCAST LINK< sophie strand, your body is an ancestor "Your body is an ancestor. Your body is an altar to your ancestors. Every one of your cells holds an ancient and anarchic love story. Around 2.7 billion years ago free-living prokaryotes melted into one another to form the mitochondria and organelles of the cells that build our bodies today. All you need to do to honor your ancestors is to roll up like a pill bug, into the innate shape of safety: the fetal position. The curl of your body, then, is an altar not just to the womb that grew you, but to the retroviruses that, 200 million years ago taught mammals how to develop the protein syncytin that creates the synctrophoblast layer of the placenta. Breathe in, slowly, knowing that your breath loops you into the biome of your ecosystem. Every seven to ten years your cells will have turned over, rearticulated by your inhales and exhales, your appetites and proclivity for certain flavors. If you live in a valley, chances are the ancient glacial moraine, the fossils crushed underfoot, the spores from grandmotherly honey fungi, have all entered into and rebuilt the very molecular make up of your bones, your lungs, and even your eyes. Even your lungfuls of exhaust churn you into an ancestor altar for Mesozoic ferns pressurized into the fossil fuels. You are threaded through with fossils. Your microbiome is an ode to bacterial legacies you would not be able to trace with birth certificates and blood lineages. You are the ongoing-ness of the dead. The alembic where they are given breath again. Every decision, every idea, every poem you breathe and live is a resurrection of elements that date back to the birth of this universe itself." Sophie Strand , Make Me Good Soil Substack October 18, 2025 Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project SPENCER WELLSScience tells us we're all related - one vast family sharing a common ancestor who lived in Africa 60,000 years ago. But countless questions remain about our great journey from the birthplace of Homo sapiens to the ends of the Earth. How did we end up where we are? When did we get there? Why do we display such a wide range of colors and features? The fossil record offers some answers, but exciting new genetic research reveals many more, since our DNA carries a complete chronicle of our species and its migrations. In Deep Ancestry, scientist and explorer Spencer Wells shows how tiny genetic changes add up over time into a fascinating story. Using scores of real-life examples, helpful analogies, and detailed diagrams and illustrations, he translates complicated concepts into accessible language and explains exactly how each and every individual's DNA contributes another piece to the jigsaw puzzle of human history. The book takes readers inside the Genographic Project, the landmark study now assembling the world's largest collection of population genetic DNA samples and employing the latest in testing technology and computer analysis to examine hundreds of thousands of genetic profiles from all over the globe. Traveling backward through time from today's scattered billions to the handful of early humans who are ancestors to us all, Deep Ancestry shows how universal our human heritage really is. It combines sophisticated science with our compelling interest in family history and ethnic identity - and transcends humankind's shallow distinctions and superficial differences to touch the depths of our common origins. >The Genographic Project< >Amazon Link<  Genographic Project Records Global Population Gene Flow over Time
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
 The Westray Goddess, the
oldest human form found in Scotland. (Orkney Archipelago)
(eik) eUROPEAN iNDIGENOUS kNOWLEDGE
|
RSS Feed
