Timefulness Quotes

“To my surprise, I found that geology demanded a type of whole-brain thinking I hadn't encountered before. It creatively appropriated ideas from physics and chemistry for the investigation of unruly volcanoes and oceans and ice sheets, It applied scholarly habits one associates with the study of literature and the arts - the practice of close reading, sensitivity to allusion and analogy, capacity for spatial visualization - to the examination of rocks. Its particular form of inferential logic demanded mental versatility and a vigorous but disciplined imagination. And its explanatory power was vast; it was nothing less than the etymology of the world.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Fathoming deep time is arguably geology’s single greatest contribution to humanity. Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Little by little, over more than two centuries, the local stories told by rocks in all parts of the world have been stitched together into a great global tapestry - the geologic timescale. This "map" of Deep Time represents one of the great intellectual achievements of humanity, arduously constructed by stratigraphers, paleontologists, geochemists, and geochronologists from many cultures and faiths. It is still a work in progress to which details are constantly being added and finer and finer calibrations being made.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Those who believe that the End of Days is just around the corner have no reason to be concerned about matters like climate change, groundwater depletion, or loss of biodiversity.3 If there is no future, conservation of any kind is, paradoxically, wasteful.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“we should all carry two slips of paper in our pockets: one that says “I am ashes and dust,” and one that reads “The world was made for me.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“It is also not the “end of nature” but, instead, the end of the illusion that we are outside nature. Dazzled by our own creations, we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted. As a species, we are much less flexible than we would like to believe, vulnerable to economic loss and prone to social unrest when nature—in the guise of Katrina, Sandy, or Harvey, among others—diverges just a little from what we expect.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Over human timescales, however, our disruption of geography will haunt us. Soil lost to erosion, coastal areas claimed by the sea, and mountaintops sacrificed on the altar of capitalism won't be restored in our lifetime. And these alterations will set in motion a cascade of side effects--hydrologic, biological, social, economic, and political--that will define the human agenda for centuries.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“The great heaps of sediment also underscore an amazing fact about the Earth: that the speeds of tectonic processes, driven by the internal radioactive heat of the Earth are, by happy coincidence, about evenly matched 13 by the tempo of external agents of erosion— wind, rain, rivers, glaciers— powered by gravity and solar energy. In the barbershop analogy, it is as if the hair on a customer’s head keeps growing as fast as the barber can cut it. And while the tectonic growth and erosional trimming of mountains both proceed at an average pace that is deliberate, they are not so slow as to be beyond our perception.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“We tend to think of the water cycle as a relatively short-term phenomenon; the average molecule of water stays in the atmosphere for about nine days; the residence time of water even in the largest lakes, like Superior, is a century or two; deep groundwater may be stored for a millennium. But there is a 100 million-year water cycle that involves the interior of the Earth, and adding water to the mantle is in fact the critical step in the recipe for continental crust.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Antipathy toward time clouds personal and collective thinking.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“More pervasive and corrosive are the nearly invisible forms of time denial that are built into the very infrastructure of our society. For example, in the logic of economics, in which labor productivity must always increase to justify higher wages, professions centered on tasks that simply take time - education, nursing, or art performance - constitute a problem because they cannot be made significantly more efficient.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Like inexperienced but overconfident drivers, we accelerate into landscapes and ecosystems with no sense of their long-established traffic patterns, and then react with surprise and indignation when we face the penalties for ignoring natural laws.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“By now, however, we should have learned that treating the planet as if it were a simple, predictable, passive object in a controlled laboratory experiment is scientifically inexcusable. Yet the same old time-blind hubris is allowing the seductive idea of climate engineering, sometimes called geoengineering, to gain traction in certain academic and political circles.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“But the Seventh Generation idea, articulated more than 300 years ago in the Iroquois Gayanashagowa (the “Great Binding Law” or “Great Law of Peace” 9 ), remains as radical and visionary as ever: that leaders should take actions only after contemplating their likely effects on “the unborn of the future Nation . . . whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground.” Seven generations, perhaps a century and a half, is longer than a single lifetime but not beyond human experience. It is the span from one’s great-grandparents to one’s great-grandchildren. From the standpoint of the Seven Generations principle , our current society is a kleptocracy stealing from the future. What would it take for this old idea to be adopted in a modern world that does not even acknowledge time?”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Life is endlessly inventive, always tinkering and experimenting, but not with a particular notion of progress. For us mammals , the Cretaceous extinction was the lucky break that cleared the way for a golden age, but if the story of the biosphere were written from the perspective of prokaryotic rather than macroscopic life, the extinctions would hardly register. Even today, prokaryotes (bacteria and archea) make up at least 50% of all biomass on Earth. 23 One might say that Earth’s biosphere is, and always has been, a “microcracy,” ruled by the tiny.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“if life first became viable after the early bombardment era ended 3.8 billion years ago, we are now almost three-quarters of the way through Earth’s habitable period. Nevertheless, we should be grateful for the great wealth of time that this planet has had as a consequence of belonging to a yellow dwarf star with a lifetime of 10 billion years. Stars just 50% larger than the Sun have a life expectancy of only 3 billion years, which on Earth would be equivalent to the time span from the formation of the planet to the middle of the Boring Billion.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“The Proterozoic Earth somehow “understood” the fundamental principles of sustainability; geochemical trading flourished, but all commodities flowed in closed loops— the waste products of one group of microbial manufacturers were the raw materials of another.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“I emphasize that my job is not to challenge their personal beliefs but to teach the logic of geology (geo-logic?) - the methods and tools of the discipline that enables us not only to comprehend how the Earth works at present but also to document in detail its elaborate and awe-inspiring history.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“This impression is a glimpse not of timelessness but timefulness, an acute consciousness of how the world is made by - indeed, made of - time.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World