She is the author of Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earthand a contributing writer for Elements, the New Yorker’s science and technology blog. Marcia Bjornerud is professor of geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth’s deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future. Why an awareness of Earths temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survivalFew of us have any conception of the enormous timescales. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. In a different kind of desert halfway across the world, on the Arctic archipelago Svalbard, Bjornerud recalls a research trip as a graduate student. But spans of hundreds of years-the time a molecule of carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere-approach the limits of our comprehension. Something strikingly similar happens in geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s new book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018, Princeton University Press). The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth’s atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. Marcia Bjornerud is a professor of geology at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet’s long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. In Timefulness: How thinking like a geologist can help save the world, Marcia Bjornerud makes the case that geological thinking is the perspective that can save our species, and the biosphere, if not the world.
0 kommentar(er)
