this essay by Lewis Hyde, The Geological sublime: butterflies, deep time, and climate change from Harper’s July 2025 Issue is really great.
It is not inadmissible to think of an epoch . . . not too far distant, when humanity, to ensure its survival, will find itself reduced to desisting from any further “making” of history. — Mircea Eliade
That mountain (Oat Mountain) sits in southern California’s Transverse Ranges, which began their rise from the sea about 5 million years ago, having first been caught, some 15 million years earlier, between tectonic plates that spun them clockwise so they now sit at right angles to the coast. The geology of the Transverse Ranges consists largely of granite from the Mesozoic Era—66 to 252 million years ago—with some even earlier Precambrian material, at least 1.6 billion years old.
These are large numbers. They belong to the calculus of deep time as introduced to the world by British scientists in the mid-nineteenth century—namely, the preeminent geologist of the age, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin, who borrowed Lyell’s unbounded temporality and used it to underpin his theory of evolution.
Later that month, Darwin climbed high into the Andes, where he found “shells which were once crawling on the bottom of the sea, now standing nearly 14,000 feet above its level.” It had taken about twenty-five million years for those shells to reach that height.
It’s one thing to hear of the millions of years it took the Andes to rise; it’s quite another to hear that, in mere centuries, the oceans may reach levels of acidity not seen in 300 million years, or that the earth is the hottest it has been in the past 125,000 years. These days, geological forces, formerly the stuff of earthquakes and volcanoes, have escaped the confines of deep time to present themselves daily, winter, spring, summer, and fall.
In thirty-five years, the number of individual butterflies observed has dropped by more than half. The number of species has fallen by a third. A dozen butterflies are now missing, including the showy Baltimore Checkerspot and the Aphrodite Fritillary, a large orange-and-black butterfly with amber eyes and light-catching silver spots on the underwing. The Aphrodite leaves its chrysalis in June, lays its eggs in late summer, and survives the winter as newly hatched larvae. Statewide, its population has fallen 90 percent in recent decades, most likely because those young larvae are more and more at risk of dying from dehydration now that snow cover is getting thinner and the seasons warmer.
Eleven thousand years of survival versus a few decades of decline: it may not be clear how we are to reckon with spans of time so utterly out of proportion with one another, but that is now the task at hand as more species decline or go extinct.
“Our capacities are finite, while the scheme of the universe may be infinite,” notes Lyell at one point. “The greater the circle of light, the greater the boundary of darkness by which it is surrounded.” As for Darwin, his arguments in the Origin often end with a bow to “our profound ignorance”; in the book’s final chapter, he concludes by saying that serious objections to his theory remain, but that they “relate to questions on which we are confessedly ignorant; nor do we know how ignorant we are.” Toward the beginning of Principles, Lyell recalls how his first encounter with the work of his predecessor James Hutton awakened in him a sense of the sublime, of awe mixed “with a painful sense of our incapacity to conceive a plan of such infinite extent.”
The era when those dead were alive—the Carboniferous—spanned sixty million years. Today, the coalfields of the Industrial Revolution contain sixty million years of plant-captured sunlight, infinitesimal drops of energy gathered day by day and then petrified over near-infinities of time. To burn them over the course of a few centuries amounts to treating human time to a blast of geological time, an earthquake of time.
the geologist Charles Lyell
the geologist Marcia Bjornerud
Book Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return
the Cambrian began 538.8 million years ago
Book by Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting