deep time and climate change
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. ...