By William E. Glassley, Ph.D.
Guest Columnist
Davis, CA, USA
The changes imposed by humanity on Earth’s surface cannot be
ignored. The destruction of coral reefs, the rampant extinctions of plant and
animal species, expanding ocean pollution, landscapes mutilated by resource
extraction, the global reduction of drinkable water, persistently rising sea
level are but a few of the consequences of unrestrained consumption by an
ever-expanding population. The struggle to find strategies upon which
international cooperation can be based to address these issues is flailing.
What we know and love of the natural world is being destroyed. Sorrow permeates
virtually every society as we witness what we perceive to be the scarring of
the planet.
Grassroots movements have taken hold which seek an ethically
informed relationship with the planet, striving to achieve an ecologically
sound and scientifically based sustainable existence. Such efforts are laudable – they fill a crucial niche in the leadership void left by the political
paralysis that stymies effective international action. But a fundamental
reality that should be foremost in the perception of all who pursue such goals
is often insufficiently acknowledged:
It is not Earth that is
scarred as a consequence of our actions on the planet, it is ourselves.
When one steps into the untamed world and experiences Nature’s
incessant evolution, it becomes clear that this reality should be the
underlying paradigm guiding our actions. Over the four-and-a-half billion-year
history of this planet, mountain ranges have risen and eroded away, seas have
dried up, species have died off – nothing is permanent, change is the norm.
Some of these transformations have played out over eons, as with the formation
and destruction of mountain systems, others have been near-instantaneous
cataclysms, as was the meteor impact that obliterated the dinosaurs. None of
these events caused the planet to mourn. Rather, each moment became an
opportunity for the artistry inherent in natural processes to form a new
expression of what wild could mean.
I came to understand this reality a few summers ago when I
was conducting scientific research in the wilderness terrain of West Greenland,
a landscape that has become an iconic example of the human impact on Earth.
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| William Glassley - West Greenland |
I was standing on a ridge bordering Arfersiorfyk Fjord, a
thousand feet above a river valley to the north, the ice sheet a few miles to
the east. The crevassed ice front was blackened by sediment left on the surface
as the ice melted away. Gushing from the base of the ice cap were streams
browned by their silty load. They coalesced into a broad reach of braided
strands, glistening in the valley below. The river meandered for a few miles to
the west, thickly viscous with its sediment, until it reached a small fjord. A
muddy delta extended into the chilled waters, providing a surface where the
river of molecules and particles mixed with the sea, becoming a thing from a
past memory.
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| Meandering stream draining into the head of Maligiaq Fjord |
The ridge I was on was a simple sculpture, carved by ice
thousands of years ago. But over time the ice melted away, gifting back to
sunlight the bedrock foundation, transforming into river and sand and outwash
delta. This was the flow of process the world effortlessly expresses.
In that open wildness, I stood in awed silence, overwhelmed
by the wonders so openly offered. Everything in me craved connection with that
moments’ creation. It was a place of beauty into which I had blessedly
wandered. As I surveyed the stunning scene surrounding me a confused mix of
serenity and desperation slowly welled up. A desire to breathe deeply in that
meditative realm calmly abided with an electric anticipation that excited every
cell in my body. Each part of me begged to be freed into that wildness, to
dissolve any separation between self and place, as though such a state of being
should be the essence of existence.
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| Ice front and melt water stream - Akugdlinguit Kugssuat valley |
In that wildness boundaries do not exist. Horizons are
imagined edges beyond which things persist and more waits to be seen. The world
took on a richness and depth that exceeded anything I had known. The
billion-year past, and all of its physical entities – waves, algae, lizards and
fish, poetry, bird cries and all that our curiosity has uncovered – simply
became prelude to an infinity of future creations. I felt as though that
beautiful terrain nonchalantly offered an imagined hand to guide an evolving
acquaintance. It was a dreamscape, something only vaguely comprehended, and yet
more concrete than city sidewalks and urban chatter.
I also understood that the view upon which I gazed was a
vanishing scene. The brown-fringed ice, the sediment-choked rivers, the
silt-laden fjords were greatly exaggerated versions of their prior selves,
unintentionally manipulated by the impacts of human activities thousands of
miles away. This was the butterfly effect made manifest. That landscape is now
the product of natural processes perturbed by the self-indulgent ignorance of
the human species. Although I stood in silence, the hum of distant economies
vibrated beyond the horizon.
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| Muds and brooks along the crevassed and silt-mantled ice front at Qasigiatsiait |
Humanity is now an integral part of that unfolding flow of process,
the landscape I viewed an emphatic statement of that fact. What I saw was
simply one expression of how human-affected climate change modifies the course
of processes in the world.
The scene I was fortunate to view on that ridge crest in
Greenland was simply one more instance of Nature’s depth. Retreating ice and
mud-filled rivers are a response to the interplay of Nature’s spontaneously
evolving self, affected by our pollution of the atmosphere. But they are
disturbing only because I brought to them naïve expectations. Had I not known
the dynamics playing out in front of me, I would have embraced the scene with
the deepest sense of Nature’s boundless beauty.
I stood on that ridge as a representative of a species
destroying its own habitat, making it less suitable for the engineered world it
had constructed. Cities are flooding as the ice melts. Storms and droughts,
agricultural devastation and mass migrations are self-imposed consequences of
an ignorance fostered by hubris. We are surprised by the effects of our actions
only because of the depth of our ignorance of the world. We have assumed we had
dominion over the land and its creatures, when in fact we are marginally
significant in the face of the power of just a single hurricane – implicit in
the tides is the meagerness of our possibilities.
It is now more important than ever that we grasp the fact
that our naiveté distorts our emotions. Wilderness is not simply scenery and
adventure – it is the artistry of unyielding process. Immersion in it, deconstructing
that which separates us from it, is the content of life’s deepest path. Whatever
things on this planet our actions destroy, Earth will resurrect in new forms
and resilient beauty. It is the spirit of humanity that suffers with each loss.
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William E. Glassley,
Ph.D., is a geologist at the University of California, Davis, and an emeritus
researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark, focusing on the evolution of
continents and the processes that energize them. He is the author of over
seventy research articles and a textbook on geothermal energy. For his latest
book, A Wilder Time, Dr. Glassley received the 2019 Burroughs Medal Award for
“distinguished natural history writing.”