{"id":7743,"date":"2019-07-23T23:48:02","date_gmt":"2019-07-24T06:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=7743"},"modified":"2019-07-29T22:51:52","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T05:51:52","slug":"message-of-the-day-50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=7743","title":{"rendered":"Message of the Day: Environment"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Earth\u2019s Deepest Secrets<\/em>, The Atlantic magazine, July 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

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There is too much to read, to see, to experience, to learn and to do. The July edition of The Atlantic\u00a0<\/em>magazine is a case in point all by itself.<\/p>\n

So we pull out of it’s many stories, one, which will not be as widely read or talked about as others. But which lyrically and intelligently tells of the experience of what the interaction between humans and earth has wrought. In this case, in what lies beneath us.<\/p>\n

The online piece by Rebecca Giggs, which centers around a book review of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey<\/em>, \u00a0is titled What Lies Beneath<\/em> online, and\u00a0The Earth’s Deepest Secrets<\/em> in the print version.\u00a0<\/em>Without further comment, here it is for your consideration and reflection.<\/p>\n

It’s an uncharacteristically short piece for us. But one which can be thought on much longer.<\/p>\n

“What Lies Beneath: The Earth’s Deepest Secrets”<\/a><\/p>\n

Rebecca Giggs, The Atlantic magazine, July 2019 edition.<\/p>\n

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On the shores <\/span>of Kamilo Point, in Hawaii, geologists have identified a new kind of stone. A sediment of recent history, the agglutinated rock displays milky-blue flecks, iotas of dull green, and fibrous orange twists. It is known, because of its unique properties, as \u201cplastiglomerate.\u201d That the name grinds together two familiar-sounding words is a clue to the stone\u2019s qualities as an amalgam. What we are talking about is a rock veined not with metal or quartz, but with plastic. Plastiglomerate forms where polymer flotsam (trash, washed up on the tide line in this instance) is subject to high heat and melts, wrapping together particulate such as shell grit or sand. It then solidifies as it cools. Or, if liquefied plastic drips into hairline fissures in basalt or other porous minerals, what is left behind\u2014a rock crazed with ersatz colors\u2014can also be deemed plastiglomerate. Campfires are one source of that high heat. Plastiglomerate may also emerge along the scorched trail of a wildfire, or it might be cauterized into the ground by lava. It almost certainly appears in places where people burn their rubbish. Call it the birthstone of the age of unintended consequences.<\/p>\n

Novel metals and mineraloids are everywhere today, not made by nature but engineered in the course of human industry. The bronze, brass, and pewter alloys of ancient times have been succeeded in the modern era by aluminum products (refined from bauxite), steel, industrial abrasives, synthetic gemstones, and laboratory-built crystals deployed widely in lasers. Plastiglomerate\u2014neither natural nor fabricated, exactly\u2014may represent the most direct conduit between our current consumer society and the far-flung future. This is how shopping enters the fossil record. Junk plastic tends to shatter or fray into filaments and specks, fine like a powder. (One of plastic\u2019s most pernicious qualities is that it doesn\u2019t so much decay as divide into smaller and smaller pieces.) Bonded to rock, plastic gains inertia and long-lasting cohesion; it gets gravity.<\/p>\n

Researchers say that in all probability, plastiglomerate will be deposited into top-level strata, plasticizing the landscape itself. But the churning of the planet\u2019s mantle could carry plastiglomerate steadily down, over centuries or longer, to form a seam of crushed consumables underground\u2014as lurid as opal and as imperishable as ore. In cementing together two different types of matter\u2014synthetic plastic and geochemical rubble\u2014plastiglomerate also offers an object lesson in the melding of different timescales. The slumberous plane of rocks is characterized by its slow-motion weathering and its gradual, granular accretions. Geology does transform and flow, of course\u2014the summit of Mount Everest is famously marine limestone\u2014but short of major tectonic events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, changes in the mineral world are believed to happen over such protracted intervals that they prove almost imperceptible. By contrast, the preponderance of plastic refuse consists of lightweight packaging products, designed to be swiftly jettisoned and replaced. The irony is that, although the junk may not have been built to last, it could extend into a future well beyond individual human lifetimes, perhaps even beyond the recording of history. Folded into rock, plastic enters the time span of forces capable of elevating a seafloor into a mountain peak.<\/p>\n

In underland: <\/em><\/span>A Deep Time Journey<\/em>, the British writer Robert Macfarlane pursues the subsurface evidence of today\u2019s major environmental changes, following what trickles down into the Earth and what migrates upward from beneath. This plunge beneath the planet\u2019s topsoil into caves, catacombs, sinkholes, mines, meltwater moulins, and whirlpools opens new terrain to a naturalist whose adventures before now have soared skyward and reached outward. In Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination<\/i> (2003), Macfarlane gauged the compelling power of alpine ranges in history and culture. The Wild Places<\/i> (2007) went on to survey invigorating myths of wilderness. Throughout The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot<\/i> (2012), the author\u2019s cerebral excursions into many different subjects (botany, architecture, literature, art) kept pace with his travels over public lands, along ancient pilgrimage trails and trading routes.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n