The earth is about 4.6 billion years old. An unimaginable age. How do we experience time at that scale? And what do we stand to learn from engaging with it? Deep time is simply so much bigger than human history, it can seem irrelevant or apolitical – even though historically deep time has been anything but, having been abused to legitimize racism, sexism, and environmental exploitation through pseudoscientific takes on evolutionary history, or by overstating the regenerative, regulatory capacity of earth’s systems. Clearly, deep time does not lack political application. The question is how do we apply it well? For example, can an experience of deep time, as a lesson in humility, reorient us to more sustainable ways of living?
One way to experience deep time is to walk
it. The Deep Time Walk is a mobile audio experience with its roots at
Schumacher College, developed, among others, by deep ecologist Stephen Harding.
Delivered either in person, or through an app, the walk guides you on a 4.6 km trek
from the past to the present, at a pace of 1 million years per meter. In the
span of about 2,5 hours, prepare to experience the earth take shape underneath
your feet; survive the Late Heavy Bombardment to see single-celled organisms
emerge, and watch them try, and fail, again and again, to produce oxygen
through photosynthesis, until – suddenly – they manage to crack it, causing the
Great Oxidation Event which paves the way for multicellular life to develop.
Then, in the last 100 meters of the 4.6 km walk, things suddenly move very
fast. Vertebrates evolve. Flowering plants burst into being. You are nearing
the end of the walk. Stretch out your arm. Point a finger at the future.
Recorded history starts barely a couple of knuckles before the finish line, and
the industrial revolution is no further than a hair’s breadth away.
The Deep Time Walk gives a rare, concrete sense
of the scale of deep time, and of the incredible brevity of our species
existence, a period in which we – and the app does tend
to speak, problematically, of a universalized we – have nevertheless done incredible damage. If that makes us the antagonists of the
story, the cyanobacteria who figured out how to produce oxygen from water are
the true protagonists of the narrative. Almost half of the walk leads up to
their monumental contribution, and the other half explores the awesome
ramifications of the event. By producing oxygen, earth gained an atmosphere
that could trap water, which otherwise would have been lost to space. And
without water, nothing can live. Life thus begets life, in the story of deep
time; and as a species we would do well to honour that tradition.
The Deep Time Walk is interesting for many reasons but certainly for its engagement with time. The steady embodied rhythm of walking forms the temporal backbone of the experience, with other temporalities layered on top of it, or coming into existence around it. The compressed history of the earth is one such a layer, and on top of that is the layer of narrative, a dialogue between a ‘fool’ and a ‘scientist’ with its foreshadowings, recollections, and playful linguistic metaphors. But there is also the temporality of the environment through which you walk. Listeners are encouraged to walk in safe, natural environments, where time is legible in rocks and trees. In urban spaces the deep time walk may yield a very different experience, however, juxtaposing deep time with the mania of rush hour for example. Because of the goal-oriented nature of walking (as opposed to wandering), however, there exists a tension between the teleological structure of the the walk, and the decidedly non-teleological way in which life on earth unfolds. The app frames single-celled organisms as trying and failing to produce oxygen for billions of years, but really what it means is that for a while they failed to produce us - until they did, and the rest is (human) history.
Journalist Paul Salopek’s deep time walk, the Out of Eden project, strikes me as less teleological. As an exercise in slow journalism, Salopek ducked out of a tent in Ethiopia’s rift valley in 2013 in order to trace our ancestors’ footsteps who left Africa about 60 thousand years ago. Salopek’s journey will take him through the Middle East, down the old Silk Road, across the Bering Strait and into the Americas where he intends to end his walk in Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America almost a decade later. As Salopek explains, what some may see as a “journey out of time” has been precisely the opposite.
“During the past
six years, after planting nearly 16 million footsteps between my starting point
at a human fossil site in the wilderness in the Horn of Africa and my current
location on the cultivated plains of northern India, my days have been
extraordinarily busy: crammed with incident and talkative people, immersed in
modern problems and current events. In this way, the Out of Eden Walk has been
more like a trek into a common future: After all, we’re walking together into
the shared bottlenecks of the 21st century.”
The Out of Eden project is not a linear journey
in which Africa stands in for the past. Rather, it is a walk set in a temporalized
geography. Salopek walks in the present – and his route is impacted by present-day events, such as when the Syrian war forces him off his chosen route. But the
past and future continuously weave and out of the story when comes across archeological sites, or speaks to people who share with him their hopes and fears for the future.
Laura op de Beke
Works Cited
The Deep Time Walk: https://www.deeptimewalk.org/
The Out of Eden Project: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/articles/2019-01-one-migrant-among-many/
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