Any journey in deep time will be leisurely, and in/Footprints/we
accompany Farrier on an unhurried (and presumably carbon intensive)
itinerary from his classroom in Edinburgh to the sprawl of Shanghai,
from the ailing Great Barrier Reef to an ice-core drilling tent in
Antarctica, and from a nuclear waste storage facility in Finland to a
marine research station on the Baltic Sea. His tour, facilitated by
academic grants, notably does not include any government buildings,
climate protests, or corporate headquarters, and we realize that
Farrier’s itinerary isn’t a political mission so much as a private
quest. Marveling at the delicate intricacy of the world, pregnant with a
significance that lies just beyond our ken, Farrier speaks the wondering
language of close observation that has defined nature writing at least
since Thoreau, and arguably since his early modern predecessor, Sir
Thomas Browne. He shows us a world rich with sense, everywhere encoded
by natural and human activity. “Ice is the planet’s seat of memory,” he
writes, what he calls “a global archive reaching back hundreds of
thousands of years,” the natural equivalent of Borges’s Library of
Babel. And even as we melt and burn away what nature has written into
the world, our pollution pumps a new kind of information into the cloud
in an act of diabolical translation. When our books have been composted
and reintegrated into the earth and the internet goes dark, “our data
will persist for thousands of years as molecules of carbon circulating
in the atmosphere.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/fossils-waiting-to-be-on-stoicism-in-the-anthropocene/
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