Underland
8/26/21
Hi all: This week in curated Anthropocene news, I’m reducing the homework load as a way of especially recommending two essays which cut deeply into our tendency to hope rather than act. The first is a fifteen year old essay by Derrick Jensen, “Beyond Hope,” from the Orion archives, where it is still being read and discussed. I taught the essay many times over several years, and it never failed to fire up my students. The second is a recent opinion piece by Louise Fabiani in Mother Jones, charting “The Perils of Magical Environmental Thinking.” Let me know what you think. Comments are always welcome.
Heather and I spent last week in a sweet, simple, century-old cabin a few feet from the water on a small rocky point of a quiet Maine island. We were only a mile from the mainland, and only two miles as the herring gull flies from our house, but we were a million miles from the mediated catastrophes and kerfuffles of the world. No breaking news, no updates. No pavement, no cars, no traffic or roadkill. This was good-old-fashioned, mid-20th-century rustic Anthropocene living, with propane-fueled lights, stove, and fridge, and a bucket of cedar shavings in the outhouse. We had our phones, sure, but they were used almost entirely to photograph flowers and bugs and fungi we wanted to identify once we were back hunkered down on the porch with our guide books and a beer.
The Anthropocene was visible everywhere, of course, from the plastic Gatorade bottles, pressure-treated wood, and styrofoam buoys washing up in the coves to the diesel-powered lobster boats churning slowly around the bay as they farmed lobster with thousands of traps baited with fish caught for the purpose.
We spent our days slowly observing the beautiful surface of the natural – if largely altered – world. Often this was the sheen of the bay occasionally ruffled by breeze or buoy or boat, or broken by seal and cormorant as they pushed up schools of mackerel until they burst desperately through the surface. Sometimes it was the caterpillar-haunted underside of milkweed leaves, the 1/8th inch flowers of Dwarf Enchanter’s Nightshade, or the wonderfully weird Hydnellum peckii dotted with beads of what looked like strawberry jelly.
The one place I looked beneath the surface was at the harbor’s edge at half-tide, sitting quietly and watching small fish dart out cautiously from ledge crevices and the dark haunts of rockweed. It was like a glimpse into a living room window of an endless city: fascinating, but scarcely a fragment of the larger reality at hand. As I’ve written here before, we know so little of the sea, though it surrounds and feeds us daily.
We think of ourselves as an all-seeing species, but really we live in a variety of darknesses. We’re as blind to most of the electromagnetic spectrum as we are to our transformation of the Earth (science informs us about both, but we seem to scarcely understand). We don’t know what we don’t know, and we can’t see what we can’t see. On the visible side, it intrigues me that the list of Earthly things we can actually see through is quite short. Translucency is common, but transparency is rare. We evolved alongside water and ice, jellyfish, amber, diamonds and Muscovite mica and some other clear crystals, but that’s about it. (Well, there’s also the clear aquarium of the eye itself, through which a minority of the world reveals itself.) Today we can add manufactured chemicals, glass, and certain ceramics, and the plenitude of clear plastics, but the list remains short. The world is generally opaque, and that’s especially true of all that lies below us. We live on the skin of a globe whose interior we rarely see or think about.
As Robert Macfarlane puts it in his opening pages of his astonishing new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey,
“We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet. Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon’s face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe. I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it…”
I’ve mentioned Underland and Macfarlane several times in recent months, but I finally had a chance last week to take a deep dive and finish it. And to think about it, at length. I’ll say first that Underland is not a book about the Anthropocene so much as it is a book that masterfully inhabits and articulates the Anthropocene as it explores our history with the worlds beneath our feet. Those worlds, whether caves or mines or the interiors of soil and glacier, have a lot to say about our ignorance, cruelties, biases, and catastrophic mistakes, even as Macfarlane – always gentle and honest – simultaneously weaves in narratives of our countervailing virtues of intelligence and creativity and courage and activism and optimism.
The book is in three sections: Seeing, Hiding, and Haunting. All of it takes place in Europe (assuming you count the UK and Greenland as part of Europe). Three chapters in Seeing take us caving in a limestone region of England (Burial), driving at high speed through a 600-mile mine network that stretches out beneath the North Sea (Dark Matter), and exploring the fungal networks that we now know redefine forests as interconnected communities rather than a collection of competitive species (The Understorey). Hiding takes us into the catacombs under Paris (Invisible Cities), a subterranean river in Italy (Starless Rivers), and a brutal buried history in Slovenia (Hollow Land). In Haunting, Macfarlane journeys to Norway for a difficult pilgrimage to a remote cave art site (Red Dancers) and a conversation with a fisherman about the battle against oil companies who want to drill through his rich fishing grounds (The Edge); to a rapidly changing Greenland for two glacial journeys (The Blue of Time, and Meltwater); and to Finland to tour a deep, eerie nuclear waste storage facility (The Hiding Place).
In its structure, Underland is a typical work of narrative nonfiction, whether environmental journalism or cheerful travelogue. He has stitched together several journeys, each interesting and well-told. But Macfarlane’s writing, research, and meditations on what it means to be human set his work apart. Perhaps above all it’s his lyricism that sings us into awareness. As one reviewer phrased it, he “seems to metabolize landscape into lyrics as he walks.”
Opening Underland at random, I’m with him driving through Slovenia in his Hollow Land chapter, and find this:
“The true peaks of the Julian Alps are now beginning to show on the horizon: a Gothic dream-range. Limestone summits spiral up to towered tops. Structures of hollow and fold replicate up and down the scales, from ridges and valleys to the water-scores on a single boulder. Matter shifts appearance, changes place. It is hard to tell cloud from snowfield from pale rock-face.”
Macfarlane is a poet of the present tense in these journeys, but the poetry is woven inseparably into his brilliant feeling and thinking about where he is and what it means. In Slovenia, the conundrum at hand is the brutal use of the beautiful karst (cave-riddled limestone) landscape as mass murder and burial sites during WWII and later. In the paragraph after the one quoted above, Macfarlane weaves together the narrator of a W.G. Sebald novel, horrified by the continuum of cruelty to a coastal British landscape, to the unexpected uncontrollable weeping of a friend he traveled with to the same landscape – a former nuclear weapons test site – which “caused the surfacing in her, unbidden, of memories of a cruel relationship in which she suffered for many years.” He ends the paragraph with a borrowed line, in italics: The violent event persists like crushed glass in one’s eyes. The light it generates, rather than helping us to see, is blinding. Only in the Notes do I learn that it’s from a 1996 academic collection of writings on the intersection of anthropology and literary studies. Macfarlane is a deep and thoughtful scholar, and the information load his prose carries, in the mode of Barry Lopez, is often astonishing, but it never weighs down the narrative or its emotive power. His prose is elegant enough to let the woven paragraph work its quiet magic.
A little more magic in the next paragraph, which describes a roadside scene: an elderly woman in a wheelchair among the boulders of a river’s edge, alone, watching the “whirling blue water.” She is a fragile anomaly in a hard place, put there by and awaiting unseen hands. Macfarlane drives on, and writes on, slipping now into a long paragraph typical of his writing, at once intellectual, historical, philosophical, and personal. It’s worth quoting at length:
“Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way of seeing such landscapes, it might be thought of as ‘occulting’: the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness. The Slovenian karst is an ‘occulting’ landscape in this sense, defined by the complex interplay of light and dark, of past pain and present beauty. I have walked through numerous occulting landscapes over the years: from the cleared valleys of northern Scotland, where the scattered stones of abandoned houses are oversung by skylarks; to the Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid, where a savage partisan war was fought among ancient pines, under the gaze of vultures; and to the disputed valleys of the Palestinian West Bank, where dog foxes slip through barbed wire. All of these landscapes offer the reassurance of nature’s return; all incite the discord of profound suffering coexisting with generous life.”
Remember, this was a page I randomly turned to in Underland for the purpose of this essay. That’s an indication of how rich, beautiful, and rewarding this book is.
Much of these journeys are told through artful and wise conversation, most notably perhaps with Bjornar Nicolaisen, a Norwegian fisherman cycling through rage, activism, and psychological exhaustion as he struggles to rally Norway to value fishing traditions over petro-wealth, and with Merlin Sheldrake, a plant scientist who tours Macfarlane through the still scarcely understood underland of fungi-facilitated interconnections beneath the forest floor, nicknamed the “wood-wide web.” As cute as that metaphor is, it betrays a problem that Macfarlane and Sheldrake discuss: we don’t have the language to properly describe the more-than-human world we’re changing and erasing.
Sheldrake says that the mycorrhizal fabric fungi create to link root to root is often described in research papers in weirdly economic or political terms, either as an exchange of goods or as a social utopia.
“Why should we expect fungi and plants to behave as humans started to behave economically in the eighteenth century, with the emergence of the limited liability corporation? I find it so bizarre… But I’m also sceptical of the socialist dream of fungi as sharing and caring, a rose-tinted vision that sees trees as nurses… I’m tired of both of these stories… The forest is always more complicated than we can ever dream of. Trees make meaning as well as oxygen. To me, walking through a wood is like taking a tiny part in a mystery play run across multiple timescales.”
Macfarlane responds:
“Maybe, then, what we need to understand the forest’s underland,” I say, “is a new language altogether – one that doesn’t automatically convert it to our own use values… Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi… We need to speak in spores.”
“Yes,” says Merlin with an urgency that surprises me, smacking his fist into the palm of his hand. “That’s exactly what we need to be doing – and that’s your job,” he says. “That’s the job of writers and artists and poets and all the rest of you.”
Speaking in spores, as Macfarlane playfully suggests, is entirely foreign to us. We don’t, as some indigenous languages do, have a grammar which automatically gives life or intention to the natural world. Trees and islands and fungi are dead objects that our language distances from us, and from each other.
Again and again, Macfarlane explores the underlands to help us understand their place (or absence) in our consciousness and our conscience, from Neolithic burial sites to the dead crossing the Styx to the impending collapse of the Greenland ice sheet to the conundrum of storing nuclear waste safely for the next 10,000 years. A thread that binds much of these disparate stories together is in his subtitle: A Deep Time Journey. Before the Anthropocene, much of our activity in the underlands, real or imagined, was in reverence of deep time. We buried our dead to launch them on eternal journeys and we made cave art as secreted and sacred permanent representations of our place in the universe. Now, we’ve mined millions of years of accumulated coal, oil, gas, potash, salt, and wealths of various minerals in a matter of decades. (The drilling rigs that Bjornar battles would add merely a few more miles to the over 30 million miles of holes made in our various petro-quests.) We’ve hollowed out regions of the deep Earth to feed our surface (and often superficial) needs. And in burning much of what we’ve unearthed (note the dark echo – un-Earth – of that word) over the last century, we’ve permanently destabilized much of the planet’s ice.
In related news, it rained on the summit of the Greenland ice cap a few days ago. No one’s ever seen that before.
I spent my evenings on our quiet island reading and thinking about Underland. (I’ve barely scratched the surface here.) There was plenty of Macfarlane’s dissonance to go around, not least as I sat on the screened-in porch reading late into the night with a headlamp on, a spelunker or miner working his way down into the caves of metaphor. The lovely cabin we inhabited was once a bunkhouse for men working in the island’s 19th century fish oil processing plant. The island, once a thriving fishing and farming community, had its pre-contact mature forests razed for timber and firewood and its soil compacted by livestock. A forest is back, but it’s not the same forest. The deep history of the coast and islands, those long millennia in which a small, rationally-sized population of the Wabanaki lived in the landscape, was scarcely visible. But it’s there, in the understory under our story.
I should close by saying that our week was wonderful, slow, and beautiful. My “occulted” view of that time, however informed it may be by Macfarlane’s reminder that from any point on Earth we can see and acknowledge and grieve the Anthropocene, is certainly more full of light than dark.
Links:
Underland: https://wwnorton.com/books/underland/
Review of Underland in Outside Magazine: https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/books-media/underland-robert-macfarlane-journey-book-review/
In Other Earth-Shattering News:
Derrick Jensen’s essay “Beyond Hope”, in Orion: https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope
Louise Fabiani’s opinion piece in Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/08/environmental-existential-perils-magical-thinking-covid-climate-change-emergency/