Facts in isolation are just facts. Scattered and disconnected, they remind me of litter on a city street. But facts arranged and organized make possible understanding.
The books discussed here have helped me build a personal framework of understanding, one that is imperfect and ever changing, one made by arranging and organizing facts. Who I am, the writer of this blog, is best explored by asking "who and what has influenced him?" Here, then, is a partial answer.
A Most Important Book (for me)
More than anything else, John McPhee's book Basin and Range (1979) initiated my interest in geology and brought me to the Southwest. McPhee is not a geologist; he just writes well and takes good notes. Consequently, his perspective is particularly attractive to those of us who aren't professional geologists either. Since 1965, he has been a feature writer for The New Yorker. His narrative nonfiction takes himself and his readers into the lives of the people he profiles, a diverse collection ranging from basketball player (and, later, U.S. Senator) Bill Bradley to those going to the Alaskan frontier seeking new lives.
"Basin and range" refers to the land of alternating valleys and ridges stretching in parallel succession across Nevada, extending south into Mexico, and as far east as Albuquerque and the Rio Grande Rift containing us. The book's treatment of geological time and its immensities becomes elegiac: who, then, are we and what does our history amount to when, to the earth, a million years is but a season?
Written in 1979, Basin and Range also addresses the radical paradigm shift in geology then underway: plate tectonics. Geology, like the earth it studies, has its own history, a human history of competing explanations composed from new evidence sometimes serendipitously discovered. McPhee relates this human story as well. He went on to write a total of six books on geology, the first five (including Basin and Range) collected into a single volume, Annals of the Former World (1998).
It is a book worth reading, both for the knowledge it imparts as well as for the pleasure of traveling with McPhee and his companions as they seek the deep history of the American land.
Books on Local New Mexican Geology
Geology is often done roadside. Roads get us there, and road cuts expose buried rock. Halka Chronic's book, Roadside Geology of New Mexico (1987), makes an excellent departure point. In it, she presents our state's geological history and topography through a series of detailed geological maps. All of this is then organized according to the roads crisscrossing our state.
For explorations closer to home, there is Field Guide to the Sandia Mountains (2005), edited by Robert Julyan and Mary Stuever. Though primarily dedicated to flora and fauna, the book also offers hard-to-find detail on rock types and ages of the Sandia Mountains that define the eastern boundary of Albuquerque.
For handbooks to be carried into the field, I use Peter Alden, National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Southwestern States (1999) and Sarah Garlick, Rocks and Minerals of North America (2014). Alden's guide is broad in scope, shallow in depth, and highly pictorial in presentation, describing whatever one might encounter, from copper-bearing rock to coyotes to the constellations overhead. Garlick's succinct writing keeps her guide slim yet consistently informative. She also covers fossils, rock structures, and landforms.
Books (and DVDs) for Background Understanding of Natural Sciences
Pedantic, certainly, but in their comprehensiveness and consistency of presentation, well-written textbooks can provide an initial framework for understanding. They go far beyond what a heterogeneous collection of websites, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia entries might provide. (Of course, textbooks necessarily oversimplify and are outdated by the time of their publication, so the internet remains an essential complement.)
Understanding Earth (fifth edition, 2007) by John Grotzinger, Thomas H. Jordan, Frank Press, and Raymond Siever is helping me learn geology in the usual manner, on my own. More recent editions are available, but at a much higher price. (I typically pay less than ten dollars, including tax and shipping, for a good used textbook that is a decade old.)
Rocks appear in the larger context of structures and landforms and are profoundly affected by the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Water flows and the wind blows, plants grow, and carbon is stowed, becoming soil and deeper still oil, oil that percolates, the carbon it contains circulates, carbon dioxide gas above and carbonate rock below, and at the earth's surface, sunlight falling fixes carbon, turning its gas to sugar then to starch. Onward goes this eternal march. For this more macro perspective, I like Physical Geography: A Landscape Appreciation (ninth edition, 2008) by Tom L. McKnight and Darrel Hess.
For the most macro perspective, there is Professor Robert M. Hazen's set of 48 half-hour long lectures, "The Origin and Evolution of Earth: From the Big Bang to the Future of Human Existence" (2013). It is available on DVD or streaming from The Teaching Company. Hazen is a mineralogist and makes a compelling case that life and minerals have co-evolved over the 4.6 billion years of our solar system's existence. (Prior to these lectures, I believed that only living things evolved. I stand corrected.) He also demonstrates that earth's climate has always been changing. What matters are the causes and mechanisms of change, be they self-correcting negative feedback or change-accelerating positive feedback. Also important is time-scale: decades or millions of years. Life has repeatedly faced climate change, often with mass extinctions. Now it appears we face another bout. Hazen's lectures offer the grand, panoramic perspective needed if we are to respond effectively.
Geology overlaps with both biology and chemistry. Biology (ninth edition, 2011) by Kenneth A. Mason, Jonathan B. Losos, and Susan R. Singer offers a comprehensive perspective on life on earth with strong emphasis on, yet again, evolution. Earth's primordial atmosphere, for example, was nothing like its current oxygen-rich state. Evolution of oxygen-producing photosynthetic life made it so.
Minerals are chemicals, and thermodynamics and kinetics determine their presence and their change. As an undergraduate, I studied Biochemistry. Of the many chemistry textbooks I have read over the years, Peter W. Atkins remains one of the best authors. In particular, his Physical Chemistry (first edition, 1978, and many editions since) helped me substantially when studying for the GRE exam in Chemistry. I return to that book again. Atkins' emphasis on thermodynamics makes him apt reading for geology.
Books (and Television Series) on the Role of Humanity in Nature
Human nature is nature, I believe. So, it is "natural" -- indeed inevitable -- that we humans build and create, and those creations, for better and for worse, are part of nature. (How I loved synthesizing new chemicals in organic chemistry lab!) Our species might more aptly be named Homo faber, for man the fabricator, than Homo sapiens. Wind farms I've seen at Altamont Pass in California are as natural and attractive as Yosemite Valley down the road. How we understand humanity colors how we perceive nature.
Books and other media listed next are merely meant to elucidate my particular perspective, one that is rooted in the laws of chemistry and physics and that finds no compelling reason for appending supernatural entities like God, the gods, souls, or life after death. It is but one perspective out of many.
Two works, first encountered as a teenager, shape my perspective, one that, for lack of a better label, might be called "scientific humanism". They are Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (1972) and Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1980). Each appeared as a PBS television series and as an accompanying book.
Only much later, in 2010, did I come to realize the long history from which Bronowski and Sagan drew. In about 55 BCE, as the Roman Republic was becoming the Roman Empire, Lucretius wrote a long poem, Da Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of the Universe, espousing the ideas of Epicureanism. In short, the world, he argued, is composed of atoms and void, atoms moving and bonding together in accordance with observable physical principles. No heaven or hell awaits the dead, and the gods, if they exist at all, have bigger fish to fry than to bother with petty human concerns. Lucretius is striking to me in how contemporary his outlook feels. Of many translations available, I read the English language prose translation by R.E. Latham (1951) published by Penguin.
Ancient Perspectives on Nature and the Human Presence
Science is a human endeavor, and as such suffers from characteristically human limitations. New ideas, such as those embodying evolution or plate tectonics, are resisted, even in the face of accumulating empirical evidence. Consequently, it is fun, if not also useful, to return to the dawn of science, specifically to the Greek-speaking world of the Aegean Sea prior to the age of Socrates, prior, that us, to Fifth Century Athens.
Stories told and questions asked then started to change. Earlier, Hesiod and Homer had sung of the gods, Zeus and his cronies, acting on the world for their own, sometimes petty, reasons. Here was the epic mythology of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then came a new generation and their new questions. Rather than asking who and why in reference to the gods, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and others asked what and how in reference to the world. What is the world made of, and how, for example, does vapor become liquid or solid? Science, I believe, was born in this change of perspective. What new science might emerge today were we again able to change our perspective?
Thales and company are conventionally called Presocratic philosophers. Returning to them and their new ways of seeing the world means going back 2500 years. In doing so, one encounters the same problems faced by geologists going back 2500 million years, namely, not much remains, and what does has been heavily altered and metamorphosed over time.
Thoughts of the Presocratics exist only as a hodgepodge of scattered fragments and sayings, scholars of antiquity quoting earlier scholars of antiquity, translating, retranslating, maybe mistranslating along the way like the children's game of Telephone. But that is what we have to work with. A comprehensive and scholarly English language collection of such fragments has long been G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (second edition, 1969). Heraclitus presumably had something to say, something sophisticated and well-reasoned. Kirk and Raven collect and translate all that remains of him, fragments like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Your game is to imagine the picture of the puzzle assembled when all you have are those few remaining pieces.
Are there radically different ways of thinking about nature and the human place within it? I think so, having read but never fully appreciated the Tao te Ching (sometimes transliterated as Daodejing) by Lao Tzu (or, Laozi). Countless translations of this brief classic text of Chinese Taoism exist, my favorite being the 1972 English language translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English.
Their Tao te Ching opens with "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. / The name that can be named is not the eternal name. / The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. / The named is the mother of ten thousand things." So, can we know of things lacking names or words? Does the act of naming somehow also circumscribe? Chapter five begins, "Heaven and earth are impartial; / They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs". Ten thousand things is a metaphor for the multitude of material things constituting the world, including humans. Straw dogs [1] are decorated boxes bashed apart in sacrificial ceremony. Humans seem almost an afterthought, just one of the ten thousand disposable things.
And finally
Land is not solely sampled and studied. It is also lived upon, traveled over, and visited for recreation or religious ritual. Henry Thoreau lived beside Walden Pond in Massachusetts from 1845 to 1847. In his Walden (1854), he showed me how to observe nature that I am part of.
Two travel books are worth mentioning. First is Leaves of Grass (1892), the great work of poetry by Walt Whitman. It is also a travelogue for, in poems such as Song of Myself and Song of the Open Road, young man Whitman is on the road, out of doors, into the future, fully part of America, both our land and our people.
In Narrow Road to the Deep North (ca. 1690, translated into English in 1966 by Noboyuki Yuasa), elderly Japanese poet Basho takes to the open road too, perhaps for a final time. His narrative offers a perspective of land and time shaped by his age and times. He seeks the shrines and sacred places where the ancients before him set foot. Mount Fuji looms in the distance, symbolic of something significant, different from, but at least as significant as, the subduction of the earth's crust that Mount Fuji today symbolizes.
In Yuasa's translation, this classic work of Japanese literature begins "Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth til they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind -- filled with a strong desire to wander." So, too, for the ever-changing earth in its travels around the sun, and for the sun as well in its travels around our Milky Way galaxy.
Footnote
1. In the 1997 edition of Feng and English, "straw dogs", which is the literal meaning of the Chinese, is for re-rendered as the more palatable (and politically correct?) "dummies". Never rely on any single translation; read several.
posted: 2019-11-15, last edited: 2019-11-30
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