I recently read the pop-geology book A Brief History of Earth (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6169724173); it was OK but the final chapter bugged me—this book about 4.5 billion years of history suddenly transformed into a political finger wagging about how humans are messing things up.
I was particularly disappointed because I was excited to see how someone who can take a long time, geological perspective, understanding how entire species of corals have gone extinct for example, and how the planet is constantly undergoing these massive transformations, would see the whole climate thing. In my fantasy such a person could bring a balanced view that can both see via the geological record how what we’re doing to the Earth mirrors other global events (precedented, but unwanted) and the potential dangers while also seeing how the earth continues to auto-regulate even after much more dire circumstances (such as previous mass extinctions, from great oxidization 2,300 million yrs ago to supervolcano eruption 443 million years ago to asteriod 66 million years ago), and help me see and thing about things in a new way that I haven’t before because i don’t have such a lens.
But I felt like the author Knoll simply forgot the whole geological perspective and went super small. He says something at the end like it’s our responsibility to preserve the earth, but it was weird because he didn’t say which Earth to preserve and for how long. It was weird because he had just mentioned how we’re in a slightly warmer version of an ice age which should last for another 90,000 years before a big warming. On the one hand, 9 x 10^4 is a big number, on the other, dinosaurs were the kings for 16.5 x 10^7 years… so if we want our species to flourish on any sort of geological timescale, 9*10^4 years isn’t really such a big deal. I don’t really want us to preserve our planet as it is for the next 165 million years for example; i’d rather be in a more intimate relationship with the changes.
The thing I’ve read that really holds this wide of a planetary-time view is Dune, and author Herbert’s orientation to desertification and the humans desire to greenify the desert planet.
Anyway typing this out I realize my view is less easy to express than i thought. I have some work to do…