A poetic, entrancing exploration of the spaces that lie beneath.Robert Macfarlane. 2019. Underland: A Deep Time Journey, W.W. Norton & Company.https://geographical.co.uk/reviews/books/item/3214-underland-a-deep-time-journey
I finally read Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, which I wanted to read two years ago, and learned a lot. Underland cuts paths through science, geography, anthropology, poetry, myth and extreme human experiences. Underland is an epic, perspective-shifting exploration of this world beneath our feet, which will change your worldview on the relationship between time and space, human being and nature.
Macfarlane quotes a dazzling range of poets and novelists and great galaxies of writers on geology, archaeology, mythology, morphology and glaciology, as well as on nuclear science, "dark matter" physics and art history. It is beautifully written and full of philosophical thoughts.Underland is a story of journeys into darkness, and of descents made in search of knowledge. It moves over its course from the dark matter formed at the universe's birth to the nuclear futures of an Anthropocene-to-come. During the deep time voyage undertaken between those two remote points, the line about which the telling folds is the ever-moving present. Underland's first chapter is a descent, its last is a surfacing, and during the voyage of 4.6 bn years made between those two remote points — crossing landscapes from the Mendip Hills to the Slovenian highlands, the Lofoten Islands to Greenland's ice cap, and from western Finland to a Cambridge spinney. Readers are pulled underneath Paris, Arctic ice, forest floors; into deep caves and underground rivers; ancient funeral chambers; even to underground research stations that look into space.
Robert Macfarlane in Greenland.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/08/underland-by-robert-macfarlane-reviewWhy descends to the underworld?The roles of the underworld across time and culture – "to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable and to dispose of what is harmful" – are seductive, terrifying, often invisible.Such fears of underland are embedded deep in our language where height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be "uplifted" is preferable to being "depressed" or "pulled down".Stories of human journeys into the Underworld are as old as literature itself. But few of them are happy tales. The oldest of underland stories concerns a hazardous descent into darkness in order to reach someone or something consigned to the realm of the dead. A variant to the Epic of Gilgamesh–written around 2100 BC in Sumeria – tells of such a descent, made by Gilgamesh's servant Enki to the "netherworld" on behalf of his master to retrieve a lost object.Descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation. Our common verb "to understand" itself bears an old sense of passing beneath something in order fully to comprehend it. "To discover" is "to reveal by excavation", "to descend and bring to the light", "to fetch up from depth".In the early 1990s a young Canadian forest ecologist called Suzanne Simard and her colleagues used microscopic and genetic tools and peeled back the forest floor and peered below the understorey, into the "black box" of the soil. What they saw down there were the pale, super-fine threads known as "hyphae" that fungi send out through the soil. These hyphae interconnected to create a network of astonishing complexity and extent. The hyphae of these so-called "mycorrhizal" fungi were understood not only to infiltrate the soil, but also to weave into the tips of plant roots at a cellular level – thereby creating an interface through which molecular transmission might occur. By means of this weaving, too, the roots of individual plants or trees were joined to one another by a magnificently intricate subterranean system. The fungi and the trees had "forged their duality into a oneness, thereby making a forest".Simard's first major paper on the subject was published in Nature in 1997, and it was from there that the subterranean network of tree–fungus mutualism gained its durable nickname of "the wood wide web".The relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and the plants they connect is ancient – around 450 million years old – and largely one of mutualism. In the case of the tree–fungi mutualism, the fungi siphon off carbon that has been produced in the form of glucose by the trees during photosynthesis, by means of chlorophyll that the fungi do not possess. In turn, the trees obtain nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi have acquired from the soil through which they grow, by means of enzymes that the trees lack.The possibilities of the wood wide web far exceed this basic exchange of goods between plant and fungi, though. For the fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources between one another. Sugars, nitrogen and phosphorus can be shared between trees in a forest: a dying tree might divest its resources into the network to the benefit of the community, for example, or a struggling tree might be supported with extra resources by its neighbors. Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send immune-signalling compounds to one another.Well-developed fungal networks will enable forests to adapt faster at larger scales to the changing conditions of the Anthropocene.Benjamin was strongly drawn to enclosed and underground spaces. Benjamin proposed his vision of Paris's invisible city, filled with "lightning-scored, whistle-resounding darkness". He wrote in The Arcades Project is Convolute C："Paris is built over a system of caverns ... this great technological system of tunnels and thoroughfares interconnects with the ancient vaults, the limestone quarries, the grottoes and the catacombs which, since the early Middle Ages, have time and again been entered and traversed."Much of the Île-de-France sits on Lutetian limestone, which accumulated chiefly during the Eocene, when the region was for around 5 million years an area of calm bays and lagoons of seawater.Much of Paris was built from its own underland, hewn block by block from the bedrock and hauled up for dressing and placing. Underground stone-quarrying began in earnest towards the end of the twelfth century, and Parisian limestone grew in demand not just locally but across France. Lutetian limestone built parts of Notre-Dame and the Louvre.The residue of over 600 years of quarrying is that beneath the south of the upper city exists its negative image: a network of more than 200 miles of galleries, rooms and chambers, organized into three main regions that together spread beneath nine arrondissements. This network is the vides de carrières – the "quarry voids", the catacombs.In the mid eighteenth century, the extensive undermining began to have consequences for the upper city, causing subsidence sinkholes known as fontis that were reputed to be of diabolic origin. The quarry voids had begun to migrate to the surface; the under-city had begun to consume its twin.Louis XVI responded shortly after his accession by creating an inspection unit for the "Quarries Below Paris and Surrounding Plains", headed by a general inspector called Charles-Axel Guillaumot, and tasked with regulating the quarries for the purposes of public safety. It was Guillaumot who initiated the first mapping of the void network, with a view to consolidating existing spaces and regulating further quarrying activities. A subterranean t ownplanning system was established whereby chambers and tunnels were named in relation to the streets above them, thus creating a mirror-city with the ground serving as the line of symmetry.It was also Guillaumot who, in the mid 1780s, oversaw the idea of using the quarry voids for purposes of storage. And what urgently needed storing was Paris's dead. In 1786 the process began of evacuating the city's cemeteries, crypts and tombs of their dead, and transferring the remains of more than 6 million corpses to the quarry region known as the Tombe-Issoire, soon to become Les Catacombes, on what was then the Montrouge Plain.The deposition of bones into the catacombs continued over the course of the nineteenth century, but quarrying dwindled away as the best limestone deposits became worked out. From the 1820s the quarry voids were put to a new use as mushroom fields: damp and dark, they provided the perfect growing spaces for fungi, which sprouted from rows of horse manure. Adaptable quarrymen made a career move into mushroom farming, and a subterranean Horticultural Society of Paris was founded, its first president being a former general inspector of the mines. By 1940 there were some 2,000 mushroom farmers working underneath Paris.After the war, the cult of the catacombs began to grow. Increasing numbers of people were drawn down into them for purposes of concealment, crime or pleasure. These users of the network became known as "cataphiles" – "lovers of the below".It became – and still is – what the anarchist-theorist Hakim Bey calls a "Temporary Autonomous Zone": a place where people might slip into different identities, assume new ways of being and relating, become fluid and wild in ways that are constrained on the surface.
"Deep time" is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink.There is dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from the Earth in the blink of a geological eye? Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd – crushed to irrelevance. Assertions of value seem futile. A flat ontology entices: all life is equally insignificant in the face of eventual ruin. The extinction of a species or an ecosystem scarcely matters in the context of the planet's cycles of erosion and repair.We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us.Seeing the Anthropocene from the perspective of deep timeIn 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer jointly published an article proposing that the Anthropocene should be considered a new Earth epoch, on the grounds that "mankind [sic] will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years to come". As the Pleistocene was defined by the action of ice, and the Holocene by a period of relative climatic stability allowing the flourishing of life, so the Anthropocene is seen to be defined by the action of anthropos: human beings, shaping the Earth at a global scale. The Anthropocene is formally adopted as the current Earth epoch, with a start date of 1950 – coinciding with the dawn of the nuclear age.Among the relics of the Anthropocene, therefore, will be the fallout of our atomic age, the crushed foundations of our cities, the spines of millions of intensively farmed ungulates, and the faint outlines of some of the billions of plastic bottles we produce each year. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.Our accumulative activities have even produced a new type of rock called "plastiglomerate" – a hard coagulate that contains sand grain, shells, wood and seaweed, all held together by molten plastic produced by the human burning of beach rubbish on campfires. Plastiglomerate was first identified by geologists on Kamilo Beach in Hawaii; it has been proposed – due to its durability and distinctive composition – as a plausible future Anthropocene strata horizon marker.Storage Room for nuclear wasteseems to me our purest Anthropocene architecture yet, and the greatest grave that we have so far sunk into the underland. Those repeated incantations – pitched somewhere between confession and caution – seem to me our most perfected Anthropocene text, our blackest mass.By far the most advanced of all these deep storage facilities is Onkalo, the Hiding Place, set 1,500 feet down into 1.9-billion-year-old rock on the Bothnian coast of Finland.But the Anthropocene, for all its faults, also issues a powerful shock and challenge to our self-perception as a species. It exposes both the limits of our control over the long-term processes of the planet, and the magnitude of the consequences of our activities. It lays bare some of the cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other beings now, as well as between humans and more-than-humans still to come. Perhaps above all the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands. What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: "Are we being good ancestors?"CityReads ∣Notes On Cities"CityReads", a subscription account on WeChat,
posts our notes on city reads weekly.
Please follow us by searching "CityReads"