Underland

May 18, 2019 6:46 PM

What lies beneath: Robert Macfarlane travels 'Underland.' "From prehistoric cave paintings to buried nuclear waste, underground spaces record how humans have lived. To explore Underland means voyaging into the deep past – and raises urgent questions about our planet’s future." This is a brilliant essay by Robert Macfarlane on the themes of his book Underland.

Spring bulbs push themselves up into flower far earlier than a century ago. Last August’s heatwave in Britain caused the imprints of long-vanished structures – iron age burial barrows, Neolithic ritual monuments – to shimmer into view as parch marks visible from the air: aridity as x-ray, a drone’s-eye-view back in time. The same month, water levels in the River Elbe dropped so far that “hunger stones” were revealed – carved boulders used since the 1400s to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the stones bears the inscription “Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine” (If you see me, weep). In northern Greenland, an American cold war missile base – sealed under the ice 50 years ago with the presumption that snow accumulation would entomb it for ever, and containing huge volumes of toxic chemicals – has begun to move towards the light. This January, polar scientists discovered a gigantic melt cavity – two-thirds the area of Manhattan and up to 300 metres high – growing under the Thwaites glacier in west Antarctica. Thwaites is immense. Its calving face is the juggernaut heading towards us. It holds enough ice to raise ocean levels by more than two feet, and its melt patterns are already responsible for around 4% of global sea-level rise.

These Anthropocene unburials, as I have come to think of them, are proliferating around the world. Forces, objects and substances thought safely confined to the underworld are declaring themselves above ground with powerful consequences. It is easy to aestheticise such events, curating them into a Wunderkammer of weirdness. But they are not curios – they are horror shows. Nor are they portents of what is to come – they are the uncanny signs of a crisis that is already here, accelerating around us and experienced most severely by the most vulnerable.

These unburials also disrupt simple notions of Earth history as orderly in sequence, with the deepest down being the furthest back. Epochs and periods are mixing and entangling. Our burning of the liquefied remains of carboniferous forests melts glacial ice that fell as snow in the Pleistocene, raising sea levels for a future Anthropocene. Both time and place are undergoing what Amitav Ghosh has called “the great derangement”, torqued into new forms by the scales and speeds of anthropogenic change at a planetary level. “The problem,” writes the archaeologist Þóra Pétursdóttir [pg 18], “is not that things become buried far down in strata – but that they endure, outlive us, and come back at us with a force we didn’t realise they had, a dark force of ‘sleeping giants’,” roused from their deep-time slumber.

posted by homunculus (12 comments total)

Robert Macfarlane previously.
posted by homunculus at 9:31 PM on May 18, 2019

Robert Macfarlane, Word of the day: "corvids" - those birds that form the family Corvidae, including crows, rooks, jays, choughs, magpies, ravens & jackdaws. Corvids –– cocky, piratical, acrobatic, curious –– are among the most intelligent birds known, with tool-making & problem-solving abilities.
posted by homunculus at 11:25 PM on May 18, 2019 [1 favorite]

Winter is coming.
posted by adamvasco at 6:00 AM on May 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

No one writes a walk quite like Macfarlane – he captures the experience of passing through a place in a way that is unfailingly compelling. Granta published an early excerpt from Underland back in 2013, and it's an enthralling piece of prose. I've been waiting for this book for years.
posted by oulipian at 6:52 AM on May 19, 2019 [5 favorites]

Off topic, but the name Robert Macfarlane will always and ever be conjoined with the the Reagan era National security advisor who went down with the ship in the Iran-Contra scandal and yes, those spelling is slightly different. Sorry. You may right a string of Nobel prize winning novels, but you will never force my brain to relinquish this association. You might as well be named Vince Foster or Sirhan Sirhan.
posted by hwestiii at 1:13 PM on May 19, 2019

I'm doing my best not to think that 'the graves are vomiting forth their dead', and all that that implies ...
posted by jamjam at 1:23 PM on May 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Oops.
posted by homunculus at 3:29 PM on May 19, 2019

Scientists Reveal a Massive Biosphere of Life Hidden Under Earth's Surface
posted by homunculus at 3:36 PM on May 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Via Robert Macfarlane‏: Wood wide web: Trees' social networks are mapped
posted by homunculus at 3:37 PM on May 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

The Desert Under Our Feet – An Extraordinary Biological Web that Serves Us in Countless Ways

We are witness to assaults on our desert landscape every day, but we usually recognize only what we see above ground. In fact, these surface alterations result in critical changes below ground that have far-reaching implications that are mostly unnoticed or unappreciated. If we could see the intricate systems that hum along invisibly underground, we would likely fight even harder to protect our desert landscapes from unnecessary disturbance.

Research around the world is showing that the biggest contributors to soil stability in deserts are the smallest of microorganisms. Tiny microbes hold our desert landscape together. The valuable role of hidden microorganisms in keeping our air cleaner, preventing dust storms, controlling erosion, and helping us reduce carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere is enormous, but that role is mostly overlooked when we make land-use decisions in our desert.

posted by homunculus at 6:54 PM on May 21, 2019

Robert Macfarlane‏: "How do you find the words to tell the story of the environmental emergency of our times?": this is a shattering, brilliant essay about "the new language" of climate catastrophe, traditional knowledge & "broken rivers" by the great Alexis Wright.

Alexis Wright: We all smell the smoke, we all feel the heat. This environmental catastrophe is global: Governments of the world need to act. It’s time to speak to our planet with kindness before it’s too late
posted by homunculus at 1:42 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

Robert Macfarlane: "I haven’t posted any reviews of Underland prior to now, because it felt unseemly to do so. I hope you might bear me sharing this essay about the book by the great Terry Tempest Williams, which runs today on the cover of the New York Times Book Review."

The Unseen Worlds Beneath Us: Places of Beauty, Danger and Wisdom
posted by homunculus at 1:27 PM on June 18, 2019