Ep. 19 – Robert Macfarlane on being good ancestors across deep time

In eastern Greenland, Macfarlane descends a moulin, a smooth ice shaft cut into a glacier by meltwater. “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert,” he writes. “New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.” Photo by Helen Spenceley.

In 1994, three French cavers came upon the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. In his new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, the writer Robert Macfarlane describes the December day in which the trio descended into the chamber, passing stalactites that reached from floor to ceiling. Suddenly, the flashlight of one caver illuminated a mammoth, then a bear, then a lion with a mane speckled with blood. It was soon revealed that the gallery of Chauvet Cave, also known as the Cave of Forgotten Dreams, houses hundreds of animals — mammoths, rhinoceroses, lions, bison, owls, stags, panthers and bears — painted over 30,000 years old. Many of the creatures are now extinct or nearing extinction.

Macfarlane writes: “The art of the chamber has an astonishing liveliness to it. Despite the rudimentary materials and the lack — to our knowledge — of any kind of training or tradition on which the artists could draw, the animals of Chauvet seem ready to step from the stone that holds them. The horns and cloven hoofs of the bison are painted twice, the lines running close to one another, to give the impression of movement — a shake of the head, a stamp of the foot. The horses are painted with soft muzzles and lips, which one wishes to reach out and touch, feel, feed. Sixteen lions — muscles tensed, eyes fixed with hunting alertness on their quarry — pursue a herd of bison from right to left across a wall of stone. This is, you realize, an early version of stop-motion; a proto-cinema.” Macfarlane quotes John Berger: “Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away. The talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.”

In Andoya, Norway, Macfarlane visited off-shore oil fields with a local fisherman and activist, Bjornar Nicolaisen, as his friend and guide. “What Bjornar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia,’ the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’ …” Macfarlane writes. “Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home becomes unhomely around its inhabitants.” Photo by Bjornar Nicolaisen.

Macfarlane continues: “Throughout the cave, there is, strikingly, little or no foreground present — no line of landscape or vegetation on which these creatures exist. They have no habitat save the rock and the dark, and as such they seem to float free, unmoored from the world. They exist at once as exquisite anatomical drawings — and as embodiments of a worldview utterly different from our own. These animals live, as Simon McBurney memorably puts it: ‘in an enormous present, which also contained past and future. A present in which nature was not only contiguous with them, but continuous. They flowed in and out of a continuum of everything around them; just as the animals flow into and out of the rock. And if the rock were alive, so were the animals. Everything was alive.’…”

“I think we are more tender toward the dead than to the living,” Macfarlane says. “If I learned one thing [in writing this book], it is how tender we need to be to the living and to the living to come.” Photo by Bryan Appleyard.

In this podcast episode, Robert Macfarlane joins us to speak about his magnificent new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, and the questions that “deep time” raises about what it means to be alive and to be a good human.

“Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us,” Macfarlane once wrote. “Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.” Underland is such a book. Macfarlane’s writing has shifted our climates for the better, deepened our sympathies, expanded our understanding of and attention to the natural world, reminded us of the stakes of being alive, and made us want to be kinder.

In Underland, Macfarlane descends into caves with underground labs, buried nuclear waste storage facilities, Norway’s offshore oil fields, hidden soil fungi networks, and the moulins of Greenland’s melting glaciers. He goes deep into the earth to tell readers what lies underground, why we explore but should not disturb this place, and what is happening to the earth and to us now that our species has done just that. The book is an exploration of our moral landscapes as much as our physical landscapes, and illuminates the deep and inextricable ways in which the two are inseparable. Macfarlane explores how we humans shape value across expanses of “deep time” — geological time in which the units of measurement are eons and epochs, not days or years — and asks: Are we being good ancestors?

Macfarlane’s beloved other books include The Old Ways, Landmarks, Mountains of the Mind, and The Lost Words. He teaches at the University of Cambridge.

Macfarlane descends a moulin in eastern Greenland. “Ice has a memory,” he writes. “It remembers in detail and it remembers for millions of years or more. Ice remembers forest fires and rising seas. Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last Ice Age, 110,000 years ago. It remembers how many days of sunshine fell upon it in a summer 50,000 years ago. It remembers the explosions of Tambora in 1815, Laki in 1783, Mont St Helens in 1482 and Kumae in 1454. It remembers the smelting boom of the Romans, and it remembers the lethal quantities of lead that were present in petrol in the decades after the Second World War. It remembers and tells — tells us that we live in on a fickle planet, capable of swift shifts and rapid reversals. Ice has a memory and the colour of this memory is blue.” Photo by Helen Spenceley.
Macfarlane treks across Knud Rasmussen Glacier in northern Greeland. “For more than 15 years now,” Macfarlane writes, “I have been writing about the relationships between landscape and the human heart. What began as a wish to solve a personal mystery — why I was so drawn to mountains as a young man that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them — has unfolded into a project of deep-mapping.” Photo by Helen Spenceley.

Recommended books:

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez


Listen & subscribe: Apple PodcastsSoundcloud | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts