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    Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
    Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
    Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World
    Audiobook5 hours

    Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

    Written by Marcia Bjornerud

    Narrated by Tanya Eby

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet's long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves. The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth's atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. But spans of hundreds of years-the time a molecule of carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere-approach the limits of our comprehension. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth's deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future.

    Marcia Bjornerud shows how geologists chart the planet's past, explaining how we can determine the pace of solid Earth processes such as mountain building and erosion and comparing them with the more unstable rhythms of the oceans and atmosphere. These overlapping rates of change in the Earth system-some fast, some slow-demand a poly-temporal worldview, one that Bjornerud calls "timefulness."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateSep 11, 2018
    ISBN9781684415298

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    Reviews for Timefulness

    4.5/5

    66 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An otherwise decent book that unfortunately close by using autism as a metaphor to characterize humanity as "rigid, savants [in] narrow obsessions, [and] dysfunctional."

      Terrible myths that harm the neurodivergent community.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      In Tunefulness, Marcia Bjornerud makes an impassioned and eloquent argument for developing a poly-temporal worldview of time is one of Bjornerud’s objectives. A concept she calls Timefulness. Bjornerud is cautious to avoid the trap timelessness that so many geologist fall into. She contends that timelessness falsely invokes a sense of permanency and sterile aspiration, when the Earth in fact is dynamic and in a constant never ending state of change. That understanding timefulness better equips scientist to tackle the larger philosophical and practical questions posed by climate change. And that the practices of close reading and spatial visualization in geology provides material records that have documented many changes of our planet. Something that human beings are not been able to witness or experience. It is crucial that geologists take a more active role in public discourse to encourage the public to think more deeply about Earth’s multiple past and future iterations. She makes a compiling case that "fathoming deep is geology's greatest contribution to humanity".It's a hopelessly romantic book, but If nothing else she has been able to articulate something I have found so difficult to explain. Rocks to a geologist aren't nouns they are verbs. They have stories to tell about the past and the future.
    • 5/5
      This is outstanding. With 5 years studying geology and 44 more years practicing geology, this book does the best job of chronologically documenting the history of earth, and human's affect on it. Within this book you will find the history of earth's natural resources and the changes in their uses for humans and their changing availability, even sustainability. Going a step further you will also learn the changing sustainability and value of our resources based on data, not arm waving. The book is enlightening, thoughtful and truly based on proven fact, collected over centuries, agreed on by all who have looked at and studied the data gathered by numerous organizations worldwide. The book is thorough in its geology, and well balanced on the changes seen, measured, and reported on, that are underway on our earth today. The author points out how wise resource planning, which incorporates the geological record and its changes, could greatly affect our future quality of life on out planet.