Alberta Review: Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History
Leaving a bit to be desired, but a solid start
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If there’s one theme I’m consistently returning to in Alberta Review, it's that geography matters. It shapes our economy, politics, and culture and even guides our decision-making about which grocery stores we visit. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to look at its influence: (very) long-term in how it shapes the world we live in, and more personal in where it shapes our psychology. Obviously, these two are intimately related and cannot be separated, but they are distinct. A river forms a psychological barrier to our movement in the day-to-day, but ancient forces created it.
Those ancient forces are what Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell is most concerned with. Chapter by chapter, he discusses how natural forces, from plate tectonics to volcanism, provided us with the landscape and natural resources necessary for civilized life. Much of what is written about geography is about identifying globe-spanning coincidences and trying to find out why. For example, tectonic plate boundaries almost perfectly align with the places on Earth where the world’s earliest major civilizations developed. The Fertile Crescent, the Yellow River, and Central America. “Considering the amount of land available for habitation on Earth, this is a startling correlation, and is very unlikely to have come about by chance.” It was the natural resources created at these plate margins, like fertile soil, ease of irrigation, or access to minerals.
I’m always fascinated to learn—for this is not the first book I’ve read it in—how near we are to the last ice age and how rapidly a twist in the Earth’s angle or change to its rotation can bring another one about. While climate change may be warming things up, we’ve been much warmer in the past, but also much cooler. When reading a book about million-year geological changes, the thought that we could be a mere epoch away from ice covering Calgary again is weirdly terrifying, even if it is heat that is more likely to alter our world in my lifetime.
Origins’ main point—the Earth, via geology, shapes us and provides for us—is commonsensical and obvious if any of us bother to think things through (we, of course, won’t be armed with the scientific reasoning and causality, but I think most people could come to similar conclusions a basic high school understanding of geology). But what the book really shows you, or at least what it drives home to me, is that everything changes, will always be changing, and will continue to change. Humanity is but a blip on an ancient planet, one where continents were once joined together and eventually divvied up; the planet boiled, the planet froze, mountains grew, mountains eroded. The Mediterranean was once dry, and humanity walked from Asia to North America.
This epochal nature of…well, nature…reminded me of some of my favourite passages by my favourite author, James A. Michener. He has two passages of natural forces that have always awed me. The first was in his best book, Hawaii:
While volcanoes still played along the chain, China developed a sophisticated system of thought and Japan codified art principles that would later enrich the world. While the islands were taking their final form, Jesus spoke in Jerusalem and Muhammad came from the blazing desert with a new vision of heaven but no one knew the heaven that awaited them on these islands.
For these islands were the youngest part of the earth's visible surface. They were new. They were raw. They were empty. Ancient books that we still read today were written before these islands were known to anyone except the birds of passage. Songs that we still sing were composed and recorded while these islands remain vacant. The Bible had been compiled, and the Koran...
If paradise consists solely of beauty, then these islands were the fairest paradise that man ever invaded.
The second, though, is a reminder to Albertans just how much a feature that has shaped us so strongly, and so intimately, is relatively new to this world while, at the same time, something that, at some point in the very distant future, will no longer exist:
The Rockies are therefore very young and should never be thought of as ancient. They are still in the process of building and eroding, and no one today can calculate what they will look like then million years from now. They have the extravagant beauty of youth, the allure of adolescence, and they are mountains to be loved.
The “extravagant beauty of youth” and “the allure of adolescence” are both terms I think many proud Albertans—and, to extend this, Canadians—would use to describe our province and our country. So perhaps the importance of geology written about in Origins is as much about the mythical and existential effect on our identity and self-awareness as it is about the resources the Earth provides.
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