Summary

In this mind-bending conversation, geoscientist Dr. Marcia Bjornerud (author of Timefulness and Turning to Stone) and I explore the radical implications of thinking in geological time—and why our culture's "adolescent pugilistic relationship with nature" is literally threatening our survival.

We dive deep into the ramifications of taking an overly "Newtonian" worldview to science, examine the sobering parallels between today's climate crisis and the "slow-mo catastrophes" that caused Earth's prior great mass extinctions, and explore why mainstream geology just may be quietly aligning towards ideas that may have been dismissed as "new agey.” 

Dr. Bjornerud reveals how every steel building connects us to extinct rocks from a "never-to-be-repeated moment" in Earth's history, why Mars colonization fantasies reveal a stunning ignorance of just how much Planet Earth does for us, and how we might evolve from clever technologists into "law-abiding biogeochemical citizens."

And the verdict on my "Life Breathing Together" creation story? Nothing to correct—and some surprising scientific support for expanding and re-imagining the boundaries and corresponding definition of life and even extending the notion of breath beyond respiration (with caveats ;).

Introduction

Welcome back to Negotiating Reality! I'm your host, Eric Hekler.

Today we're diving deeper into the ideas from our "Life Breathes" episode—but this time with a geologist's eye. I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Marcia Bjornerud, Professor of Geology and author of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World—a book that actually helped shape the creation story we explored.

Quick Recap

For those just joining us: In "Life Breathes," I attempted something a bit audacious—crafting a new creation story that could speak to our current moment while staying true to what we know from science, spirituality, and indigenous wisdom about living in right relationship with the natural world.

We've already explored this work through a theological lens with Dr. Christopher Carter, who reminded us about the seductive pull of creation stories built on redemptive violence and helped us understand why the conditions that originally sparked new creation stories in ancient times might be re-emerging today. (And yes, if you'd like to explore these ideas through other lenses—Buddhist, Islamic, indigenous, atheist, or otherwise—please reach out. All perspectives are welcome in this conversation.)

Why This Conversation Matters

Now I want to turn to the scientific side of things. Because let's be honest—in "Life Breathing Together," I made some moves that will raise eyebrows in certain academic circles. And that's exactly why we need this conversation.

Here are some of the big questions we're wrestling with:

First, the boundary problem: Is it scientifically defensible to extend our definition of "life" beyond biology to include geological and cosmic processes? I'm not just talking metaphorically here—I'm asking whether, ontologically speaking, we might need to expand what we mean by "alive" when biological life literally depends on these other self-regulating systems to exist.

Second, the relationship shift: What happens when we stop viewing cosmic, geological, and biological processes as commodities to be exploited and start seeing them as partners in relationship? Is this just feel-good spirituality, or does it point toward something scientifically important about how complex systems actually work?

Third, the breathing metaphor: I've stretched the notion of "breath" way beyond lungs—extending it to the multi-layered cycles and feedback loops that keep everything synchronized, from quantum mechanics to the cellular pacemakers in our hearts to the geological dance between volcanism and erosion that maintains our mountains to the dynamic relationship between our sun and the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. How far can we push this metaphor before it breaks?

What You'll Discover

As you'll hear, Dr. Bjornerud brings remarkable clarity to these questions—and her responses might surprise you. She'll walk us through what she calls the "geologic habit of mind" and explain why our culture's dysfunctional relationship with time is literally threatening our survival. We'll explore how geology, as a field’s, great intellectual achievement of mapping Earth's 4-billion-plus-year history required not just brilliant minds like Hutton and Darwin, but also "legions of hardy anonymous field mappers" who learned to "turn rocks into verbs."

You'll discover why Dr. Bjornerud believes we need to move beyond our "adolescent pugilistic relationship with nature" and become "law-abiding biogeochemical citizens." We'll examine the sobering parallels between today's environmental crises and the "slow-mo catastrophes" that caused most of Earth's prior great mass extinctions—and why those gradual collapses might be more relevant than asteroid impacts.

Perhaps most intriguingly, we'll venture into controversial territory: Can rocks breathe? Is Earth alive? Dr. Bjornerud will share how mainstream geology has quietly embraced ideas once dismissed as "new agey"—and why she thinks the average geoscientist, if really pushed, would say that "in some sense, yes, Earth is alive."

The Real Stakes

Here's what I think is really at stake: We keep having the wrong conversations about the biggest challenges of our time. We end up fighting because we're using different tools to understand different facets of reality—then talking past each other instead of first creating shared understanding.

The objective methods of science are incredibly powerful, but they have boundaries. Where are those boundaries? What lies beyond those boundaries? What else do we need to know to live well, and how do we learn it if not through scientific processes alone?

Dr. Bjornerud will help us navigate the tension between what has been labeled "Newtonian" thinking—which seeks timeless universal laws—and "Darwinian" thinking, which embraces time, evolution, and the messy complexity of systems that never reach equilibrium. As she puts it, we need "wisdom, not cleverness and technology."

These aren't simple questions, but they're essential ones.

Why Dr. Bjornerud

I'm deeply grateful that Dr. Bjornerud agreed to this conversation, because honestly, I couldn't have asked for a better guide through these questions. Reading Timefulness felt like discovering a kindred spirit—someone equally devoted to rigorous scientific practice and debate, yet clear-eyed about science's boundaries when it comes to living in right relationship with nature.

What captivated me about her book was how she weaves together so many threads: her deep respect for the scientific method as a tool for creating what she calls "the Atlas of Time," her accessible and beautifully clear explanations of geological knowledge, and her invitation into what she terms "the geologic habit of mind"—the practice of timefulness itself. This practice, as she shows, resonates remarkably with other ways of knowing, like the Seven Generation governance structure of the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee. I was also very excited to learn about her more recent book, Turning to Stone, which I am eager to pick up. 

Her arguments about learning to think like a geologist were so compelling that I tried to incorporate that geological perspective directly into the creation story we explored—and as you'll hear, she offers some generous and thoughtful feedback on that attempt.

Who better to help us navigate these big questions than someone who literally thinks in geological time—someone who understands both the power and the limits of scientific thinking when it comes to our relationship with this living planet? Someone who can help us see how steel buildings connect us to extinct rocks prior to the Great Oxygenation Event, and why "all models are wrong but some are useful"?

My sense is that we had exactly the kind of conversation our moment demands: rigorous enough to honor the scientific method, humble enough to acknowledge its boundaries, and imaginative enough to help us find new ways forward.

Let's dig in.

Recap

That wraps up our rich exploration with Dr. Marcia Bjornerud - a conversation that tackled some of the most fundamental questions about how we understand and relate to our living planet.

Throughout our discussion, we grappled with critical tensions that shouldn't be simply resolved, but rather navigated thoughtfully. Take the challenge of using powerful metaphors like "breathing" to help people connect with geological and cosmic processes, while avoiding inappropriate anthropomorphism - or even "animalomorphism," as Dr. Bjornerud reminded us, since lung and gill breathing is a very recent development in geologic terms.

Her guidance here was illuminating: our language is inevitably "freighted with references to our bodies," but anthropomorphism isn't always dangerous. The key is awareness. We can see resonances with nature because we are part of nature, but we shouldn't impose ourselves as the authoritative template for everything. When we generalize the notion of breath into processes of exchange that could take nearly infinite forms - including our own relatively recent type of breathing - we can start to feel the connections between our breath and the breath of Planet Earth and beyond.

We also explored the boundaries of scientific knowledge - when objective methods are incredibly powerful tools, and when we need other ways of knowing to live well. Dr. Bjornerud 's offered distinction shared by Hart previously between "Newtonian" thinking, which seeks timeless universal laws, and "Darwinian" thinking, which embraces time and evolutionary complexity, helped illuminate why our technologies often fail when applied to evolving natural systems. This useful dichotomy kept helping us probe where an orientation towards the timeless might be creeping into our thinking when timefulness is actually what's needed.

Regarding the three core questions I posed at the beginning:

On extending definitions of life beyond biology - we found compelling scientific support for viewing Earth's self-regulatory systems as alive in meaningful ways, but critically, on their own terms. Just as with the anthropomorphism discussion, we can't simply translate how we or other biological life forms live and directly transfer that to the ways various processes on Planet Earth emerge into a type of animacy.

This led us to an emerging recognition from across multiple fields: there seem to be at least two complementary forces at work - one driving towards entropy and equilibrium, another driving towards complexity. The evolutionary dynamic interaction between these tensions, expressed differently at cosmic, geologic, and biological scales, provides a starting point for reimagining our notion of "life." As Dr. Bjornerud noted, most geoscientists, if pushed, would say Earth is alive in a sense - meaning on Earth's own terms, not ours. She described how rocks literally "breathe" through chemical exchanges with their environment - again, in their own sense, on their own terms.

On shifting from exploitation to relationship - we discovered this isn't just feel-good spirituality, but points toward how complex systems actually work. The goal, as she put it, is becoming "law-abiding biogeochemical citizens" rather than maintaining our "adolescent pugilistic relationship with nature."

And on the breathing metaphor - we found it holds up remarkably well when understood as the flow of resources and energy that creates synchrony across scales, from quantum mechanics to galactic dynamics. The key is understanding it as metaphor - we can't take everything true about lung and gill-based respiration and apply it to other types of exchanges. But when we use the breath metaphor properly, we can start to notice areas of synchrony and resonance.

Perhaps most importantly, we recognized that our definitions and models are provisional tools. As statistician George Box said, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." The question becomes: are our current definitions of life, progress, and our place in nature still useful for the challenges we face?

Both Dr. Bjornerud and I found ourselves open to an expanded definition of life that would build above the current biological taxonomy without diminishing what the biological sciences offer. And to state it explicitly, I feel drawn to this for teleological reasons that, my sense is, Dr. Bjornerud was open to as well - to help us understand our purpose and orient toward meaning in life. This reinforced the need for the "Life Breathing Together" creation story that sparked our entire discussion.

Thanks for joining us in this attempt to think more geologically about our moment in deep time.

Book Recommendations from Dr. Bjornerud

Dr. Marcia Bjornerud’s books Timefulness and Turning to Stone

Robert Hazin’s Symphony in C and The Story of Earth

Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain

Plus look up hyper local books about your local geology including field maps and otherwise to get to know your local geology

Look for your state and provincial geological survey and agency that will have free maps and guidebooks

Look up a series of Roadside Geology of [STATE].

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