Chapter 17 - Deep Time Visible

Summary

This chapter explores a selection of new nature writing by Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, Adam Nicolson, David Gange and Amy Liptrot, which features Scottish islands at the British archipelago’s farthest Atlantic edges. These accounts speak to the cognitive and imaginative challenges of the Anthropocene, bringing deep time and planetary interconnections into view, evoking temporal scales that range from 600 million years in the past to millions of years in the future, oceanic tides that move to the pull of celestial bodies, and animals whose migrations trace lines across the globe. They also enable us to think through more elusive Anthropocene effects – its uncanniness, and the way in which it requires us to imagine ourselves as spectres haunting the deep time of the future. At the same time, these works offer a glimpse of alternative, interim narratives in which we learn to be better ancestors for human generations still to come.