Deep History May Disquiet Us By: Michael Gaffney When I was a kid on Long Island, I was fascinated by a five-million-pound boulder that sat near my elementary school. It was called “shelter rock,” so the story went, because it served as a dwelling for the indigenous peoples of the region, before settler colonialists murdered and displaced them. Shelter rock was always shrouded in mystery for me, not merely because it recalled a violent past I hardly understood, but also because of its sheer mass: the size of house, it seemed to gather everything around it in orbit, it “took dominion everywhere,” as the poet Wallace Stevens once said of a jar in the wilderness. I learned more about the boulder one year in elementary school. My teacher, gesturing toward the classroom window, invited my class to imagine a two-mile-high ice sheet on the horizon and explained how it would have slowly carried the granite rock to that precise location 20,000 years ago. Shelter rock was quite unlike the outcrops I saw on mountains or highways, revelations of erosion and road building; it was unmoored from the Earth, a glacial erratic scraped from the bedrock somewhere and deposited toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch along with soil and other remnants. Over thousands of years, the rock was surrounded by biological life in a process of ecological succession that is still in progress: trees, grasses, and wildlife moving northward to reclaim the space once presided over by the Laurentide ice sheet and its tundra. Learning about the past of Long Island in that way was my first lesson in what some call “deep history,” which encompasses geological and evolutionary history, and the history of humans before the invention of writing, all narratives of the past that are typically ignored by history textbooks. To think through the deep historical lenses of geology and evolutionary biology changes the way you confront a place. The contemporary geology of Long Island, for example, is now determined by biological forces: it is dominated by those human settlers who spread, so the current thinking goes, in waves out of Africa, only arriving in North America 13,000 years ago (or possibly much earlier, according to current research), and on Long Island even more recently. There is, it has been said, now a distinctly human layer on the planet—a strata to which the term “Anthropocene” has been controversially attached. To build the structures of New York City, materials like concrete, steel, copper, brick, and glass were assembled over hundreds of years. A collection of minerals, the city is a geological formation in its own right. And like any geological formation, this new form of human “exoskeleton,” as the philosopher Manuel DeLanda might say, allowed new forms of ecological systems to emerge, with pigeons, rats, cockroaches, and so many trillions of microbes thriving in novel niches. But the term Anthropocene also refers to the distinct changes humans—more specifically, those in industrialized nations—made to the atmosphere. And it is in this sense that the historical irony of Long Island’s deep history is hard to miss. My home is one of the many coastal areas threatened by the rising oceans and superstorms of global warming, a space that in the deep future may no longer be able to sustain terrestrial life. Long Island weaves together the glacial past and the warming future, a landscape composed by one form of climate change and fated to dissolution by the other.
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