Worlds Beneath Our Feet Huw Lewis-Jones Relishes a Scientific and Poetic Journey Underground
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COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY Worlds beneath our feet Huw Lewis-Jones relishes a scientific and poetic journey underground. ight years ago, I stood on the barren Siberia — are only part of knowledge as diverse as Indigenous belief shore of an island at the edge of the of climate change’s systems and groundbreaking physics. Arctic Ocean, some 150 kilo metres disturbing chapter in We begin with Britain: Neolithic burial Eoff Russia’s north coast. I had joined a Earth’s restless story of chambers in the Mendip Hills of Somerset, palaeontological expedition as an inter emergence and extinc and North Yorkshire’s Boulby Under national observer — and I was about to see tion. In his formidable ground Laboratory, where physicists such as my first woolly mammoth, coming towards work Underland, land Christopher Toth investigate dark matter a me at full speed on the back of a quad bike. scape writer Robert kilometre below the surface. From there, we The Russian field researcher driving it was Macfarlane explores ride shotgun to potash and rocksalt miners shouting something I later understood the troubling, and clawing their way out under the North Sea. Underland: meant ‘buried treasure’: giant bones like uplifting, human and A Deep Time In northeast London’s Epping Forest, gathered driftwood, swaddled in muddied environmental histo Journey girded by traffic, we learn from plant canvas; a huge, curved tusk. ries beneath our feet. ROBERT MACFARLANE scientist Merlin Sheldrake of tree–fungus Wrangel Island may have been the final He leads us on an Hamish Hamilton mutualism, the mycorrhizal networks that refuge of Mammuthus primigenius, until the underground jour (2019) enable plants to communicate and transfer last died out some 3,700 years ago. Today, ney across cultures nutrients underground. When the pioneer the permafrost is thawing and shorelines are and epochs, to the very limits of the earthly ing research into these networks was first eroding, causing tusks to reemerge from map — and beyond, as new geographies of published in Nature, the whole shape of the ground: a trove that speaks of multiple knowledge are configured. His is a story woodland ecology “shimmered and shifted”, tragedy. But subterranean developments with a cast of subterranean scientists, poet Macfarlane notes (S. W. Simard et al. Nature caused by the Arctic thaw — from methane cavers, philosophizing urban explorers and 388, 579–582; 1997). explosions to rejuvenated anthrax spores in arboreal linguists. It is also an investigation In Paris, we drop into — and crawl, climb, LIBRARY PICTURE MUNOZ/NATURE CARLOS JUAN The Škocjan Caves in Slovenia’s Karst Plateau contain one of the world’s largest known underground canyons. 188 | NATURE | VOL 569 | 9 MAY 2019 ©2019 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. ©2019 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT slide, wade and wedge our way through — the As in previous books, including more complicated and a whole lot more gaps left by undercity quarries whose rock Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Old Ways interesting”, as anthropologist Matthew built the city. (Here, Macfarlane finds strange (2012) and Landmarks (2015), Macfarlane’s Tocheri put it. The ‘underland’ still has much fellowship with explorers of ossuary and approach is holistic. He interleaves poetry to reveal as we struggle to understand our catacomb.) In northern Italy, we are drawn to and literature — the terrain of memory and past and find a way to a viable future. the starless rivers and labyrinthine limestone myth — with modern geology, ecology and But, as Macfarlane admits, “there is dan uplands of the Karst Plateau, which straddles physics, and nature narrative. This is a map gerous comfort to be drawn from deep time”. the Slovenian border. These hollow high ping of “the relationships between landscape That could undermine our determination to lands, he shows, are not just a mine of geo and the human heart”. The writing is lumi turn the tide on humandriven environmen logical wonders; they are a storied landscape nous, intense: at times, a wandering stream tal change, he speculates, because “what does riddled by death and persecution. Thousands winding seawards; our behaviour matter, when Homo sapiens of people died here on the First World War’s “There is at others, precise will have disappeared from the Earth in the Isonzo Front, and in the Foibe Massacres of dangerous and penetrating. It blink of a geological eye?” What’s needed to the Second World War and afterwards; many comfort to be will take me months jar us out of such inertial thinking is a more of their corpses were thrown into sinkholes. drawn from to fully process the thoughtful awareness of where we are now — deep time.” maze of directions the Anthropocene epoch, in which human ENDS OF THE EARTH and story lines in these activities are making their mark on the geo Finally, in the ‘Third Chamber’ section, brilliant notes from underground. logical record. That might yet reawaken us Macfarlane’s curiosity draws him inexorably The day I finished reading it, reports to see ourselves as part of a much larger time toward extremity. He visits the fringes of the were published on Homo luzonensis — an frame: not just as traces in a landscape, but as melting Greenland Ice Sheet, and remote sea extinct species of hominin discovered deep inheritors of it. caves puncturing the stormwracked west underground on the island of Luzon in the We have been terrible custodians so far. ern shores of Norway’s Lofoten archipelago, Philippines (F. Détroit Nature 568, 181–186; As he comes up for air from the depths of where codrich waters are threatened by 2019). After a decade of excavation, there planetary and human history, Macfarlane’s government plans for oil extraction. Finally, are now 7 teeth and 13 bones — part of a core concern is one that many of us share: on Finland’s Olkiluoto Island, Macfarlane femur, the bones of feet and hands — from “Are we being good ancestors?” ■ explores a site soon to entomb spent nuclear at least 3 individuals. Their lives ended some fuel. Gouged, spiralling, half a kilometre into 67,000 years ago, when others in the genus Huw Lewis-Jones is an environmental bedrock, it is a burial site for our entangled Homo, including Neanderthals, walked the historian, expedition leader and senior human history — and a metaphor for a Earth. The find makes our understand lecturer at Falmouth University, UK. planet abused. ings of human evolution “even messier, Twitter: @polarworld ©2019 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. ©2019 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. 9 MAY 2019 | VOL 569 | NATURE | 189 .