Being a Part of the Earth’s Epic Story

All of us are living and working and playing and walking on land that has seen truly remarkable things. How easy it can be for us, then, to give a bit more respect to even the seemingly least important stretches of human civilizations today, realizing it certainly hasn’t always been this way, nor will it be this way in the future. How exciting to be a part of Earth’s story right now.

It might be an inevitable human trait, but it seems like we can’t help but feeling like the moments we live in the present are the most important in the entire history of the universe. I know if we actually thought about things logically, of course we’d all agree that that proposition is absolutely ridiculous. I mean what about the tectonic days when meteors struck the Earth and wiped out thousands upon thousands of plants and animals? What about the day when massive I sheets the size of New Jersey broke away from Antarctica or when the last carrier pigeon took its final flight or the last dinosaur took its solitary walk in the changing environment around it?

It’s a defense mechanism really. If humans recognized the whole immensity of time, they very likely would be less interested in passing along their genetic code, so our DNA has been hardwired with self-importance. But this doesn’t have to be an either or resolution. We can have important events in our own lives that are life altering for us while also respecting and understanding that the Earth has been the stage for some truly spectacular things.

I would dare say, that over the Earth’s few billion-year life, every inch of the Earth has been the scene of something grand. All we have to do is look past the few hundred years that most people have been living in communities with any conception of the idea of the mundane. Before then, there was no urban sprawl. There was no way that people could even desire to escape to or from suburbia because even the concept of suburbs didn’t exist yet.

And if we look back much further, to times before our own species roamed the vast landscape, remarkable things were happening all around the places we now call Denver or London or Bangladesh. Massive migrations, immersive floods, ferocious wildfires, earthquakes and islands rising out of the sea after volcanic eruptions, trees we have never known grew in landscapes no human has ever seen or experiences, all were circling and moving and adapting and thriving and dying in the swirl that is and was our planet.

So how do we keep from feeling like such an insignificant piece of the whole commotion of the Earth when our lives, our civilizations, and our own species existence is less than a blink of an eye in comparison to the age of even our own planet? I’d say we can start by respecting wherever we are and wherever we live because, again, every inch of the planet has played some critical role. Then how amazing would it be to explore the natural history of your current place on the planet—your local neighborhood and community.

I grew up in Utah and while I’m glad I have learned to love the state, it didn’t seem to be very important in the even the grand scheme of humanity. I remember learning about early settlers and Native American settlements long before them and a bit about how the landscape changed during the ice ages and since I was really into dinosaurs I found some cool facts about the kinds of dinosaurs that lived in the area. Honestly, the first thing that I remember being exceptionally proud of my Home state back then was that it was the center point for Lake Bonneville.

Lake Bonneville was a massive prehistoric lake several magnitudes larger than Lake Superior. Scientists believe it was so massive in fact that the weight of the water actually bent the Earth’s crust underneath it. When I heard about that, I was absolutely blown away. And for the next several weeks, I couldn’t learn enough about this amazing body of water. How did it form? What animals lived in its waters? Where did it go? Little by little I got answers to all of these questions and now when I hike in the foothills along the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, I get a special thrill seeing the benchmarks in the mountainside where old shorelines used to exist for thousands of years of this enthralling lake. I love learn about the Great Salt Lake which is the remnants of the lake.

Scientists believe that there was an event where a large opening, a weakening in the rock and ice face, that caused enormous amounts of watcher gush out of the lake which triggered its shrinking. That would have been a site to see millions and millions of cubic feet of water gushing out at such a massive scale. It must have been absolutely breath-taking. And that happened in Utah where I grew up.

I guarantee all of us are living and working and playing and walking on land that has seen truly remarkable things. How easy it can be for us, then, to give a bit more respect to even the seemingly least important stretches of human civilizations today, realizing it certainly hasn’t always been this way, nor will it be this way in the future. How exciting to be a part of Earth’s story right now.