A Conservationist Manifesto

Two Stones

Two Stones for Ursula K. Le Guin \ A man turning 60 may lose perspective on time, seeing all change as loss, counting his aches as if they were worry beads, anticipating the chill wind of his last hour instead of breathing in the present moment. And so, to regain his grip on time, to console himself for loss, and to remind himself of the great story in which he is taking part, he may consult with rocks. This man is all the more likely to do so if he has been collecting pebbles and cobbles and shards since he was a boy delving in the glacial gravels of Ohio, and if, from his wide-ranging travels, he has filled boxes and bowls on his writing desk with a medley of stones. In these days surrounding my sixtieth birthday, the two lumps of rock I touch most frequently are both gritty and gray, and each one fits comfortably in the palm of my hand. One of them is more than 300 million years old; the other is less than half my age. The older of the two is siltstone, plucked from a creek bed near my home here in southern Indiana. It was laid down as sediment in the shallow inland sea that flooded the central basin of the North American plate for hundreds of millions of years. Collisions between North America and other continental plates have lifted up a series of mountain ranges where the Appalachians now rise, each range in its youth towering as high as today’s Himalayas, and each one in turn eroding away under the friction of ice and rain and wind. Some 320 million years ago, fragments from one of those earlier mountain ranges tumbled down rivers until the bits were ground finer than sand, and the slurry of grit was flushed into the inland sea, where it settled to the bottom, mixed with the fallen husks of marine creatures, and eventually hardened into the scaly siltstone I hold in my hand. The fossilized shapes in my stone are mostly crinoids, an ancient class of animals with a slender stem and a flower-like mouth, more reminiscent of lilies than of their true relatives, the sea urchins and starfish. The stem was a column made up of flat, round segments, each with a hole in the center, like a washer or a candy lifesaver. In crinoid Caring for Earth 62 fossils, these segments often appear singly, sometimes in short stacks, rarely as intact bodies, yet each of these fragments once formed part of a whole creature, every cell attuned to every other cell, as fully alive in its moment as I am in mine. Even though my sample of siltstone is young compared to the age of Earth, and even younger compared to the universe, measured on a human scale it is incomprehensibly old. To curl my fingers around a third of a billion years is comforting, for it reminds me that everything flows, mountains as well as rivers, entire species flourishing and perishing, the hardest rock yielding as surely as a man’s bones. \ The younger of the two stones I handle most often these days is rough, angular, and surprisingly light, as filled with holes as a sponge. When rubbed, it gives off the faint smell of wood ash. It’s a glassy mineralcalledpumice ,whichvolcanoeshavebeenmakingsinceEarthwas new. This particular piece was formed on May 18, 1980, when Mount St. Helens erupted. The eruption was one of the most violent on record, exerting a force comparable to five hundred Hiroshima bombs. It blew away the top thirteen hundred feet of the mountain, spewing mud and volcanic debris over hundreds of square miles in southwestern Washington, damming rivers, smothering lakes, snapping or scorching millions of trees, killing countless animals and plants. Fifty-seven people died, including a young volcanologist who was monitoring earthquakes in an effort to protect others from harm. At 8:32 that morning, he radioed his last message to the U.S. Geological Survey base, crying, “Vancouver , Vancouver, this is it!” Within minutes a plume rose fifteen miles above the crater and over the next fortnight winds carried the ash around the globe, coating all the continents with a film of dust. Soon after the volcano quieted down again in the summer of 1980, scientistsreturnedtotheslopes,expectingtofindalifelessmoonscape Two Stones 63...