1. Living with Fossils

Fossils live deep in memory. Growing up in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, my family lived in what could be charitably called an “urban environment.” Even the yard behind our six-flat was paved in concrete. There was no money for distant family vacations so neighboring Indiana became an occasional escape to nature; our getaway destination maybe once a summer was the Indiana Dunes State Park. I have vivid memories of driving in our small, green, ageless Datsun along the Chicago Skyway, windows rolled down because it was hot, but then quickly rolled back up again when we reached the acrid smoke from the steel refineries and paint plants and the sickly smell of the massive trash dump that grew taller each year.

When we cleared Gary, the air improved and the coastal highway became surrounded by forest of oaks, hickories, and cottonwoods. Sand dusted the soil and now and again we’d catch tempting glimpses of sun-sparkled blue water between stands of trees. My first love was the dunes themselves. Dunes are wonders, sympoietic combinations of strong northern winds, ample beachfront, and the sturdy blades and rhizomic roots of the humble beachgrass that captures airborne sand and sculpts it into giant hills and ridges. Climbing to the top of a dune was arduous work, especially for a child raised in the vertically challenged Midwest. But I can remember no greater achievement than summitting a dune and no greater thrill than running headfirst down one. Each step forward felt like flying before gravity sank my feet deep into the vertiginous sandside.

A timid swimmer, I spent my time on the water’s edge while my sisters cavorted in the deeper water. I hunted pebbles and shells, looking for marvels. Once in a while, that close attention was rewarded with a fossil: a gift from the Silurian period, 400 million years ago, when what is now Lake Michigan was a shallow saltwater sea teeming with brachiopods, cephalopods, and corals. I learned much later that I also had glaciers to thank. It was they who had scoured the landscape during the last Ice Age and churned those Silurian fossil sediments to the surface.

Finding fossils in the surf is precarious play, a vivid example of the need to be present for a moment in time. As a wave withdraws one has only a few seconds to recognize and make contact with the deep history of the planet before the water returns again, swirling foam and refraction. Tantalizing hints of form emerge and dissolve, perhaps never to reappear. A fossil find always felt to me more like a cosmic blessing and less the due reward of hard work. Bending over, wandering the surf, I recall encountering favosite coral fossils, the occasional small brachiopod shell, and more rarely the impressions of zooid colonies known as lace coral. Though I didn’t realize it at the time I also encountered remarkable stones that revealed the invisible lines of stromalite striations when wet. Their aquatic transformation was mysterious and magical: what I learned only later is that these stromalites were once constellations of photosynthesizing cyanobacteria, the origin of all oxygenic life on the planet and also the oldest of all fossils. Cyanobacteria share a claim to fame with Homo sapiens as the only two species to have decisively impacted the lifeworld of every other species with whom they shared the planet.

My most precious find was a large, beautiful cluster of crinoids, looking like a handful of cheerios embedded in gray-black stone. Once upon a time, they would have been crowned with colorful feathery pinnules that filtered plankton from the sea just like today’s sea lilies and feather stars. Indeed, crinoids are one of those remarkable evolutionary success stories, so resilient and adaptable that they haven’t evolved much in the past 250 million years. Crinoids can live equally well in tidal pools as in deep ocean trenches; they sense movement, light, and food; they move and swim and sway, they provide shelter for smaller fish and shrimp.

Fossils have likely touched all our lives in some small way; my memories are no more than grains of sand when considered in terms of the rich cultural history of fossils. Historian Adrienne Mayor argues that recent archaeological and paleontological findings reinforce theories that exposed fossils inspired the imagination of some mythological creatures.1 The beak-nosed protoceratops could have offered a model for the Scythian griffin, mammoth skulls may have served as models for the Greek cyclops, and so on. Many have also speculated that Chinese and European dragon myths were inspired by fossils of large aquatic and avian creatures.

We know that fossils, especially inland marine fossils, attracted the attention of naturalists and philosophers for thousands of years. A common mystery mused about by many observers was how shells had found their way to the tops of mountains far from any obvious body of water. Philosophers like Xenophanes (570–478 BCE) and Shen Kuo (1031–1095) contemplated fossil evidence and used it to discern the dynamic character of land- and seascapes. In Shen’s case, fossils helped contribute to an insightful theory of climatological change. As such, fossils were an important catalyst of early geology. But they also offered insights into the nature of life and death. The great Persian philosopher Ibn Sīnā (981–1037) was evidently inspired by fossils to theorize a process of mineralization in his remarkable philosophical treatise, Kitāb al-shifāʾ (The Book of Healing), “If what is said concerning the petrifaction of animals and plants is true, the cause of this (phenomenon) is a powerful mineralizing and petrifying virtue which arises in certain stony spots, or emanates suddenly from the earth during earthquakes and subsidences, and petrifies whatever comes into contact with it.”2

The word “fossil” first appeared in French and English in the mid-sixteenth century, deriving from the Latin fossilis, which literally meant dug out of the earth. “Fossil” was a broad concept in its first century or two of existence, referring to anything interesting or valuable with a subterranean past. For example, the book that has as good a claim as any to coining the modern term—the Swiss physician and polymath Conrad Gessner’s 1565, De rerum fossilium (On fossil objects)—mostly concerned minerals. It was also the first European scientific text to analyze fossil specimens and to compare them explicitly with living organisms. Gessner noted the similarity, for example, between fossil echinoids and living sea urchins. But the title page of the book features engravings of jeweled rings and gems, suggesting that the true lure of things dug out of the earth was the value and beauty they promised. A Sir Thomas Palmer published a book in 1606 praising the virtues of travel for the “better advancement” of European gentlemen, so long as that travel was conducted both honorably and profitably. On the ledger of profits, Palmer advised that travelers pay close attention to countries’ commodities and especially “things hid in the veines and wombe of the earth . . . namely, the Mines of mettals and Fossiles whereof there are such sundrie species.”3

In this way, “fossil” indexed multiple interests of Early Modern Europe. On the one hand, fossils played a key role in an evolving scientific understanding of planetary forces, histories, and life. As historian Martin Rudwick writes, “In the late 17th and early eighteenth centuries, arguments about the interpretation of the various kinds of ‘fossils’ were almost as intense as those concerned with, say, the basic forces of nature, the ultimate structure of matter, or the essential character of life itself.”4 However, on the other hand, fossils captured a growing interest in discovering, unearthing, and exploiting subsurface resources. This latter confluence of meanings—minerals, valued resources, fossils—is what staged the coining of the term “fossil fuel” in the mid-eighteenth century. Literary theorist Karen Pinkus reminds us that the word “fuel” derives from the old French foaile, referring to a bundle of firewood. “Fuel, we might say, begins very early, as a form of combustion inextricable from the hearth, one of the most primeval human traces made on the face of the earth . . .”5 dating back to hunter-gatherer times. “Fossil fuel,” on the other hand, was a prototypical modern and industrial concept referring specifically to coal and peat dug out of the earth to be burned in smelting operations and, later, to fuel steam engines.

“Fossil” today maintains a similar dual meaning. On the one hand, we associate the term with paleontological discoveries, especially dinosaurs (another great childhood obsession, by the way). The second meaning denotes fossil fuels, sources of concentrated energy that have brought both great luxury and misery to the world over the past four centuries. What I wish to spotlight in this book is how fossil fuels, and the forms of cultural life associated with them, have come to be fossilized in global civilization.

Fossilization has its own curious conceptual history. Ibn Sīnā’s theory of a powerful “petrifying virtue” at work in the world belongs to a much longer scientific tradition of trying to comprehend biological processes of formation. One can find embryologies in ancient Egyptian, Indian, and Greek philosophies, debates as to what kind and how many eggs and seeds were necessary to form lives and to give lives form. Aristotle’s biology maintained, for example, that a seed holds within itself the telos (end or purpose) of an adult plant; the seed always contains a premonition of the mature biological form. This teleological understanding of formation evolved over time and expanded to include models for the association of all life forms. It was part of the medieval Christian belief in a “great chain of being,” the alchemical reasoning for transubstantiation and the curious preformationist belief, popular in the seventeenth century, that sperms contained miniaturized adult beings known as homunculi. Aristotelian teleology filtered into vitalist philosophy and pre-Darwinian orthogenetic evolutionary models, like Lamarck’s, which saw a pouvoir de la vie (enabling force of life) driving organisms to inexorably evolve from simplicity toward complexity.

Historical teleology became the signature of arguably the most influential European philosopher of the nineteenth century, G. W. F. Hegel, and the many evolutionary thinkers that came after him. Hegel wove the Aristotelian imagination of seeds and final forms together with a vision of history advancing through a dialectical cycle of formalization and negation. Fossilization was a crucial aspect of Hegel’s model of world history. Culture was like a seed that contained within itself the homunculus of an adult form, the state, which concretized a people’s spirit and will. Once a people achieved their purpose in the struggle of history, they could be expected to coast along for a while in a fossilized, routinized period Hegel described as “formal duration.”6 Meanwhile, some new people was being born and maturing to negate the achievements of the old world, setting the stage for a new world-historical chapter of conflict and progress. Later Victorian era evolutionists lacked Hegel’s nuanced sense of dialectical contingency. Believing they were already securely on the summit of history, the Victorians gave voice to the worldview of late nineteenth-century European empire, which saw a strikingly linear course to human development culminating in modern European civilization. The progress of technology epitomized European modernity, constantly revolutionizing life through the innovation of new machines for industry, control over the natural world, and for the accumulation of wealth and luxury. Everything and everyone else was a fossil according to late nineteenth-century Europe, a historical leftover to be trampled or swept aside by the juggernaut of European modernity. Not incidentally, this juggernaut depended wholly on fossil fuels for its operation and expansion.

In contrast to nineteenth-century teleology, what is striking about contemporary scientific accounts of fossilization is their emphasis on how rare and conditional fossilization actually is. It is far more common for a living being to die and then rapidly be dissembled for its component parts by its ecological neighbors than it is for its form to persist. Fossils usually require rapid sedimentation followed by high temperature and pressure conditions over a long period of time. Petrified wood, for example, only forms when, to cite one scientific description, “Ancient trees buried in sediments or volcanic ash . . . petrify when silica-rich water circulates through the wood and slowly replaces its cellular structure with jasper, chalcedony and, less commonly, opal.”7 Ancient zooplankton can only become petroleum under a specialized combination of temperature, pressure, and rock formation. At lower temperature and pressure, the plankton will become waxy kerogen or tarry bitumen. But if it’s too hot and compressed, they will become natural gas. Then, the surrounding rock must be porous and permeable enough (like sandstone or limestone) for petroleum to stably accumulate. Finally, a more impermeable rock layer above is needed to trap the petroleum in place and to prevent its migration to the surface. Despite all the power oil exerts above ground today, it is actually a geologically precarious creation.

I find it encouraging to consider the fragility and precarity of fossils. If fossilization is the exception rather than the rule in questions of planetary life and death, then perhaps it’s advisable to challenge the long philosophical and historical tradition of thinking about the progress of civilization as an evolution of stable forms from greater simplicity to greater complexity and even perfection. Instead, we should pay more attention to the constancy and contingency of worldly metamorphosis. As philosopher and historian of science Donna Haraway puts it, “Critters—human and not—become with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.”8 Form still matters, of course. But it is just an aspect of the tangling of life and death, the whirl of “lifedeath” as I like to think about it. So, form is neither to be revered nor feared. In that spirit, two lessons from thinking about fossils and fossilization guide this book. The first is that fossilization happens for specific contingent reasons that can be reconstructed with care. The second is that even the most imposing fossils are themselves susceptible to transformation, often becoming surprisingly brittle once they are removed from the environments that gave them shape.

A civilization beyond fossil fuels still seems difficult to grasp, in no small part because of how completely fossil fuels have seeped into our cultural imagination, mineralizing visions of the future in the shape of the fossil fueled past. Just like petrified wood, the cultural forms generated by fossil fuels are vivid and beautiful in their own way. But they also represent ancient life forms that, unlike crinoids, are poorly adapted to further duration on earth. The abundance of petrofossils is now choking out the life possibilities not just of humans but of the vast majority of species on the planet. It is more and more obvious that this fossil-fueled civilization has no sustainable future. It perpetuates an ecological Ponzi scheme stealing away the lives of countless species and the well-being of future generations in exchange for contemporary human conveniences (shared unequally even among humans!). Petrofossils need to decompose and dissolve. And ditto many of the carbofossils and sucrofossils that belong to the same petrified tree of history. This book tells the story of the rise of fossil-fueled civilization, explores what continues to stick us in its ooze, and explains what will release us from the quicksand of its past. Another reassuring thing I learned in the course of researching this book is that you can’t really drown in quicksand like in the old Hollywood films—liberation is slow, but escape from the remains of the past is not only possible, it is often enough the course of things.

That’s of little comfort when one is stuck deep, however. So let’s begin wriggling ourselves free. We’ll first look backward at the origins of the current ooze. We need to understand its composition if we wish to free ourselves. In the ebb and flow, the surf and sand of history, we are going to become fossil hunters.