Immensity
An immensity. The Potts Colliery, showing the coal breaker, culm piles and other coal processing structures. I clipped this from the website Up The Woods, which documents the presence of the coal industry in the Pennsylvania landscape.
It’s hard to get your head around it. I’ve said it myself as I try to understand the scope and scale of the wildfires in Australia. A super-sized event, couched in numbers that are so large the crisis remains an abstraction, beyond comprehension. Losses so staggering - a billion animal lives - that I cringe from imagining the disaster in its full horror.
For better or worse, we live in the age of immensity. Global-scale environmental disasters are unfolding at extra-human scales of material and time. We are forced to grapple with large numbers if we want understand and respond to what is happening. Here are a few strategies I am using to get my head around it.
To grasp large numbers quickly, I have found it useful to picture a MILLION and build out from there. A million clearly-legible dots can be printed onto a sheet of paper 2’ x 2’. To imagine the magnitude of a BILLION, picture 1,000 sheets. Laid out edge to edge, they would stretch from City Hall to Locust Street. The global human population is 8 billion. Picture 8,000 sheets. They would stretch out for 3 miles, about the distance from City Hall to the ball park
For a rough idea of time magnitude relative to the human experience, try this conceptual trick, good exercise for the imagination:
If all of earth’s 4,000 million (or 4 billion) year history was compressed into one year, humans would appear at the last half-hour of the last day of the last month. We began burning coal big time in the final two seconds of the year. In that geological blink-of-an-eye we increased the density of CO2 in the atmosphere to a point where the earth is warming and global weather patterns are disrupted.
Image from the Iconographic encyclopedia of science, literature, and art by J.G.Hecht, 1852.
The ability to interpret large numbers and understand their magnitude and meaning are critical skills for seeing, decoding and contextualizing our lived reality. I believe that art and imagination can help to re-scale immensities to a size and shape that we CAN get our heads around.
Imagine what could we learn from slime-mold, a life form that survived five catastrophic global extinctions over 2,000 million years of terrestrial existence.
Imagine coal remaining underground and continuing its 300 million year process - sequestering carbon.
I am currently researching, writing about and creating visual art about coal in preparation for an exhibit that I am curating at the Library Company of Philadelphia, May through August 2021. The exhibit will bring together items from the Library Company’s collections of 19th and 20th c. natural history books, geologic surveys, maps and coal ephemera. Historic documents, visual art and material samples of carbon rich materials will be exhibited side-by-side to help interpret the immensities that shape our world.