Geologists: Face the Rocks

Although I write about Earth from the geologist's side, I've never said that geologists have the One Best viewpoint. Builders, miners and children at the beach have prior claims on the landscape; artists and visionaries do too. Earth scientists benefit from hearing the testimony of these others, just as (we hope) others will gain by learning some of what geologists know. At the very least, the naive question of a nongeologist can set the scientist's mind off on a novel trail. When we friends of geology are open to the concerns and pleasures of the public, we gain by learning what the public wants. From that knowledge, we can win allies in our own quests.

One viewpoint on Earth that has priority over geology is the basic human instinct to detect faces. From this instinct inevitably arises a universal capacity to assign personality to the nonhuman world. My theory is that this inborn tendency is part of what gives rise to animistic religions, sacred places and, early in the last century, a fad for stone faces great and small. Maybe the collapse of New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountains five years ago marked the last vestige of that old secular fad. But stone faces have been rediscovered by Randy and Judy Brown in their Colorado countryside. Randy recently blogged, "We had always enjoyed the beauty all around us. When we started to see the faces in the rock formations it caused us to slow down even more. We would be so taken in by the rocks surrounding us, time seemed to go away. It is a feeling like no other."

Geologists, watch out for those faces. Spare them from your hammers. Who is to say that the messages geologists see in the rocks, however informed they are by training and insight, have more human validity?

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This is part of Accretionary Wedge #10
_{Photo courtesy Judy Brown}