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'Earth Dramas' Back Pages

In April 2014 I published a book entitled ‘Earth Dramas: Ancient Mysteries and Modern Controversies’ on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), which takes advantage of the worldwide reach of Amazon. The author sets the price of a Kindle download, and for those without Kindles, an app is available to download free so that Kindle e-books can be read on other platforms, including smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers, including my beloved iMac. I set the price as low as permitted so as not to put off potential readers – far cheaper than I would be able to achieve through a conventional publisher of printed books.
I got interested in the way that science proceeds when researching Snowball Earth – the idea that about 700 million years ago the Earth was encased in a global shroud of ice. I came to increasingly realize that science is a temple built with human hands. It is not an apparatus that relentlessly cranks out answers from ice-cold observations swallowed like mouthfuls of krill into a whale. There is no linear arrow of scientific progress.
The collected set of ancient mysteries and modern controversies from the fields of Earth and environmental science in ‘Earth Dramas’ illustrate how the scientific enterprise is affected by a range of social, cultural and psychological factors. I came to realize that he undergrowth of science is a shady place where different interpretations are fermented and hide from the light of day. Scientists become actors in a drama with a storyline they did not themselves compose. The drama is not some inevitable part of a natural order, but is the creation of human thinking and interaction.
Yet this should not lead to a scepticism about the importance of the discoveries of science. Science has been fantastically successful over the last few centuries, and the use of world-pictures does not strongly undermine the objectivity of a result that has been fought hard for, weighed, tested and replicated, and passed into the hallowed ground of acceptance. Nevertheless, the road of scientific discovery is tortuous and rocky.
The 12 main chapters of ‘Earth Dramas’ give a flavour of some of the dramas that have arisen in the past and continue to strongly influence current controversies about the Earth and its environment. Understanding these dramas is essential for the effective translation of scientific discovery to society, so that we avoid a ‘dark sarcasm in the classroom’ (to use a phrase taken from Pink Floyd’s The Wall).
Each chapter illustrates different aspects of the scientific enterprise, yet there is much common ground. Some of the examples are long disputes that eventually converged onto a broadly held consensus, while others are contemporary areas of often cantankerous disagreement. In several examples, the roles of external agencies are illuminated, whether they are multinational corporations, the media or the demands of society at large. Topics covered are continental drift, the phoney war between science and religion over evolution, the Gaia hypothesis of a self-regulating planet, the recognition of an Age of Man (the ‘Anthropocene’), the controversy about global glaciation in the past known as ‘Snowball Earth’, the age of the Earth, mass extinctions and the demise of the dinosaurs, stories of great floods, including Noah’s Flood, the deep circulation of the Earth, the subterranean architecture of the sedimentary rocks beneath our feet and the carbon crisis that threatens global climate change. I conclude the book with some thoughts as to why scientific findings are commonly greeted with mistrust and cynicism by society, and propose that science needs to be humanized rather than ‘imposed’.
The great thinker Jacob Bronowski, whose 13-part 1973 TV series ‘The Ascent of Man’ was shown when I was an undergraduate geology student at Aberystwyth (Wales), wrote in his 1951 book The Commonsense of Science: ‘It has been one of the most destructive modern prejudices that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests’. This statement is at first difficult to understand, since it is self-evident that science and art are vastly different in their methods and protocols and tackle different aspects of the world around us. But if I get Bronowski’s meaning correctly, science is not a copy of Nature but a recreation of her. The mental processes that lead to great art and literature share the same creative juices as those leading to the breakthroughs in science. Bearing in mind that scientific findings are commonly greeted with mistrust and cynicism in the publics, an appreciation of these ‘human’ factors in the scientific process, especially by scientists themselves, would, I think, help to dampen the dysfunctional relationship between scientific discovery and the society in which science is embedded.
With this in mind, in each chapter I develop the narrative through a combination of historical detail, portraits of the main players, brief philosophical perspectives, story-telling and poetry. In the front pages, I wrote the following:
‘Unnoticed by the hawthorn hedge that lines the field,When winter winds bring their piercing chill,And by the vine-twisted oak when dying flames of day,In golden shafts of light on woodland carpet lay.The rising moon whose halo hides the ancient stars,Makes silver shadows after fading twilight’s hours,While dew-covered ground sleeps dark, serene,But science has it never seen.The winding river does not know,The direction science urges it to flow.’
'Earth Dramas: Ancient Mysteries and Modern Controversies' is available from http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JQAL0X6. The free Kindle app is found at http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000493771.

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