Column by George Sibley
Climate – June 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE ARGUMENT about evolution goes on and on. Is the earth and its abundance of life the product of “an intelligent design,” a “vast eternal plan,” or is it just the fractal unfolding of an exfoliation of things that started happening in the random generation of possibilities in a universe where who knows what else is going on?
On a beautiful day here in the mountains, it is easy to get seduced by the “intelligent design” theory. These mountains, so magnificent to the eye, couldn’t be just the mindless consequence of large lumps of crusted magma crumpling into each other, or great humps of rock being cut and shaped by the same random forces of wind and water that are destroying the paint job on the house. No, they must mean something; they are so beautiful they must be intentional, part of some vast eternal plan!
But when a beautiful day turns into beautiful day after beautiful day, and the world under our glorious sun starts to shrivel in that excess of beautiful days we call “drought,” it gets harder to believe in “intelligent design.” And, speaking only for myself, beyond that belief in intelligent design life seems even more miraculous — just the fact that life has happened, is happening, that life somehow manages to come into being in the face of the mindless elemental forces at work in the universe.
I went out to the high desert, the Colorado Plateau south of Moab, a couple of weekends ago, with some other students and biologist John Sowell, who has just written a book on desert ecology. I thought that the desert might make more sense with a geologist along — there, where all those exposed layers of rock tell their stories of time and the interaction of wind and water and fire and rock.
“To geologists,” Sowell joked, “life is just ‘fluff’ covering up the interesting stuff.”
But it was an interesting weekend to be exploring the “fluff” that so lightly covers those layered masses of geology. For one thing, the weather was lousy. We’d gone hoping for a day in the sun after a Gunnison winter, but we woke up to a heavy, steady wind, and a layer of dark clouds moving in. All day that wind blew, and what it was heavy with was time; we could taste the micro-increments of time gritting between our teeth. Sometimes the wind carried snow, light dry snow that didn’t get us wet, or even dampen the slickrock or the moving dust that passed for earth there. This wasn’t water working with earth to bless life; it was water working with wind against earth, driven into cracks and nicks where it froze that night (20° F when we woke up) to chip away a little more rock.
But we were out there on the rock all day, anyway, wearing everything we’d brought, looking at the thin fluff of life there. From the multi-colored lichen so ingratiated with the rock as to be inseparable, to the bunchy grass growing out in rings from centers where it had exhausted its sparse nutrients (like a modern city, I thought), to an impenetrable mass of willow and snakeweed where water obviously collected, to an incredible old juniper — maybe fifteen feet in circumference, maybe five hundred years old, with half of its roots hanging exposed and dead in a gully where some summer flood’s excesses would eventually topple it — we looked at the fluff of life trying to hang on under the worst circumstances imaginable.
Why did it bother? One had to wonder — as we hung on ourselves, under an occasional windblast that jarred the very soul. When we sat down to “journalize,” some of us found a place on the lee side of one of those stubby stunted trees where one function of fluff becomes blessedly obvious: it combs the violence out of what wind and water are trying to do to the impudent rock thrust up into their domain.
IT’S SUCH A STUPID WAR. Earth’s fire is forever pushing rock up into the domain of wind and water which are forever tearing it down. Or sometimes (like now) the sun’s fire and wind unite for a while to destroy what the earth and water are trying to establish under a separate treaty — mountains today, shallow seas tomorrow. Then the whole magnificently mindless business starts over; drought to flood to ice to drought, now dunes, now seafloor, upthrust to downtear to upthrust. If this is design, then I need a new definition for madness: that process of the designing mind whereby, as the Marquis said, “No sooner do I think I know something than I begin to doubt it.”
But life occurs, fluff in the form of protoplants and plants, combing the violence out of the elementally stupid struggle of fire and earth, wind and water, making impossible little beachheads — like that miraculous place where the juniper seems to grow right out of solid rock halfway up the smooth face of Entrada.
I’ve been trying to think of something intelligent to say in a time of drought. But all I can come up with is a hope, that maybe — because we can at least imagine it, if only “through a glass darkly” — an intelligent design will eventually emerge out of the fluff which is so bravely trying to moderate the elemental chaos that gives us drought and Enron, glaciers and global warming, and all of the other consequences of mindless elemental contention.
But I sure don’t see it yet.
George Sibley teaches and writes in Gunnison, where he will be in charge of the Western Water Conference this summer.