Geology Museum, Warsaw

GEOLOGY MUSEUM
There is nothing more unnatural than a natural history museum…Till now.
In the Anthropocene it’s only natural that nature is now in a history museum.


​

Like all geology museums I’m greeted by a massive dinosaur—a security guard gesturing to me that admission is free.

In the main hall are the familiar cast of reassembled dinosaur skeletons—cheeky fun for the kids or idiotic selfies for adults. I don’t see the creatures from a previous epoch staged in attack position as a threat, instead, I see them as laughing at us. They’ve been watching the follies of our species, waiting patiently as skeletons do since we put them in museums. Now they’re getting their revenge for having perished by extinction by welcoming us to our own extinction. 


An infestation of children squeak and shriek throughout the hall on a required school trip. Their rubber sneakers, made from an even deeper layer of geology, taunt and tease the extinct displays of dinosaurs around them. The woolly mammoth imagines swatting them away with their tusks. The life-size dilophosaurus model drools but waits because it knows it’s playing the long game and he understands what the kids are saying because he’s Polish. Or at least he was found in the mountains of what is now called Poland—a country which itself has gone politically extinct a couple of times, the longest for a geologically mere 123 years. The dilophosaurus is 200 million years old, a time gap neither the children nor I can fully grasp. That’s another thing that’s so unnatural about natural history: perspective. No species has mapped out the timeline of the planet before. Maybe by using the dominate imperative of reason and taking such a god-like view of earth we have destroyed it. Such a perspective should be a humbling experience, but we are not humble creatures. We are still newborns on the geological timeline. A blip in earth’s history. Our species appeared 300 thousand years ago, give or take—that’s .007% of the earth’s existence. Dinosaurs lived much longer—165 million years. We were insignificant till we decided to change the course of the earth. 

For 165 million years dinosaurs were stomping down remains of previous eras, getting a layer of earth ready for our arrival. Then us clever apes came down from the trees, giving other species the middle finger and started digging with our opposable thumbs. What we dig up for fuel is older than the dinosaurs, they are not the fossils we burn. What fuels our industries and comfort comes from the Carboniferous (coal-bearing) period—so named for coal. We give names based on their use to us. And in the war of Enlightenment, of reason over myth, those who do the naming win the war. To name is to conquor. We call ourselves Homo Sapiens after all (wise + man). To give a name to a species, to an epoch, to alone have the power to create such a category is not just to identify it but to catalogue it, dominate it and now to make extinct. Naming is the violence reason wields. Natural history is human history.

Carboniferous (coal) Period was also the age of Amphibians but who cares. It came before the Mesozoic (middle-life), or the age of reptiles, you know, during the Paleozoic era… It’s all on a graph written in Polish. I’m sure the school-aged carbon-based lifeforms bumping about the museum know all this, that’s why they're here right? The bravest of which want to touch the dilophosaurus, their teacher says no. I identify with a lone boy sitting between display cases, his backpack spilled out on the ground like they both simply surrendered to gravity. He’s also the source of the regular clattering sound I’m happy and concerned to have finally discovered—he’s dropping his plastic bic pen on the marble ground over and over. Not with Newtonian curiosity but with radiating boredom. Hold the pen up, drop it. Hold it up. Drop it. There’s a metaphor somewhere in this. The kids are here for a short time, their attention spans extinct in the era of smartphones. The span of the age of coal, Carboniferous, lasted 60 million years. It’s the geological period that’s now powering the lights above, the heating inside, the TV monitors displaying ignored information. But 60 million years of a compressed period of planetary life is not enough to run our world at its present rate—some say profitable crude oil production peaked in 2006. Today we consume globally a what-the-fuck 102 million barrels per day. A barrel is 35 gallons. Imagine that, if even possible. End-to-end 100 million barrels would wrap around the earth two and a half times. 
The more we burn the more we want and the quicker we destroy.


Evolution is slow and normally so is extinction. But 65 million years ago, as the kids here today are leaning, an asteroid hit the earth and poof went the dinosaurs. The asteroid did not kill the species, the resulting climate change did. We, such wise species, have learned to read the earth’s records: There have been five mass extinction events and some say we are now in, and cause of, a the sixth mass extinction. We have rapidly, violently, left the unusual climatic comfort of the Holocene (whole + new) by drawing a line in the sand, in the rocks, in the ice, in ocean sediment with our presence. We are the volcanos of the of the End Permian, the asteroid of the End Cretaceous. We are the first species to consciously sign our name on the earth’s guest book. But knowledge always comes late in history, in life, reflective, at the teeny-tiny end of the geologic timeline. We are fueling the end of us, and most all of the species in the  world. Not their world, our world—for the power to destroy is the resulting power that has come from conquering the earth and all of nature. Natural history will be the only history when we are gone. The fossils are laughing silently, watching us enact our extinction. The children are laughing, I don’t know why, it’s just what they do. 

Extinctions are milestones, chapter breaks in the geologic history book. The greatest known extinction event, mind you named and labeled by us, is the end-permian 252 million years ago. No one’s sure what caused it beyond volcanic activity in what we call Siberia but see if the symptoms sound familiar: carbon dioxide levels shot way up which caused a rise in atmospheric and ocean temperature which changed the ocean’s chemistry which…  It’s called the ‘Great Dying’ period because 96% of all species disappeared. The Great Dying took over 100,000 years to unfold but our extinction era is happening fast enough for the creatures that caused it to notice it in a lifetime. Carbon dioxide levels are higher now than anytime in human history because of humans. We are the volcanos. And laying in wait in Siberia is methane, the release of by melting (non)perma frost will be the volcanos like in the third extinction (get ready to giggle and google kids: the great threat we’re thawing free is called the ‘methane burp’).  There is no display of this information in the natural history museum because it’s not yet history.  But the kids here will eventually learn what their species is doing when they are asked to imagine the unimaginable. A good history museum should warn us about the future, especially an earth museum. 


The flying prehistoric whatevers suspended on wires in the main hall can’t wait to pick up the weakest kids in the museum, but they wait because they are good at it. They will get us in the end. They look frozen in laughter. Fossils generally have their mouths open, archeologists love showing off the teeth of predators. Easy pickings: today’s kids are easy to spot in the high-visibility vests they’re required to wear in the city. As a species our main predator is the automobile, and well, Polish drivers. Crosswalks are the modern hunting grounds. Or the streets when kids have to walk on the road to get around a car parked on the sidewalk. Cars are the ultimate manifestations of selfishness in a city that still thinks they’re a status or class symbol and a natural right of capitalism—the individual over community. A repeating theme in the Anthropocene is that we are our own worst enemies. Kids wear plastic yellow vests to protect them from cars built from and running on fossil fuels fueled by self-importance on roads paved with petrochemicals does nothing to protect them from the longer and more serious threats of pollution and climate break-down (WHO says 4.2 million deaths globally each year from outdoor air quality). Residents have an air quality app mainly for winter when coal fire plants drive Polish cities into competition with Pakistan in the top five list of most polluted cities. Cars are an immediate kinetic danger, but their exhaust and the paved world they create is the long-term greater danger. Yet we treat the symptoms (make kits wear vests, paint crosswalks) instead of eliminating the disease (ban cars). We are wise enough apes to have invented the technology but not wise enough to stop it. When breathing through my shirt sleeve after a diesel truck passes or from the collective exhaust of idling traffic I think how early gas chambers in the Holocaust used less than 20min of truck exhaust to kill everyone in a room. Exhaust is the smell of suicide.

Have we accepted the fate of the earth as terminal because it is our own natural fate to die? By initiating the 6th mass extinction have we enacted our revenge on nature’s insistence we die? Have we have imposed our burden of consciousness and knowledge of our inescapable death onto the very earth itself? Why should nature both create and outlive us? It’s just not fair—rubber sneaker foot-stomp. Apocalyptic logic is the easiest to accept because in order to live we have must accept that we will die, this is the human condition. The painful knees, the rising seas. The loss of hair, the loss of ice caps. Nature creates and destroys, so we live a life that destroys instead of accepting nature. Our only point, according to nature, is to live long enough to reproduce then die—pass on our genes, make each new generation better. Basically Darwin’s theory. We have replaced the myth of God with the reason of evolution. Today we have replaced both evolution and God with economics. The wealthier children at the museum will be better off for just a little bit longer as natural selection is no longer natural. The extinction we are fueling is caused by the emissions of our economic lifestyle. This is not on display in the museum, but maybe it should be. So instead onto the pretty geodes!

Amethyst. 
Our tour of the museum will end in the prideful displays of coal in Poland, but the display case of shiny crystals come first. Crystals are pretty. Bright lights bring out the impressive variety of twinkly rocks found in earth’s geologic curio chest. Is their value that they’re pretty? Or under Enlightenment reasoning: how does any natural element become a resource for us humans? Today everything from nature must be processed into a commodity in order to be understood. It has value if we give it a price.

Amethyst is the violet colored quartz found in every natural history museum, spiritual shop and bedrooms of guys who own snakes and can’t quite grow a beard. Pretty is useless until we assign it a value. So with crystals the first thing we do is carve them into gems. We are the ones that make them valuable by reshaping them to our use. Value is created with a bit of labor shaping a natural resource and thus making it profitable. A crystal has no story till we carve one into it. The first carved amethyst are found in ancient Egypt, probably because they loved burials and believed that the rich can in fact take it with them. 

Another way we record human history onto a gemstone is by giving it a name, thus giving it a human centric story. Under Enlightenment reasoning to name is to conquor, to possess. Amethyst means not + Intoxicated. The ancient Greeks believed whoever possessed the crystal would avoid getting stupid drunk as it was the god of wine who stained it purple. Like all people before and since, they must have been drunk to believe they could not get drunk. Some drank wine directly from the geodes that were cut into gourds. Much later, when there is only one god, Anglican bishops wore the gem of amethyst on a ring to show that the Apostles were in fact not drunk when the holy spirit visited them—that someone must have turned wine into water. The pretty purple geode was part of the cardinal of most valuable gemstones, the big five (diamond, sapphire, ruby, and emerald) until the 18th century when colonial expansionism/exploration/whateverwecallitnow became the victim of its own success. The Portuguese found so much of the crystal in Brazil it became less valuable and got downgraded it from precious to semi-precious stone. But all was not lost for the imperial powers, for as the next display case will show, there was lots of gold in South America to fund empires. But not so much gold as to loose its value. Humans place value on scarcity, sometimes we create scarcity to create value. Gods we’re weird. Amethyst is the birth stone of February, I’ll drink to that.
_____

Geology is the study of earth’s 4.5 billion year guestbook. The oldest dates are signed in rock layers. Like the PK boundary found all over the earth and radiometrically dated to 66 million years ago. It’s a line in the sand, a signature made by an asteroid that caused the previous planetary extinction event. The event the dinosaurs in the museum might call their Pompeii. More recent records are kept by the earth in ice-cores and ocean cores because life breathes and each year exhales for the earth to collect a sample. We are cleaver enough to drill, measure, learn the language of time and gasses, translate and finally read it back in the guestbook. When did we sign our name? When did humans first leave their mark in the book? Most species don’t get a good record unless they got fossilized or stuck in something preserving. But we are a planetary force. Carbon Dioxide is the best signature to look for in the guestbook because we too breathe. But our presence was not noticed on the count till we started breathing on an industrial, global, scale. The burning of fossil fuels started to creep up the CO2 count in sedimentary samples around 1750 when factories started exhaling at scale. Atmospheric and live CO2 counts started in 1958 and now of course there’s an app that will tell you the latest—in real time, before the earth records it in its sedimentary records. Then there’s our very clear signature in the geologic record when we used radioactive isotopes from atomic and nuclear testing (and oopses like Chernobyl). But all that is looking at our increasing presence. There’s also a record of our absence around the beginning of the 1600s when 60 million native Americans died and left vast cultivated farm lands to fallow and return to forest—thus absorbing CO2 on a global scale for the first and only time in our time. A genocide created a little ice age. Two centuries later we revolutionized industry and began the measurable and runaway increase of CO2 to a tipping-point—meaning not even our absence can stop it now.
_____

Silica is the most abundant mineral on earth, technically it is earth. Sand. Quartz crystals and purple amethyst are the crystalline form of silica. Everything is useless until we make it into something we can use: we shape and transform the raw minerals of the planet into value for us in the moment. From silica we make useful things like glass, concrete and semiconductors; as well as useless things like cosmetics and jewelry. We polish something found in nature, valuing it because it is rare, shaping it to our definition of beauty into jewelry which is both wealth and a display of wealth (the most useless form of wealth—wealth for wealth’s sake). Its form is its function. Soon we abandon the toil of extraction, even when so abundant, and become gods by alchemy…mainly because it’s cheaper. Today we make our own amethyst in the lab. Strangely, artificial crystals are so pure that they are less valuable. Real gemstones are impure, and that has become their value: authenticity as indicator of rarity. Once again we are the victims of our own success.

The display of clear quartz crystal is anti-climatic. Seen it. Don’t care. The name quartz is thought to have come indirectly from an old Polish dialect from Czech term for “hard,” so there’s that, being in a natural history museum in present day Poland. The naming-happy ancient Greeks called it crystal, thinking it a super cold form of ice. Oops. Quartz bears the weight of human history like all items in display cases. For much of myth-powered history (pre-scientific reasoning) crystals possessed healing properties. They embodied belief, absorbed our own wish for mysticism in the face of colder and colder reason. Pre-historic hunters napped quartz into sharp tools, at least those that didn’t have easy access to volcanic obsidian, the closest we got to glass before we figured out how to make it by intensely heating silica. Who knew? It takes on a name (glass) when we shape it into our own uses. Now quartz tells time.

The second world war cut off supplies of quartz from Brazil just at the demand for them surged. We wanted to listen to our phonographs. But first we think big: what can a lot of a mineral do for us? Build buildings, melt into glass or just endless sand on beaches kids shape into castles and mom photographs before the rising seas reset each day. After thinking big we think small: quartz crystals turn mechanical energy into electrical energy. They can turn the groves of vinyl records into amplified signals. Quartz crystals had gone from belief (in healing) to piezoelectricity (physics). Music heals the soul more than an amulet. 

The clever electronics industry began making quartz crystals in the lab by mimicking the intense pressures of the earth, basically doing what was already done long before our time and over impossibly long periods of time because modernity is always in a hurry so we kept the processes and remove the long wait. In synthesizing the planet’s patient processes we stole time from geology. Time, the thing the earth has lots of but we don’t. Then we discovered, or controlled, electricity which accelerated our lives ever faster. Here’s a neat-o: If you apply electricity to quartz under interrogation it will give you one number every time: 32,768 each second. Because we now own, dominate, time—an abundant resource found in nature extracted for use by us—we have a precise tick of what we call a second. Thanks to a bit of quartz crystal tiny enough to fit into a circuit that’s tiny enough to wear on our wrists we will never be late again unless the battery dies (though we are often late because of self-importance brought on by the contradictory urgent awareness of how little time we actually possess). A tiny bit of quartz crystal is found in every smart phone, it doesn’t tell us what time it is, it tells the processor what time is. We demand more and more of everything we take. We demand more precision from time, the momentum of Enlightenment reasoning encourages us to dive further into to the smallest, most precise, unit possible. It makes us feel big. Nothing is more elemental than the atom. 32,768 times a second was not enough to feed us. Atomic clocks measure the energy states of the metal cesium-133. The clocks are a bit big and radioactive to wear on our wrists, but even if we could we would probably still be late. The time on my phone is dictated by an atomic clock in a lab (actually many labs), as it is for GPS and other things that can tell us where they are but only after they know when they are. Noon used to be when the sun was straight overhead, before railroads standardized time. The earth, and its rotation, no longer owns what we called time. We extracted it for our own use, made it precise, then commodified it by selling it back to us as precision or as a “vacation.” Time is money. Interest on loans ticking at the same rate as the calendar. Yet time tells us how much has passed, not how much is left. We know the age of the earth (4.6b) as measured in the age of moon rocks. We know, or we generally think we know, the age of the universe (13.787b) based on how far we can see into the origins, the Big Bang. We know how old we are because of a stamp on a birth certificate. I thought I knew my mother’s age but turns out she was lying. We know roughly how much longer our sun will last (5b). But most important of all we don’t know when we will die unless we cause it. Life is better at measuring history, time that has passed. Humanity sort of invent a clock to say how much time civilization has left built by the same cleaver atomic physicists who measure the consistent vibration of a quartz crystal. Scientists warn humanity by how close we are to doomsday. To midnight. Because of the combined consequences of our own genius, first from threat of atomic war, now climate change and disruptive technologies (AI/Sky net), we are 90 seconds to midnight. 
_____

There is no cafe at the geology museum. There is nowhere comfortable to sit other than the tile floor, which in a geology museum is technically an exhibit. Benches are the most popular exhibit at art museums, maybe this museum would be more popular if they installed more benches. It's gone eerily quiet in the atrium modeled after the British Museum. The school group has left, back outside their yellow vests so as to be seen by our shared predators. The sudden absence of our next generation stuns the museum into silence. My footsteps would be the only sound echoing through the halls had I worn hard shoes but who the hell would anymore when sneaking around in sneakers is so much more comfortable? I bounce up the stone stairs on my rubber souls, my cushion of protective fossil layer from the Carboniferous period destined for a landfill to break down into micro-plastics to seep into the water table or more likely end up in the ocean. The amount of plastic in the ocean is close to exceeding the total bio-mass of the ocean. I will not outlive my shoes and the forever petrochemicals in them. Again, is this a nod to our immortal quest for immortality, to know something will exist long after we are gone, a geologic reminder of our presence in the age of plastics? The shoes bear my weight but I can not carry the consequences of their use around with me each step. The burden of awareness is too great and would feel like I’m on slow a funeral march for the planet. When this building was built bearded men were clattering around on hard shoes of wood and leather, basking at the displays, taking pride in their knowledge and capture of nature. 

Under Enlightenment reasoning the display cases can be seen as cages in a zoo. If something in a natural history museum is in a case then it has been captured in the wild, given a scientific name, cataloged, labeled, tamed—all ending in an aesthetic sample caged and put on display. If something in nature is useful to us then it will survive.


Diamonds are far older than life on earth. The purest form of carbon is rare, clear and beautiful. Whereas coal, carbon in a different form, made our world ugly and altered our climate and the earth’s future. Unlike coal, diamonds don’t come from compressed prehistoric plants. They emerge from the mantle of earth itself which spits them up only very rarely for its own amusement to watch us apes scramble after them. Diamonds can cut class and other diamonds because they’re so strong…otherwise diamonds are completely useless. We gave them a value by giving them and price. You’re an idiot if you buy makeup with diamond dust. 

To touch a diamond is to place your finger on a fragment of geology that’s 1-3 billion years old. Diamonds are not metaphorically forever; in a geological sense they ARE forever. They’re pretty when cut it into a gem, using diamond tipped tools. Steel is stronger, but diamonds will always hold the title of hardest material found in nature—that time before us in that treasure chest we call earth. If you wear a diamond or “a rock” on your finger then you are promised to another, a social way to repel potential mates while also displaying how wealthy yours is. You can also use it to cut glass if you need to escape said social convention. 

Again the value/price of diamonds is due to their rarity. Us cleaver scrambling apes can now grow synthetic ones in the lab, which has relieved the planet from more mining scars and maybe fewer conflicts over them. Synthetic diamonds are in so many industries, which is great, means we don’t have to use the very few real ones that exist to make UV LEDs, laser optics, machine cutting tools, semiconductors… The jewelry industry is loosing their fight to keep the nearly identical lab crystals out of the gem market. Fake diamonds are natural substitutes that don’t use carbon, like cubic zirconia, so they’re easier to spot by jewelers and can’t be sold as real diamonds. Lab diamond’s main give away is their purity. 

We first found uses for diamonds in their pretty twinkly character which has guarenteed them a place in human history as an indicator of wealth.  Diamond is Greek for invincible. Small felt bags pour forth incredible wealth into the palms of movie characters in heist films. Industrial applications grew as we grew them in labs. Once again, victim of engineering success, abundance threatens to devalue diamonds as the earth looks on and laughs. 

It can rain diamonds on Neptune or be produced by stars.
_____

I’ve figured out why I’m sad in natural history museums: all is known. I can only discover something I didn’t know, but which is something already known. The map of the world is complete, globes give us an unfair god-like perspective. Satellites have replaced god and street views take the surprise out of travel. Names of countries change but there are no lands left to be discovered. So what can I do when all is known? Forget? Actually today we recategorize: We move much of what we have only recently named and cataloged into an extinction category. Now past the peak of discovery of what exists in natural world we transition from writing to erasing. Is the naturalist and explorer’s roll now to document what we are changing? Science has gone from discovery to creation to destruction. In a way this museum is not to educate but to gloat. To show-off our knowledge of the globe as it was, the complicated names we have given things, the chemical elements we’ve mapped and created. That is why it’s a history museum, we can only look back at what was as we continue to add more. Whole species and ecosystems in our own geologically-short insignificant life span. I feel a disappointment that the globe hides far fewer discoveries, that’s the message of dominance of knowledge in a science museum. We now model and record the destruction and disappearance of the natural world with greater scientific precision but still lacking the humanity to stop it.
_____

Gold is a noble metal. Meaning it is ideal for us and for nobility. Resistant to corrosion, found in its natural state (no processing required), solid yet malleable, gold was just hiding waiting in the earth for us to find. The only species to have any use for it. We’ve always loved gold, it’s a precious precious metal. ‘Geolu’ In Old English means yellow, before English had their great vowel movement. AU is the chemical symbol, from Latin ‘aurum’ or ‘golden dawn’. The ‘golden rule’ is to do unto others as they would do unto you. Abraham was rich in gold and silver. Noah was told to make the lid of the box holding the most sacred objects of the Israelites, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Your face would melt if you opened it and dared, as a mere mortal, to cast your eyes upon God. The highest awards are in gold. Stephen Spielberg was nominated for a Golden Globe but didn’t win for Raiders, but did win for Schindler’s List. In Islam men are discouraged from wearing gold and, according to the Quran, hoarding gold (greed) and not giving some of it to the poor is condemned. Gold has long represented wealth, too much of it represents greed. In the Torah God showed Moses a half-shekel coin made of fire, letting him know (interpretation of ancient texts being as malleable as gold) that gold is like fire in that it can be both useful and destructive. Choose wisely. God told the Israelites to make things out of pure gold (Exodus 25), representing either God’s holiness or a strategy of taking wealth back from the Egyptians. Gold is literally and figuratively wealth.

Like all earth’s elements we either find a use for it or we leave it in the ground. We decide what’s precious, not the earth. And if it’s super rare we try to make it ourselves. Greed drives humanity and gold is a measure of greed. Lazy men have always tried to make gold. Early alchemists eager to secretively transform matter to gold were the precursors to modern sciences, or simply nut jobs. Now we can make gold. Like diamonds and other natural elements we can synthesize gold because we are the gods now. Early attempts to do so successfully produced only a tiny bit of gold so radioactive you would not want to handle it, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark it could melt your face. But for billions of dollars in both energy and costs to you could build a particle accelerator and make some gold but would not be worth its weight in gold. It would be cheaper to mine it from asteroids. 

The industrial revolutions continued revolving and each time we return to our catalog of precious metals to see what other clever uses they might possess. The worse thing for an element that wants to be left alone to be is rare and desired by us. Today one of the worse things it can be is conductive, much worse to be semi-conductive. The third industrial revolution brought computers with their eagerness to move elections about and know exactly how long a processing second is. In this century of human folly the value of a mineral now lays in its electrical conductivity at the atomic level. We search for conducting metals that do not corrode over time and whose atoms wore pretty valence (outer) electrons (what makes a material conduct electricity). There’s about $1.50 of gold in your smart phone (a little more of course if it’s an iPhone). Hardly worth it till e-waste is shipped to Ghana in tons to be toxically burnt down to separate the metals. They’re mainly after copper to resell and to be made into more electronic crap which will end up again on their burn pile. 

Copper is another victim of our violence of resource extraction because it meets the requirement of being rare, conductive and profitable. Whole towns in the Western US were left destroyed and polluted after we wired the country for electricity. The elemental symbol, the label we assign it, Cu, comes from the Greek for the island of Cyprus where antiquity first withdrew the earth’s deposits of copper. The use of metals were so instrumental in the “evolution” of society that we named whole periods as the “Age of Metals.” Out of the stone age we emerged/evolved/stumbled into the Copper Age then the Bronze Age and finally the Iron Age. It was the start of humans shaping the world, especially shaping durable metals into things which would outlive them. Archeology is the science of digging through trash, the things we leave behind, including our bones and trinkets. The materialism of history: we are defined by the dominate material of the age we live. Today it’s said we are in the age of plastics, while keeping a toe in the atomic age. We are also in the information age even if poorly informed. But our material record will be mostly plastic. Carl Marx’s theory of history is called historical materialism. OK, back to gold:

Gold was used as money as early as 600 BCE. Silver was generally the metal of currency exchange (think pay-phones), gold was for reserve and storage of wealth (think Fort Knox). The Great Depression was, in part, because of gold, or the value we tied to it. Deflationary shocks were not limited to the dollar, but to the internationally agreed value of gold. The weight of the noble metal pulled the world down with it. After 1944 currencies were fixed to the dollar instead of to gold, the IMF was created to help bolster the dollar as the global exchange currency. Zimbabwe became the first country in the 21st century to return, or try to return, to the gold standard in the face of hyperinflation— For 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars you can get 40 U.S. cents. So they switched their currency from Zimbabwe dollar to Zimbabwe Gold—now $1 is a manageable 30 ZWG. Will we all go back to limiting ourselves to gold, or use wheelbarrows to cart our money about? Or worse, invent a new currency that only exists in the minds of computers.

World economies were based on the rarity of gold—we tied our worth to only that which the earth possessed. Humanity knows it needs to place limits on itself and money does not grow on trees, but you can cut down trees to print money and paper bonds that represent your holdings of rare metals. The debate over monetary policy and metals (gold and silver) raged at the turbulent end of the 19th century. American reconstruction, economic expansion, reckless industrialization, railroad monopolies, materialistic excesses, obscene levels of wealth inequality (till today), widespread political corruption…it was called the Gilded Age after a Mark Twain novel satirizing greed as so much gold held by the rich they lined their walls with it. Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, an allegory, some say, in response to the debates: Dorthy (naive American) in her silver shoes (representing the silver standard but was changed to ruby for technicolor effect in the film) had to follow the yellow brick (gold standard) road.  “Oz” is the measurement abbreviation used for gold and silver (from ounce)/ The whole pretense of stability thwarted by a disheveled man frantically pulling at levers, a mere politician calling himself a wizard. Emerald city, green, the color of paper fiat currency. And greenbacks, the all mighty dollar. The tornado the chaos of the times. The Lion, the cowardly American military during the Spanish-American war. The Scarecrow representing American farmers, not very smart and in need of government help. The Tin man—the American steel industrialists with no heart. Message? Stay on the standard road of gold.

Gold was so important to the economy that in 1933 Rosevelt made it illegal to own gold as reserve and Americans had to return all their holdings (coins and bars) to the federal banks. Dentists could keep up to 100oz. Many of the photos showing a run on banks from the depression were actually people handing over gold TO the banks. FDR was now free to issue bonds (debts) to pay for his new deal. 

The international gold standard was standard till 1971 when Nixon nixed the direct international convertibility of the dollar to gold in an effort to stabilize inflation. The limits we placed on ourselves, the limits of what the earth created, were removed. Wealth was free to be invented. Now we can have deficit spending and start lots of profitable wars. The opposite of tying a currency to a metal is a “fiat”. 

Gold coins were precious because they were always worth their weight in gold, but their value is not longer fixed and can now ride the roller-coaster volatility of the stock market as yet, and just, another commodity. Before money represented gold, now you can use money to buy gold. Gold coins are worth even more today because since we discovered it’s semi-conductive. Gold now has a use. Apple and other computer makers will buy gold, whereas not so long ago you could buy a whole bushel of apples for a gold coin. Price vs. value. Let’s not even get started on the digital coin world, a world that uses semi-conducting gold to conduct its calculations. 

Gold is pretty, gold mines are ugly. The easier to find nuggets have all been found, the lowest hanging fruit already plucked. Industrial extraction by mining companies have dangerous consequences to everything down river. Extracting small amounts of ore is easy but we isolate it using cyanide. Poison for profit. Heavy machinery as seen on “monster machine” TV shows dig massive open pit mines instead of tunneling mines the name of economic efficiency. The largest excavators in the world move earth around to extract the hidden dust of gold into dump trucks of ridiculous proportions. The mines are inverted pyramids etched out of the earth, the deepest one, so far, is 550 meters (1800ft) deep, 3.5km x 2.5km wide. The fuel, the land, the water, the cyanide, all wasted for the profit of a metal we as a society have deemed valuable due to its prettiness, conductivity. Its curse is its rarity and can no longer hide from us in rocks. Greed has left scars on the earth.



Coal is human history. And it’s my favorite display at the museum. Poland is so proud of coal it puts its geologic and cultural history on display. It has shaped the nation and reshaped the land. There is a complete absence of consequence in their displays.

The dinosaurs stomped for millions of years over the remains of a previous periods that ended millions of years before them. Humans dig past the fossils of dinosaurs to get to the fossilized fuels—to the lump of coal that is thousands of years of photosynthesis, plants, and animals that ate the plants, and all that energy that life created for them frozen in death, preserved and waiting just for us. Coal is petrified sunlight. It was baking in earth’s oven while reptiles roamed the earth, getting ready for the age of mammals (Cenozoic) where the future users of coal were still 63 million years away from learning how to walk.

Silesia is a region mostly in Poland but a bit of German and what is now called the Czech Republic. The area has been different countries, such is the history of Europe and the violence of boarders. And the hunger for energy. The industry grew when it was part of Germany then peaked in the 70s when it was under control of  the People's Republic of Poland. If you love coal mines and power plants then southwest Poland is the place to go. Some abandoned mines are being repurposed, rediscovered (not sure we have the right word for it in English) but the rusty past is being appropriated for the glee of the present. One city has turned the mine in the center of town into an underground modern art museum. Mines are dangerous and abandoned ones are prone to collapse or fire or ground water poisoning…younameit. 

Unearthing coal underground was the pride of the people in Silesia, the work defined the culture and eventually the miners who dug for power found their own power in solidarity to all workers. That’s the labor history, the human history, not the environmental one, not that they’re separate. Technology replaces labor, especially under capitalism. Build bigger better machines and less need for fussy unionizing humans. Build obscenely large excavators that just remove the earth instead of headlamped humans digging tunnels. Open-pit mines. Keeping with the metaphor of future environmental debt: the term for large areas stuffed with coal are “Deposits”. Culture came from the ways we humans made withdrawals from the earth. Societies formed around fresh water access, farming, food sources, energy sources. Now, like so much of our cultural world, extraction is mechanized and labor is displaced.

Lignite coal, or brown coal, is the shittiest most polluting coal there is and what is abundant in Silesia. Bituminous is the next most useful, redundantly called black coal. The best is Anthracite, or hard coal and also called black coal because at some point we’re no longer good at naming things. Pennsylvania is hard coal, but today of course China digs up the most. Brown coal has more carbon dioxide and sulfur than other fossil fuels. Toxic heavy metals and even radioactive materials are farted out when it’s burned. Brown coal doesn’t burn very hot so it’s not good for much other than heating water to spin turbines to generate electricity. A cheap way to heat your home, which cities have banned people from doing today. The Bełchatów lignite-fired power plant in Poland is the EU’s largest CO2 emitter and has been burning bright for over a decade. It’s surrounded by opencast mines, massive holes dug into the dirty brown lignite earth. Maybe you’ve seen those evil cartoonishly large scooping excavators or the larger-than-life-should-allow bulldozers? There’s a viewing platform built by the company so visitors can gaze upon the removed world and watch the mighty machines gobbling at the ground, burying themselves and the future climate deeper. Machines are digging their own open graves. The nearby plant puffs out white clouds, water vapor from candy-cane painted towers. They burn a tonne of coal each second (that’s 1000kg, or 2,205lbs, or a-shit-tonne). I went to the PGE (Poland Energy Group) “Power Giants” museum nearby. It is upwind of the plant. They charge an admission which seems insulting. But whoever charges admission controls the story. You can take stairs down the fake mine shaft and see child-friendly excavators made from legos. It’s fun for the whole family. Or try on a Silesian hat and coat for a selfie. Embrace the glory days of coal and never learn about the consequences or the current EU legal challenges to have it all shut down. No, it’s where kids can put on the silly hat to inherit the past at the expense of their own future.
____

A new school group pours into the geology museum, predictably squealing at the dinosaurs, sneakers squeaking on the polish. The dinosaurs have seen it all before, same thing again and again, but they have the patience of fossils knowing that this moment, our moment, is amusingly brief compared to their millions of years. Welcome new batch of kids to a museum of our victory over nature. The rocks on display have each been useful to us so we give them a name and place them in a case. The animals are long gone but we put them on display because we are the gods of nature and time. I envy the kids, mainly that they don’t have me as their teacher to take the joy out of a field trip. They do not yet know how many species of animals and plants have gone extinct just in their own short lifetime (thousands of times greater than if we refrained from the industrial revolution). I also envy their bubbles of ignorance and joyful innocence, mine has long since vanished. They do not yet know what I know. Knowledge: that unique trait that has separated us from all other species yet has still not freed us from nature as promised. Knowledge has destroyed nature. Knowledge was once the liberation of our species, but it has become our downfall and enslavement. We cleaver beings are destroying nature as a consequence of our own cleverness and greed. To dig out coal is to dig our own grave plus the species we share this blip of geologic timeline with. Knowledge is our burden, our curse. The human condition is knowing we will die, maturity is coming to terms with that, or in capitalism it’s to deny it by filling our lives with distractions and material things made of plastic and semi-conductors. When your first pet dies you grieve the loss and get lost in the efforts to understand the meaning behind death. When grandpa dies it is a tragedy even if it is natural. Learning the cycle of nature in a museum should make us appreciate, or at least better understand, our brief place in it. Appreciate how far we have to zoom in on the geological timeline just to see our own species. Humanity has been a brief but catastrophic moment on earth’s geological record—right there at the end, our end. A mere mark in the billions of years of earth’s timeline. Maybe our destruction of the biosphere is revenge for the knowledge of our own insignificance on the geological timeline. We are the only animal to have changed the direction of the earth’s record, to write on intentionally and alter the timeline. This rock will continue to orbit the little star and what we call nature will recover but not at all in the form we first encountered it. We cannot undo what we have done, nor can the earth. There is no preserving. Timelines only move forward. We have changed the climate but we have not changed ourselves.

If we are truly Homo sapiens (wise + man) then we must accept the damage we continue to inflict, the mass extinction we initiated, the species we have erased, and to somehow live with the knowledge of it because it’s too late to change either the damage or our own human nature. Childhood can no longer be an excuse to postpone knowing. Childhood itself, as a concept, must also come to an end. It’s a somewhat recent invention born of both nature and nurture, a social construct. When do we become adults? When we can drive a car or go to work in the mines? When we make our own child or when we bury a parent? Or when we realize our parents are flawed, human, like us but just in a different point on a timeline of orbits around the sun we call years? Childhood will end earlier as a consequence of our selfishness, when knowledge can no longer be kept at bay. Their awareness of the broken world will be what cracks the colorful protective walls and endless plastic toys built to insulate them and extend innocence and ignorance. Perpetual adolescence is a foundation of capitalism—to breed impulsive consumers till they cross a line of maturity, look around at their material embrace and shake their head in shame. Childhood will die when we are no longer ignorant. Knowledge makes us adults. Is it unfair to bring new life into a world that is leaving? A new right of passage will be when we learn of the betrayal, that their world is not the one our parents nor history had always promised. That the future, what children embody and the beasts burdened with the hope of all previous generations, is at risk of being unrecognizable.The climate future, the natural world, will not look like the past—a promise in all of human history is now a self-betrayal. In the anthropocene we must be adults and to stop behaving and consuming like children. Adulthood will come when our parents finally become adults and confess to their children they can no longer protect them. When we collectively admit that the growing debt to the earth accumulated for generations has become too large to repay and that no more borrowing will cover it. There is nothing left to borrow. Earth’s deposits are completely withdrawn and civilization is running on fumes and dying in the exhaust.

I watch the children having fun being chased by dinosaurs and say to them, as all previous generations now must: I’m sorry. 


END?