Earth Dramas: Ancient Mysteries and Modern Controversies

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 collection 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. The 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. Despite this, science has been fantastically successful, 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. 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’. After an introductory chapter that takes a general view of the way in which world-pictures colour the scientific enterprise, the following 11 chapters give various examples of how scientific debate proceeds or has proceeded. Some of these examples are long disputes that eventually converge 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. The book concludes with some thoughts as to why scientific findings are commonly greeted with mistrust and cynicism by society, and proposes that science needs to be humanized rather than ‘imposed’. The book is written in a literary style, with historical anecdotes, portraits of the main players, brief philosophical reflections, story-telling and even poetry. It is thought provoking, educational, creatively written and entertaining.