Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the Wo

Why an awareness of Earth's temporal rhythms is critical to our planetary survival

Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales of our planet’s long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating. The lifespan of Earth can seem unfathomable compared to the brevity of human existence, but this view of time denies our deep roots in Earth’s history—and the magnitude of our effects on the planet.

Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth’s deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future. Featuring illustrations by Haley Hagerman, this compelling book offers a new way of thinking about our place in time, showing how our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and how our actions today will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations.

This edition includes discussion questions for reading groups.

https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/marcia-bjornerud-grandmothers-of-geoscience

https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/marcia-bjornerud-on-timefulness

Praise: "A profound meditation on the richness, depth and entanglements of geologic time."—Wall Street Journal

"In this trenchant study, Bjornerud calls for a new geological literacy to instill deeper knowledge of planetary rhythms and processes."—Barbara Kiser, Nature

"Bjornerud's lucid writing gives geology an energy it rarely has in popular imagination."—Justin Cober-Lake, Englewood Review of Books