1 Deep Time Narratives

The European university, which was institutionalised in the thirteenth century, was from its emergence a place in which knowledge was fragmented into different disciplines, which were ordered hierarchically (Van Engen 2000). History was not one of them.¹ It was theologians, mostly male, who produced for their times authoritative academic discussion of the meaning of the human and planetary past (Wei 2012; Kerby Fulton et al 2020). Drawing on ancient Hebrew myths integrated into the canon of Christian scriptures, they told of an ordered garden-world made by an androcentric male deity for humans; and the subsequent punishment of the first humans for their disobedience by ejection into a different, harsher environment. Here the god set people perennially at odds with nature, doomed to wresting their needs from hostile landscapes, and their children through women’s risky and painful labour. After a lifetime of work, people would die. For those who formulated and accepted the doctrines of Christianity, this was intolerable.² Unlike the rest of planetary life, humans, created in the image of an immortal god, should not die permanently or be part of an ongoing making and unmaking of restless assemblages. They should be resurrected, entire, from the earth, to live eternally (Bynum 1995). These notions responded to, and embedded, a dangerous cognitive dissonance in western ideas of being and time. Terror of the perceived finality of death inhibited the development of cultural strategies for grasping fundamental realities (MacDuffie 2018) and thinking about them well. The absence of good thinking contrasts with the conceptions of Deborah Bird Rose’s Indigenous Australian interlocutors, who showed her that “death is a move into connectivity … an Earth-based solidarity that embraces all of us” (2011:141).

During the medieval period, these particular theologies underwrote a regime of governance in which populations were educated to believe that disobedience to contemporary ecclesiastical norms would be punished by unending torment of physical bodies.³ Often vividly depicted, this conception occupied a vast temporal canvas designed to fill space and time, leaving no room for alternatives (Pennock and Power 2018). The process from human creation and fall to human redemption was thus presented as consonant with the whole time of the planet, from its creation for humanity to the apocalypse that immediately preceded the day of judgement (Scully 2015; Blowers 2012). After this, the humans most faithful to the dominant ideological formulations of their place and time, and the quotidian requirements of its temporal institutions (Tanner and Watson 2006; Reeves 2015), were relocated to a pristine site in the stars, “the world to come”. All this could happen at any time, always perhaps very soon (Matthew 24:36–51). Compliance could not be deferred, for humans inhabited the imminence of time’s ending. The earth, then, was reduced to the status of a theatre for humanity’s redemptive drama. After this had been played out, its moral and physical purposes vanished and it could be discarded.

An important factor in this ethical and cosmological scheme was the way in which it positioned different social classes in relation to the earth and its future. For elites, there were two main routes to achieving resurrection into paradise: one could either enter the religious life, or give generous financial support to ecclesiastical and monastic institutions, which would then pray for one’s soul. This was subsequently extended to give privileged access to the afterlife to laity involved in ecclesiastically sanctioned military and colonial adventures. But the religious life was the best guarantee of salvation because it required a person to reject the joys of embodied life in a bounteous planet, and refuse responsibility for the continuity of earthly life. This abdication of the world was promoted as the highest form of virtue.

For serfs and slaves—the vast majority of the population—there was a different route. Their job was to ‘tame’ the earth and produce both the agricultural surpluses that supported elite activities and new generations of labourers to continue the work. It was their submissiveness to the exploitation of their labour that would win them eternal joy. Productive critiques of injustice of the system or acts of rebellion to improve conditions for future generations were more likely, within this economy of salvation, to damn them for eternity. They, too, were discouraged from intimate engagements with the world around them. Such relationships were designated pagan, and much ‘pastoral care’ was directed at their extirpation. The perversity at the heart of this governing use of ‘deep time’ was its emphasis on the linked moralities of organised extraction and individual divestment.

The academic theologians’ view of planetary past and meaning set the framework within which histories were written and scholarly enquiry into the workings of the ‘natural’ world undertaken in the west. While it was obviously susceptible to a (limited) range of moral and ideological readings, as a story of the planet, it was inescapably anthropocentric. Francis of Assisi, a papally-approved ‘radical’, sang that everything in the cosmos existed to showcase and celebrate his anthropomorphic⁴ god’s power, a perspective on which he insisted in his preaching to birds and wolves. No record has come down to us of Francis trying to understand animals on their own terms (Power 2022). Outside the regulated spaces of Latin orthodoxy—its theologians, administrators and charismatics, and its lay supporters and beneficiaries—a host of rich, diverse and ecologically engaged ideas were possible and never fully suppressed. But here we are concerned with the anthropocentric occupation of deep time and its uses as a governing, colonising and extracting tool. The ideologies that moralised the harnessing of life and non-life as a salvific deep-time virtue enabled the amassing of power and technologies for violent imposition on others. In the long run, there was an intimate link between the character of these ideas and their requirement that alternatives be destroyed. An internal colonisation of minds went together with the conquest and “conversion” of neighbours, and later, the brutal occupation of other worlds beyond the seas.

Secularisation has made almost no difference to the sense in western culture that earth is a planet for humans, to the cognitive dissonance that had both produced this view and that it reinforced, or to the ethics that it promoted (MacDuffie 2018). The idea of ‘evolution’ with humanity at its apex, and especially in various social Darwinist guises, kept the earth, its deep time, and its systems subordinate to narratives of human ‘advance’. ‘Progress’, and its objective, ‘growth’, are still simplistically moralised, used to justify exploitation and acute injustices, enrich elites, and silence critics—and this although more than six decades have passed since scientists identified this fossil-fuelled ‘growth’ as an existential threat (Oreskes and Conway 2010). Human ‘progress’ under neoliberal capitalist globalisation is marked out by rejection of an involved habitation of environments in favour of subjugating self, others, other-than-human life, and non-life, to profitable ‘improvement’ (Haraway 2016a; Povinelli 2016; Latour 2018). The inculcated alienation from specific places makes capitalism’s ‘sacrifice zones’ possible: if no particular place matters, then any place can be sacrificed to serve dislocated interests. Scaled up, the whole planet is now treated as a sacrifice zone by industries, corporations, and consumers. While the damage is regretted, sometimes compensated to varying degrees, and by some deeply mourned, a powerful ideological consensus around the necessity of ‘progress’ and ‘growth’ secures public consent to—or at least complicity with—these sacrifices. This is made easier because sacrifices have usually been required of those with the least voice in the decision-making process (Nixon 2011; de Souza 2021; Hecht 2012), and concealed where they cannot be contained in this way (Zhang 2019).

The writing of history creates powerful tools for shaping the future, and as Marilyn Strathern has observed, it matters what ideas we think other ideas with (Strathern 1992: 10). Within current ‘progress’ narratives, the future sits further along the same trajectory of progress. It is often imagined as a technologically-driven ascent to the stars and colonisation of “worlds to come”. It has given birth to the sterile ambition of finding ‘solutions’ to climate crisis that can be adopted without fundamentally altering course. The notion of human extinction before or even entirely independently of the destruction of the planet is weakly rooted in our conceptual or linguistic worlds (Rothe 2020; de Castro and Danowski 2016). At no point are careful relationships with future human generations or other-than-human life, much less rocks, water—frozen or liquid—and air, part of this particular story (Lawrence 2022). The planet appears an occasionally unruly, often challenging, but fundamentally available resource for humans to exploit.⁵ The unruliness is part of the story of human triumph, for in this kind of story, it underlines the singular achievements of particular kinds of humans in anticipating disruption, mitigating its effects, and extracting wealth from the most inhospitable regions (Yusoff 2018; Malm and Zetkin Collective 2021; Demuth 2019). That humans have been produced by, mastered, and now apparently command 4.6 billion years of evolution is a further reason for esteeming ourselves and assuming that the future lies with us. Deep time itself is nothing more than a resource for humans in this story. It took those untold aeons for minerals and fossils to coalesce in the earth that, extracted, now fuel modernity. The Carboniferous period (359–299mya), with all the rest, is collapsed into the present, and the race is on to empty and burn every remaining reservoir now. These usable parts of the deep past will soon be gone, sold for shareholder profits, transformed into CO₂, heating the atmosphere and acidifying oceans.

Deep time has been thoroughly colonised within western ideologies of history. The powerful have for many centuries mobilised interpretations of the planetary past to silence any but extractive and exploitative views of the world. Submission to power has been inculcated as a deep-time virtue. Salvation histories and progress narratives require the acceptance of universalising single stories of life on earth, and the structuring of individual lives around efforts at personal and societal improvement. This is always closely linked to disengagement from, as well as modification of, ‘nature’. The costs of each are mere externalities, and don’t count. The span of planetary life is ground that has never been willingly ceded to dissenters. Because of this monopoly, even those who wish for change will not find it easy to know how. But the mounting disasters of our age cannot be dealt with by ‘solutions’ while these narratives remain unchanged. Historians must tackle the long colonisation of deep time, or remain complicit with power’s greed.

2 Methodologies

We need now to consider how historians might engage the possibilities of deep time in more productive ways. These must consciously undo the knots of contemporary political, economic and social consensus, which bind ideas of past, present and future to the service of extractive practices, and to which many historians have, if unconsciously, tended to accede. But first, we need to understand why it is that from a methodological perspective, as well as a story-telling perspective, the modern historical discipline has been ill equipped to think well with deep time.

With the nineteenth century professionalisation of the discipline—which came in the aftermath of the recognition by European intellectuals of the deep time of the planet and evolutionary processes, as well as in the context of European colonial projects—there was a new division of labour. Emerging professional fields such as history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, as well as the various natural sciences studying different aspects of planet and cosmos, became distinct specialisms (Shyrock and Smail 2011). History was the study of the human past through, principally, surviving written records. Historians did not easily work with other kinds of evidence and were rarely trained in the necessary skills and methodologies to examine societies that had not left such records. This meant that as far as the discipline was concerned, societies entered the historical record when they began to make written records or were conquered, described, or otherwise dominated by those who did. Prior to that, they were ‘prehistoric’, and were the province of other disciplines. Not studying more distant human pasts became methodologically definitional for historians, just as they were vacating theological models that had placed humans within planetary deep time.

The relationship between the historic and the prehistoric has created some peculiar problems for historians who might want to think with deep time. In the first place, it is artificial and far from neutral. It emerged within the racist and hierarchical framings of humanity that underpinned colonialism and functioned to delegitimise other forms of knowledge-production and transmission (Schmidt and Mrozowski 2013; Boivin and Frachetti 2018). Matters were not helped by the fact that studying a society almost exclusively through its written records enshrined a strong disciplinary bias in favour of the perspectives of literate, predominantly male, governing elites. These were usually the people who were most removed from natural environments, most ignorant of the challenges of inhabiting them, and most likely to think of them in terms of ownership and extraction. They were therefore most likely to be invested in idealisations of the power of human agency (including that of the anthropomorphic gods they ventriloquised) and the delegitimization of intimate relationships with other-than-human life or non-life that might critique or otherwise interfere with exploitation. It is less often acknowledged in this context that historians as individuals tended to share this lack of experience and its accompanying biases. Historians and their sources joined in valorising writing and those who could do it. The use of writing was not taken as an impartial indicator of movement from ‘prehistory’ into ‘history’, but was treated as an objective improvement. With enough such improvements, the story went, a people could become modern.

The category of modernity has come to loom very large among historians. Everything that is in motion, that is dynamic, that looks recognisable—especially in its relations with nature—can seem ‘modern’, Latour notwithstanding. The residue that does not constitutes a static, provincialized ‘pre’ that is constantly being pushed back in time as experts in each period claim their own relationships with modernity (Shyrock and Smail 2011; Ogundiran 2013). This ‘pre’ also coexists with the present as a useful container for anything that goes beyond, or cannot be recognised within, the constraints imposed by western notions of modernity. This includes different, sometimes more sustainable, modes of habitation of the earth and ways of knowing that ‘exceed’ westernised notions of rational political thought (Cadena 2013).

Deep time, in the geological sense, seems to stand outside these particular ideological entanglements and distinctions of history and prehistory. But while they remain unresolved, there is a risk that deep time will become another kind of ‘pre’, and perhaps one where the idea of the ‘primitive’ can be quietly or inadvertently re-inscribed. There is a complicated politics around the imagining and ownership of deep time, claims about who is located within it and who is not, and how such claims might relate to contemporary ownership of place (Chakrabarti 2020; Povinelli 2016). What happens when today’s Life and Nonlife are given deep histories? These issues are beginning to be carefully explored in the context of writing ‘deep history’ (e.g. McGrath and Jebb 2015) and historians must engage with their implications. Which deep time stories can historians tell, and what must be recognised as someone else’s to tell, if they choose?

With these various considerations in mind, and with the growing literature that examines them as guide, how might historians proceed? While most environmental and climate history doesn’t explicitly engage deep time, the preoccupations and methodologies of this increasingly prominent field are hospitable. It’s an important site of interdisciplinary experimentation and critical reflection. One impetus of particular relevance has been supplied as climate scientists seek a better grasp of long-term climate shifts in order to contextualise contemporary global heating. When historians began working with the resulting scientific findings, they had to address the uneasy challenge that this kind of research posed to the discipline’s fundamental confidence in human agency as the main driver of historically significant change on earth. It showed that humans, as all life, existed within dynamic environments in which incomprehensibly complex interactions were continuously taking place on every scale, from the microbial to solar cycles and multi-centennial climate shifts. From a conceptual perspective, the historical discipline struggled to take on these recognitions and the unfamiliar methodologies on which they drew. The main available category seemed to be the flat and negative one of ‘environmental determinism’ (Isenberg 2014). It marked out a boundary of resistance in the historical mainstream. Surely human agency was the sine qua non of the discipline?

Influencing this rejection must surely have been concern about what would happen to the field if reconstructing the past came to require skills and knowledge that lay outside the training and professional expertise of historians. How could text-based research fit in to this larger enterprise, except perhaps to confirm science-led narratives (Sessa 2019; Warde 2017)? Would historians lose control of the past? These legitimate anxieties have had to be addressed, and the process of doing so has, at its best, led to improved practices for both scientists and historians, as disciplines that had earlier taken their separate paths tentatively re-engage around the urgent questions of our times (Thomas 2018). We no longer hear about climates in “Dark Ages Europe”, societal resilience and adaptation are often foregrounded, and textual evidence is less likely to be taken at face value as confirming data-based findings. Caution is nonetheless needed to avoid the negotiation between determinism and human agency resulting in a failure to integrate the agency and meaning of other-than-human life, and perhaps non-life, at this critical juncture (Rose 2015). It should build on the current proliferation of inventive approaches, including re-readings of well-known materials with fresh eyes and different questions, together with an expansion of the subjects and methodologies for historical research. In a related development, historians of science have been studying formative intellectual relationships, historicising the emergence of geological narratives and concepts such as evolution, extinction, and climate (Chakrabarti 2019; Sepkoski 2020; Coen 2018). Such studies weave disciplines together and give historians better understanding of the politics and stakes at work in fields they might otherwise depend on relatively uncritically.

The preconceptions arising from value-laden periodizations also need addressing. They are especially acute since climate crisis appears to many not merely a modern phenomenon, an unfortunate consequence of otherwise impressive technological advances—but a crisis that lies predominantly in the future, and so hardly a matter for historians. This depoliticised and thinly historicised view is how more affluent populations have been encouraged to view matters. But others know better. And among historians, many have, in fact, become attentive to the ongoing harms of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and racism, which increasingly seem inseparable from the greed and remorselessness of those humans who are driving anthropogenic disruptions to earth systems, placing relentless pressure on biodiversity, and profiting from the saturation of the earth with radiation and synthetic chemicals (Mbembe 2019). These analyses have, however, generally tended to prioritise the impacts of European colonialism, while ignoring millennia of severe anthropogenic impacts in East Asia, much of it driven by colonial expansion of various states and empires (Lander 2022; Elvin 2004). And as we have already seen, it is also important to look back further in time, since the attitudes that drove the European invasions were inculcated and refined over many preceding centuries, and the practices of European settler-colonialists were not novelties.⁶ These recognitions will aid the development of a broad, ecologically entangled understanding of states, power, elites, governance and their dependency on the exploitation of life and non-life. It is nonetheless crucial that today’s anticolonial and decolonising histories can engage productively with deep time, without loss of their force and immediacy.

The idea of the Anthropocene, still unfamiliar to many historians, has emerged as a complicated but effective way of talking about these interconnected phenomena. The Anthropocene is a neologism coined to describe the “major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17–18). While finding increasing acceptance in the humanities, it is nonetheless seen as a problematic term, chiefly because of its insensitivity to the vastly different contributions of different societies and social classes, and the complex histories that lie behind these (Yusoff 2018). Proposals for alternatives such as ‘plantationocene’, ‘capitalocene’ and ‘racial capitalocene’ may capture more accurately the forces driving ‘human’ domination of earth systems (Haraway 2015; Perry and Hopes 2021; Vergès 2017). Despite their interpretative differences, any of these can serve to emphasize the enduring and intensifying effects of what had previously been understood as ‘progress’. It is the refocusing around the scale and devastation of human impacts that offers a coherent conceptual framework for radically different histories. It has the potential to provoke a very different kind of engagement between historians and the geological deep time of the planet (Thomas, Williams and Zalasiewicz 2020; Chakrabarty 2021: esp. 153–204). The defining records for the human ‘triumph’ over nature are no longer the written record of civilisation, but its productions, indelibly layered into the planet itself: as much part of deep time as the preceding eras, and all those to come.

Even so, the Anthropocene is not a straightforward way to think about humanity in the context of deep time. Firstly, it is usually located in very recent times, with radiation from the first nuclear tests as the key geological marker and its causes, identified as industrialisation and especially the ‘great acceleration’ of the twentieth century (Zalasiewicz et al. 2021). The thin temporality limits its explanatory power by treating it as essentially a by-product of technology rather than as a much longer-term outcome of certain humans systematically eradicating or delegitimising more sustainable alternatives. Secondly, it is usually treated as a rupture and as something that has gone wrong. It is an unnatural turn of events for the planet. This is right to a point, but the interpretation is only possible because of the peculiar but intractable habit of regarding humans as apart from nature. Humans are not envisaged in remotely the same terms as cyanobacteria, which also transformed the atmospheric composition with catastrophic results for anaerobic organisms (Blank and Sánchez-Baracaldo 2010). But we are no more and no less ‘natural’ than cyanobacteria or any other species aggressively modifying its surroundings. Other Anthropocene markers are plastic and cement, which are artificial, polluting, and devastating to organic life, but made from earthly materials by earth’s life using processes possible on this planet. Scale, speed, and complexity of human impacts are perceived as another disjunction with normal geological time, but asteroids and volcanic activity—seen as ‘natural’—have also brought about rapid change. Yet, while humans are integral to planetary life, there may at present be a brokenness, or perhaps a diseased quality to us, engendered, not by “human nature”, but by the now overwhelming predominance in our systems of the inculcated modes of thought discussed above. Using the Anthropocene to write about the past requires holding in creative tension the ways in which it simultaneously naturalises and denaturalises humanity in deep time.

3 Histories with Deep Time

If historians do not draw on new methodologies to contest more effectively the complacencies induced by our stories about humanity, we will continue to enable the deadly perception that humans—or at least the most ingenious or pale-skinned (Malm and Zetkin Collective 2021)⁷—will always triumph over disaster, can survive a hothouse earth, need not worry, need not act, need not demand action from those in power, need not reimagine.

It is therefore imperative that we make and tell completely different stories. Some of these stories might work with the Anthropocene—as humanities concept as well as geological marker—by placing it carefully in deep time. Only here, in deep time, can historians develop a sense of the true proportions of things, the fragility, terror, and wonder of any moment in earth’s temporality—or indeed in the incomprehensible temporality and vastness of the universe. Only when humans abandon extra-planetary fantasies and see ourselves in geological, earth-bound terms, can we begin to intuit the intricacies of our utter dependence on, and relatedness with, everything that has been going on for billions of years. For conceiving ourselves as actors on the geological scale is an implicit reminder that like all life and non-life before us on this planet, our real afterlife is the traces of us in the organic and inorganic matter layered over the earth’s crust.

How can historians find and write these deep time stories—these different, human, but vastly other-than and more-than human, stories? We are in the habit of assessing matters in linear terms, interested in change, its causes, mechanisms and consequences. Our origins lie in that burst of energy and its unfolding forces, within which we—individuals, species, ecosystems, planet, solar system, galaxy—are a moment like any other moment in whatever it all is. Should the intellectual process of placing humanity into deep time begin, along with everything else in the universe, at the beginning? This has generally been the approach taken in the ‘big history’ books, which might start with “Primordial Flaring Forth” and work their way to “Rise of Nations” and “The Modern Revelation” (Berry and Swimme 1992). A localised version begins more recently, 4.6 billion years ago, with the formation of our home, and tracing the “rough journey” of life on a volatile planet, as it moves towards modernity (Brooke 2014).

In this sort of telling, human beginnings are with the constituting of the planet.⁸ By 3.9–3.8 billion years ago, earth had the right conditions for the development of life: solar energy and inner heat of planetary core; liquid water with the right salinity and pH; carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur; the right temperature and pressure on earth’s surface. In these conditions, it is hypothesised, the universal common ancestor of all life on earth appeared: single-celled, living in deep sea hydrothermal vents. A few hundred million years later, still in the oceans, bacteria were inventing the means of harvesting energy from sunlight, which would eventually oxygenate the atmosphere, creating the protective ozone layer. It took time before this thinly scattered emerging life had any particular effects on its surroundings, but once it did, there was a co-evolution between living and non-living aspects of the planet. By about 1.7–1.6 billion years ago, there was multicellular life; sexual reproduction from 1.2–1.1 billion years ago; and perhaps by 800–700 million years ago, fungi and algae were colonising the previously barren landscapes of a rocky supercontinent, weathering the rock and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This led to drastic global cooling, perhaps a ‘snowball earth’.

Then we come to periods of flourishing diversifying, abundant life and more of the great dyings—beginning with the Cambrian ‘explosion’ of life around 600–500mya. Apes emerged around 25mya, the first Homo species appear between 2.1–1.5mya, and our direct ancestors around sixty thousand years ago. If not situated in the flow and pulse of deep time, this ape-and-early human endgame appears as a strange rupture: the becoming of apes, and humans, is a distinct event, almost like the old idea of creation. The image in which a sequence of figures develops from the ex nihilo of an ape on all fours to an upright and relatively hairless male of the homo sapiens, epitomises this. Deep time instead embeds our most recognisable ancestors in the vaster patterns of life and death in which we all belong. But what happens, in this sort of story, as humans emerge? David Christian divides cosmic time into three parts: Cosmos, Biosphere and Us (2018). Deep time as “Big History” is still humanity’s story. It is at the same time not a kind of history that historians can write unaided, so it is enmeshed in the possibilities and challenges of any interdisciplinary endeavour. It also requires boldness (Hughes-Warrington, Christian and Wiesner-Hanks, 2019) and carries considerable, obvious, risks of teleological anthropocentrism (Sideris 2017). The vastness of these alien spaces and forces is contained by writing about it in ways that are likely to produce what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in another context called a “single story” (2009).

But historians could draw on approaches from the wider environmental humanities, multispecies ethnographies, and social sciences, as well as other collaborations, to tell stories of particular deep entanglements across time. This might take an even greater boldness. Without teleology, without a place to put ourselves as the outcome of evolutionary processes, historians are left contemplating the sheer contingency of human existence within this immensity. Without narrative framework, adrift in strangeness, “stretched-out temporal horizons”, marginalised and decentred, is there a risk of a silencing alienation (Ginn et al. 2018: 214)? Perhaps, but it could also be a place of inventiveness. One strategy in recent work by historians thinking with deep time is to take ‘deep time’ to mean deep human or hominid time, but within this temporal framing, the discussions are far from being progress narratives and do explore themes and connections of various kinds (e.g. Shryrock and Smail 2011). Some might argue that history is fundamentally a discipline that treats of humans, even if it ventures far into the ‘pre’. Yet the point as far as historians are concerned must surely be to open room to gather the whole world—made by and of deep time—into human stories, and stories that run past humans into futures that humanity is rapidly vacating in favour of any life that can withstand the conditions that are being created.

Deep-time entangled histories to come will really depend for their success on what companions, what kin, specific knots of connection,⁹ are found in the star-punctuated blackness, how historians consider human relations to the matter and energy of the universe, and whether historians are prepared to see our discipline as part of it: 13.8 billion years old so far, and constituent elements of us stretching away in shifting assemblages into the reaches of the future. Inspiration could be taken from Margulis and Sagan’s What is Life? (1995). Such histories would be ones where our familiar subjects and sources are differently constituted: not yet (or, in the future, no longer) ‘human’; for most of the time not yet producing anything we currently recognise as historical ‘sources’. But even if we aren’t equipped by our training to handle any of this, the possible ways in which we might think with it offers a disruptive, exciting sense of the human part in things that could profoundly alter what we do write.

This immensity of planetary experience, with its drastic reversals in global temperatures and balance of atmospheric gases, its periodic mass extinctions, and its repeated blossoming of life is the common, co-creating, restless ancestry of everything we know today. It is almost impossible, thinking within the historical paradigms of westernised modernity, to grasp as story of absolute co-evolution. Even as what once seemed purely human worlds are presented as entangled multispecies webs or assemblages, the humans tend to remain, at least for historians, the mostly dominant agents (e.g. Scott 2017). This may be changing, perhaps particularly in imagining the lives that have emerged in the aftermath of anthropogenic disturbances (Tsing 2015) or that might resist the ending of their worlds. Perhaps other parts of life or non-life might play a larger role in our sense of the workings of human creativity and agency (De la Cadena, 2015; Ivanova 2016). Many other cultures would have little difficulty with thinking of complex relationships in these ways, but as we have seen, the discipline of history has been tied to western notions of time. Perhaps we might now think with Aldo Leopold:

X had marked time in the limestone ledge since the Palaeozoic seas covered the land. Time, to an atom locked in a rock, does not pass. The break came when a bur-oak root nosed down a crack and began prying and sucking. In the flash of a century the rock decayed, and X was pulled out and up into the world of living things. He helped build a flower, which became an acorn, which fattened a deer, which fed an Indian, all in a single year. From his berth in the Indian’s bones, X joined again in chase and flight, feast and famine, hope and fear. He felt these things as changes in the little chemical pushes and pulls that tug timelessly at every atom. When the Indian took his leave of the prairie, X mouldered briefly underground, only to embark on a second trip through the bloodstream of the land.

1968: 104–105

This is a more vivid passage of life and non-life and richness of ongoing experience than anything bounded and contained in one human body. This is one way to think into unfamiliarities: one that, as Leopold intended, inspires radical shifts in both historical imagination and ethics.

If we consider some specific knots in deep time relations, the planet’s temporal and physical connections come alive in moving, peculiar and disturbing ways. When humans, breathing the current composition of earth’s atmospheric gases, cook parts of plants and animals with the heat of burning extracted afterlives of the trees, insects and amphibians of the Palaeozoic coal forests, they involve themselves simultaneously with multiple aspects of deep time. No part of life is otherwise. What has happened when humans drive tanks made of metal alloys, fuelled by ‘refined’ compressed zooplankton, algae, and other aquatic lives, into a concrete city constructed of crushed sand and gravel bound with calcium, and fire carbon-metal compounds at other humans—whose remains, perhaps initially buried in the complex mixture that we call soil, slowly disperse through the earth’s biosphere? What has occurred when Precambrian magna cooled into granite—hacked apart, transported, and polished by the carbon-releasing processes of our busy species—finds itself in the banality of a paved suburban garden? There it lies in mute Anthropocene adjacency with plastic turf made of oil-based synthetic fibres and some toxic ‘forever’ chemicals. They have been brought together so that certain affluent humans can remove themselves a little more from the sweet moist life-giving earth.

If humans are part of everywhere and everything, histories of deep time might also help us instil some badly needed boundaries. We in the modern west tend to think of the whole planet as existing in our narrow slice of time—all ours to take. Much mapping of the past has been in pursuit of extracting ‘resources’ and identifying and claiming ‘deposits’ of oil, rare minerals, and other deep time legacies. But if we see those billions of years of life and death as having their own place in the past, rather than just the present, we might think more clearly about them. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, talks about the gifts of the earth, the things that are here and now, and ours to take with respect and care, to use and to value. She contrasts these with the coal that has to be ripped from the earth, with violence and ecological devastation—this, she says, is no gift to us, not ours to take. She asks: “How can we distinguish between that which is given by the earth and that which is not?” and answers: “By no stretch of the imagination is coal “given” to us. We have to wound the land and water to gouge it from Mother Earth” (2013: 185, 187). That ancient locking up of carbon was integral to making the habitations of the present. Its removal from the atmosphere was, in a sense, a gift of the distant past to Holocene life. But if we see the earth as existing only in the present, we doom ourselves in the process of its exploitation—because we have not invested temporality with meaning, or considered seeing deep time as generous to us.

There has been little scope in the mainstream understanding of human past and present for envisaging futures that undo the dangerous political, economic, and social consensus of modernity. Such futures, while urgently needed, struggle to gain traction because they are presented as uncomfortable ruptures and discontinuities. They do not fit into the single story of human progress from amoeba to the stars. They violate deeply engrained narrative logic. In their recent book, Graeber and Wengrow centre this loss of alternatives by showing the diversity of political and ideological systems that once existed among humans and asking how it has happened that: “we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?” (2021: 9). The first step is to recognise how this shackling of the public imaginary has been achieved by taking possession of the meaning of planetary time and making it support extractive agendas that refuse responsibility and connection. The next step is to explore strategies through which human histories can be put into exploratory dialogues with the rest of planetary life as it exists within the planet’s deep time. The aim must be to problematise and unravel westernised modernity’s stifling grip on imagination, and craft approaches to the past that give urgently needed room to all life and non-life, relationships, and possibilities.