A review by angelayoung
Underland by Robert Macfarlane

5.0

I read far less non-fiction than fiction, but this book reads like a novel, and a beautifully-written novel at that. And, naturally enough, it informs. Macfarlane's language immediately conjured images in my mind and his ability to simplify complicated subject matter is exemplary. An example of his elegant simplification:

The Anthropocene ... exposes both the limits of our control over the long-term processes of the planet, and the magnitude of the consequences of our activities. It lays bare some of the cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other beings [and] ... perhaps, above all, the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands ... The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: 'Are we being good ancestors?'

An example of a terrifying underland matter: at a Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) in New Mexico anthropologists, architects, archaeologists, historians, graphic artists, ethicists, librarians, sculptors, linguists, geologists, astronomers and biologists make up panels of people deciding how best both to bury radioactive waste and to warn future generations, both semantically and structurally, how dangerous the waste is. Apart from the rock and salt and earth and ceramic and clay and glass and metal that will enclose the radioactive waste beneath the earth, there will be:

An information chamber ... built of granite and reinforced concrete, designed to last a minimum of 10,000 years. The chamber will carry stone slabs into which will be inscribed ... maps, timelines, and scientific details of the waste and its risks, written in all current official UN languages, and in Navajo. Buried directly below ... will be a 'Storage Room' ... with four entrances, each secured by a sliding stone door. In the room will be messages of warning cut into stone and simply phrased: We are going to tell you what lies underground, why you should not disturb this place, and what may happen if you do ... . We believe that we have an obligation to protect future generations from the hazards that we have created. Those repeated incantations - pitched somewhere between confession and caution - seem to me our most perfected Anthropocene text, our blackest mass.

And an illustration of the beauty of Macfarlane's language:

It seems that a white freight train is driving fast out of the calving face of the glacier, thundering laterally through space before toppling down towards the water, and then the white train is suddenly somehow pulling white wagons behind it from within the glacier, like an impossible magician's trick, and then the white wagons are followed by a cathedral - a blue cathedral of ice, complete with towers and buttresses, all of them joined together into a single unnatural sideways-collapsing edifice - and then a whole city of white and blue follows the cathedral as we shout and step backwards involuntarily at the force of the event, even though it is occurring a mile away from us.

Read Underland to find out what lies beneath our feet (whole rivers and deserts, miles of catacombs and ice, and so much more both good and bad), to discover much, including a man called Glenn Albrecht who invented the word solastalgia to describe our homesickness for the home we live on which is changing beneath our feet. Albrecht has also written more on this subject in his book Earth Emotions https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42366966-earth-emotions which'll be the subject of another review soon(ish).