By Lane Worthing
Forward
Throughout Environmental Science this year, we have learned so much about the fundamental forces of nature that govern our world and how humans have affected them. In my final project, I wanted to discuss some of the most interesting and important topics we learned about, but from a slightly different perspective, so I wrote from the perspective of a mountain (that’s why some information is in footnotes – it’s relevant, but I didn’t think a mountain would know or care about the obscure terms we’ve come up with for things like the Laurentide Ice Sheet, for instance).
Overall, I wanted to convey the sense that the history of the natural world goes back so much farther and is so much bigger than human history, yet we are still drastically changing so many aspects of it.
Mountain, Appalachian
The mountain and his siblings were called Appalachia by humans. He didn’t hold with names, usually, but this one was fine; it properly represented the weight of its history and the deep green wildness of its slopes. The mountain liked his slopes, and his brown soil and trees, and the animals that brought a teeming sense of life to the hills, and the wind that sometimes whispered, sometimes howled, but always gnawed at him. For millennia he’d been content.
But the mountain was growing uncomfortable. It takes a lot to strike fear into the core of a mountain, but he felt it now. The air around him had suddenly started growing hotter just a short while ago and gotten ever more intense, dragging him from the slow contemplation that mountains grow prone to, when they become as old as he. The problem was not that he was unused to hot temperatures in the air—no, the first era of his existence had been in a climate much more extreme than now. But temperatures usually changed slowly enough that he barely noticed; when they changed suddenly, upheaval nearly always followed. Mountains do not like upheaval, being so naturally sedentary themselves. The mountain did not like when sudden temperature changes caused the deaths of animals and plants that lived on him, instead of their gradual change into new kinds of animals and plants; and he did not like when climate temperature changes caused wind and weather patterns to change, and change the rate at which they eroded him.
No, it was the speed of the heating now that bothered him, not the heat itself. The mountain was no stranger to heat. His very flesh had been formed of molten rock eons ago, even before he existed, and the scorching memory of the earth’s interior had lingered in the rock long enough for him to know it. Those rocks had formed him at the meeting of continents geologic ages ago, when the currents underneath the earth’s surface pushed all the continents together into a landmass humans knew as Pangaea. He would have preferred a name for that continent less simplistic than “All Land,” but he supposed humans did not have the capacity to create a name that could encompass all Pangaea had been, so he didn’t mind that one, either. To him, Pangaea had been the land of dinosaurs and little scrabbling mammals, of swamps, and of immense deserts and extreme seasons: a huge, awe-inspiring nursery for his young mountain chain.
He had grown tall as the continents pushed together—very tall. The mountains in the chain had been as tall as the tallest mountains existing now, and had been even longer than the Appalachians by themselves. He was proud of the mountains they had been then – so large, so powerful they had changed the entire world! When they had risen from the crust of the Earth, an ancient rock of volcanic origin was shoved high into the atmosphere, where it was easily weathered by wind and water. The rock then became easy to erode as it drew in carbon, which retained heat in the planet’s atmosphere. The sediments had filled in the valleys, and the mountains no longer boasted the height they once had; but they had been so large, and so much rock had been eroded from them, that they had caused the world climate to cool. Humans called it an ice age, but he found that name entirely unsatisfactory. Ice, glaciers–– they were only a small facet of the cold periods the planet went through. Species moved, died out, and were born; weather patterns changed; seas lowered and glaciers grew, and the moving water changed the very surface of the earth. He himself had been altered by the recent glaciers and their meltwater, which had further ground him down and carved cliffs and streambeds.
Yes, he and his Appalachian siblings had been large, and they were only a part of that long-ago range. When time and tectonics had torn Pangaea apart, they had separated the mountains, too, and an ocean now lay between, and sometimes even atop, the spray of remnants. The mountain could still feel them in a way, enough to know that they were far from him and home to different plants and animals than he, but he still missed them, and missed Pangaea.
The world now was very different from that time. As continents grew solitary again, their inhabitants had grown apart, too, and eventually, species diverged even as his mountain chain had. No longer able to reproduce with their relatives across distances and oceans, descendents of the pangeans had differentiated in response to the different environmental conditions and challenges they encountered. Mammals, once skittering and small, grew large once the dinosaurs were gone. Ah – the mountain remembered well when the dinosaurs had died; it had been so sudden for his longtime inhabitants to disappear so quickly. Though they had not disappeared entirely, for he could still feel their bones pressed into his, turned to rock. Their bones were very interesting to humans, too, it seemed, and they very occasionally dug dinosaurs out of him and took them away. He did not mind this as much as most human activity, because he supposed that he was also a kind of rock-thief, a huge mass of rock from mountains gone long before he’d formed. And there was a strange circularity when humans resurrected the forms of old creatures whose deaths allowed humans’ distant ancestors to evolve.
Those ancestors had evolved an ocean and a continent away from the mountain, with humans only evolving from them very recently; and even when they’d joined the forms of life that had evolved on his slopes, he never paid much attention to them until they began to radically change the environment on and around him. When those people arrived thousands and thousands of years earlier (long ago, by their standards), they’d lived among the rich forests covering the Appalachian range. In the time since Pangaea, the plant and animal life on the mountain had changed naturally, slowly, until the forests were as diversely populated as the mountain could wish for. Not that he paid overmuch attention to specific lives, of course – mountains are generally too big and old to care about one individual songbird or tree over the other – but when species were old, when they evolved on him and populated his slopes for a while, he developed a fondness for them.
Trees – trees were his best-loved companions. He had beech, birch, oak, poplar, walnut, sycamore, and many more, and he had affection for them as deep as anything. The roots of trees (and smaller plants) had guarded the mountain for millenia against erosion and weathering, and he was grateful for that. Trees made the best companions, except other mountains – they had a much longer collective memory than nearly anything else, so the mountain could communicate with them in a way, through roots that gripped bedrock. Grasses and ferns and flowers were constants but hopelessly ephemeral, rather like insects. Lichen and moss were hardly better; they were old and covered many an exposed stone, but had no perception of time. But the mountain appreciated them nonetheless.
The trees presided over shorter-lived animals: white-tailed deer, songbirds, wolf, bison, elk, bobcat, black bear, fox, eagle, mouse. Fish and crayfish, and frogs and toads, and other amphibians of all kinds thrived in the rivers and streams of Appalachia. Reptiles, too, were abundant (he rather felt a kinship with snakes, for their patience and scales were almost rocklike). He was proud that he could support such life, and awed that he could bear witness to it!
But he feared for it, too – humans were killing the plants and animals that populated him. They killed his beloved trees, his armor, in droves. The oak and hemlock and pine were disheartened, and though their lifetimes were so short, the mountain could feel them slipping away, giving up. What was their purpose, if not to give a home to the birds and black bear? How could they possibly store enough of the gas heating the atmosphere if humans were going to put too much into the air anyway? How could they enjoy the water that sustained them when humans contaminated it wherever they went? Through tree roots, the mountain felt all this, and saddened. He mourned one kind of tree in particular – the trees called American chestnut by the humans who’d killed them. They had evolved on the mountain’s slopes, and had grown, ring upon ring, among the red and white oak and the birch, but humanity had brought a fungal blight to the chestnuts. The species, which had been company to the mountain for eons, had been gone before he even noticed. Usually, the mountain did not mind fungus, which underlaid its soil and helped the trees and flowers grow; but this one had killed ruthlessly, and the mountain could only forgive it because it was its nature. He could not forgive humans for bringing the fungus, though, and he could not forgive them for the other deaths they caused on his climes.
Of the animals that had once lived upon him, few were left, and fewer kinds. The elk and bison and wolf had been driven from him, as had some of the smaller ones that had burrowed into his soil and lived in his trees. There were fewer birds in the air and the trees, and they did not sing as joyfully. The mountain had liked their calls – the songs of the warblers and thrushes had entertained him for a long time, though their lives were too quick and ephemeral to mean much to him. But the trees liked the birds, and the mountain liked the trees, so the mountain mourned the birds, too.
There was no way nature could maintain or recover the delicate balance of Appalachia with this disturbance. Humans had always killed, yes, ever since they’d first come, but this was something else – death had accelerated since the newcomers had arrived some centuries ago. The mountain did not like them, and he did not like to think about centuries. They were too short a span to think about before they were over, and yet humans had forced him to speed up his slow thoughts with their changes to climate and ecosystem – it was too much for a mountain of his age.
He had preferred the old people, who had respected them – at least, they had not razed and ruined his sibling mountains to extract their rocky flesh, as the newcomers did. This, the brutal tearing of rock, was the pinnacle of humanity’s wrongs against the Appalachian mountains. They decimated entire mountains for the seams of ancient plant remains turned to rock so plentiful in Appalachia. They used it as fuel and called it coal – he hated the name. Garnering the hatred of a mountain was no small thing, but the word coal had managed it. A short, simple word like that could never encompass the pain his sibling-mountains felt as they were destroyed – a pain that he felt through them. He hadn’t been touched yet, even though he did have seams of coal running through him, but to feel such ancient and proud mountains torn to pieces so suddenly was unthinkable. He was no stranger to loss, but the separation of his Pangean range had been a gradual thing nothing like the suddenness of dynamite. No, coal could never encompass the harm humans did in their thirst for it.
And it wasn’t just the mountains they were harming, either – they were also harming themselves. Coal still contained carbon that the ancient plants had stored, and when humans burned coal for fuel, they released the stored carbon into the atmosphere. The mountain knew they must be burning more than just Appalachian coal-fuel, though, for the amount of heating he felt was far more than Appalachian coal could produce on its own. But, whatever the source of the carbon, it would continue to warm the air and topple the balance of the natural world, eventually damning the humans, too. The mountain was sad for them, in his way, because they were somehow not wise enough to see what he saw. He was sad and afraid that he himself would be mined and brought low, and he was angry and afraid for his trees, and for his animals, and for his Appalachian siblings. He was not used to such sadness and anger and fear. It takes a lot to strike fear into the core of a mountain, but the mountain was as terrified for the humans and for himself as he could be.
He could not see why humans kept up their burning and ruining. Mountains were slow, near-eternal things, and if a mountain could see and fear the harm, how could they not?
Well, perhaps it was precisely because of their short-lived nature that they could not see it. Most of them did not have to fear the repercussions of their actions for very long at all. Most of them had not the perspective of eons that the mountain did, and maybe some deliberately blinded themselves.
Maybe they would not be so cavalier with their world if they had the perspective of eons.
Maybe they would never have it.
But maybe they could learn.
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