This post is contributed by Barnaby Porter. Read the previous post here.
Sitting, as I do often these days, surveying this world around me, I am without fail moved with a full measure of awe by how much LIFE I can see when I look upon the tidal Maine river I live on. I can see nearly six miles of it, up and down, and what most strikes me is the trees – millions and millions of trees, leafy and needled, standing amid ferns and mosses, bark patched with lichens, holed by and home to birds and mammals and zillions of insects, all here within my view.
Then there’s the river itself, its myriads of life forms largely hidden below the surface. But certainly not all. Its surface is continually broken by splashes and the wakes of swimmers, its shores hosting many feathered and furred hunters of food, and, as the tide drops, I see crabs and mussels, periwinkles and the squirting of clams, all among the luscious amber and green of seaweeds blanketing the rocks and ledges.
The wonder of it all is that its spellbinding boundlessness defies adequate definition. That said however, planet Earth does meet the criteria of occupying what planetary scientists have come to call “The Goldilocks Zone,” a fragile place where every condition must be just right to support and perpetuate life – at least life as we know it. They would include, in brief: liquid water; a survivable temperature range; a breathable mixture of atmospheric gases; solar energy to provide warmth and to drive photosynthesis; key elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and sulphur. Two more important requirements ought to be added: TIME, for life forms to evolve, and a hell of a lot of LUCK.
We know of no other such world in our solar system, or anywhere else….. yet. The miracle is that the abundance of life here on Earth is so vast that it is impossible to comprehend in its entirety. Scientific probability suggests that there must be more living worlds out there. I think there have to be.
However, I see a problem with humanity’s shortsighted thought process despite its rather amazing intellect. We, for the most part, live our terribly short lives on a very limited, homebodyish time scale that allows us to believe in a dependable stability in our world. We live by calendars to mark the seasons, the phases of the Moon, the tides and when to plant our gardens. We trust in a comfortable sameness through our lifetimes.
We’ve learned a great deal about the Earth’s geological history, the flip-flopping magnetic poles and continental drift; what life forms came before us, how they evolved; the extreme and repeated fluctuations of climate between steamy jungles and ice ages. And we know there have been intermittent periods when there was no life at all, due either to our planet’s rampant volcanism or the hell visited upon it by incoming fireballs from space – such things as asteroids or meteorites or even the planet-sized body that struck Earth and blasted off enough material to create our Moon. It’s all in the history books.
Still, from humanity’s stingy time perspective of only 12,000 years or so, life in our epoch, the Holocene, has found us (in spite of ourselves) living a mostly safe, survivable and predictable existence. The big truth, however, is that virtually nothing out there in space (which is where we are) is safe, survivable or predictable with any certainty at all for living things. It is an extremely unfriendly-to-life, dangerous and endless place where events happen over billions of years… or in an instant!
TIME and LUCK – They are two most basic yet elusive requirements for life to occur here. I find myself thinking about my trees again, our planet, covered with them; the best example of full-blown LIFE I can conjure up.
And two images come to mind. The first is from the 1908 Tunguska Event in Siberia, where a huge rocky body from outer space traveling at 33,500 mph, most likely an asteroid or a meteorite, exploded 3-6 miles above the middle of the vast Siberian Forest. The blast wave flattened 80 million trees in a radial pattern over an area of 850 square miles. No one was there to witness it. It was a near instantaneous event.
The second image is from the 1980 eruption of the Mount St. Helens stratovolcano in Washington state. This explosion had a lot of witnesses. Though smaller than the Tunguska event, its blast zone covered 230 square miles, causing huge damage with pyroclastic flows, mud and landslides, floods and raised gigantic clouds of volcanic ash into the atmosphere. More than 4.7 billion board feet of lumber was destroyed across 86,000 acres of forest. This more home-grown volcanic event was prolonged over a period of hours.
Whether such things and events emanate from the universe and outer space, or from the bowels of our own planet, we at least know that here we have actual life, the miracle. We have lived it and known it… and loved it. We are in that Goldilocks Zone. We have to take it the way it is, hang onto it for all we’re worth and accept the truth of things.
A sobering thought occurred to me not so very long ago, gazing up and down river at all those lovely trees – sobering though not actually frightening. It was simply the truth of things: Every tree I see, every tree on this planet, will be coming down sooner or later.
The hope is that forests will continue to be able to replenish themselves, and that LIFE will go on… with time and a lot of luck.
Artist and author Barnaby Porter has had a varied career in marine research, aquaculture, and woodworking, among others. Most recently he partnered with his wife Susan as co-owners of the Maine Coast Book Shop & Cafe in downtown Damariscotta. In October 2021, Barnaby completed his tenure on Coastal Rivers’ Board of Trustees after six years of service.
Image courtesy of Barnaby Porter
