Karine Polwart performs “James Hutton and The Restless Earth”

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Award winning Scottish folksinger, songwriter and storyteller, Karine Polwart celebrates the 300th anniversary of James Hutton’s birth, the Scottish scientist and philosopher known as the father of geology.

With specially performed music and song, she explores one of Hutton’s most radical and challenging concepts – deep time. Hutton was the first to hypothesise that the formation of the Earth had taken unfathomably long stretches of time, far, far longer than the eight thousand or so years that studies of the bible had suggested. And that radical theory would be confirmed by a discovery Hutton made when he and his two companions stepped ashore from a boat trip to Siccar Point on the east coast of Scotland in June 1788. What he saw was sandstone eroded away to reveal sharp vertical shards of the rock greywacke laid down some 60 million years earlier -what geologist today would call an unconformity.

Recreating that journey for the programme Karine is joined by geologist Dr Angus Miller and David Farrier, writer and Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh.

Angus explains just how influential Hutton’s theory became through the writing of his companion on the trip – John Playfair

“The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible to how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.”

The truth that Hutton revealed was indeed far stranger than fiction, not only upending the received wisdom about the age of the Earth but would have far reaching consequences, giving successors like Charles Darwin a timescale that would allow the incremental changes of natural selection to take place.

For David Farrier Hutton’s discoveries opened up not only the deep past but the prospect of the deep future. His book Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, looks at the marks we are leaving on the planet and how these might appear in the fossil record in the deep future.

Karine weaves these ideas together in the music threaded through the programme blending the events of Hutton’s visit with these challenging ideas about our responsibility to those far off generations to come.

The idea of seeing intimate, human connections to the geology of the planet is taken up by the artist Illana Halperin. Her work explores where human time and geological time scales intersect most notably in how she shares a birthday with the Icelandic volcano Eldfell that she visits on every major milestone as they age together.

The programme builds to a crescendo of all these ideas overlaid and blended into a powerful message of how we’ve become a planetary force capable of great feats for both good and ill.

Written, composed and performed by Karine Polwart

Sound design and additional music by Pippa Murphy

Piano: Dave Milligan

Producer: Peter McManus

Trump and American Enshittification

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IT’S WORSE THAN YOU THINK

By Rick Wilson

You feel it and see it, everywhere, like an ambient, grating sensation that everything is worse, and getting more so by the day.

Your airline seat is narrower than it was ten years ago, and you paid extra for it. Your insurance company denied the claim through a system designed so that appealing it takes more days than the cancer patient has left without treatment. Your groceries come in a smaller box at a higher price. The brand you love was bought out by private equity and cheapened, a logo stuck on something made in a Chinese slave factory.

The app that used to just work now wants a subscription. The doctor gets four minutes. The customer service line is a machine that says it understands, then hangs up. The hotel charges a resort fee for a resort that doesn’t exist. Every institution you interact with has quietly discovered that it can degrade the thing it sells you and lose almost nothing, because where exactly are you going to go?

Cory Doctorow named this process enshittification, and the word went viral because everyone in America recognized their own life in it.

They’re good to you at first, because they need you. Worse once you’re stuck. Worse still once being stuck is the entire business model. He was describing tech platforms, but the idea scales to the whole country.

This piece is bleak, even for me, because thus far there’s no immmediate cure for enshittification [ . . . ] Read full piece on Substack

On “Reek Sunday” Ireland climbs its Holy Mountain

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On the last Sunday of July every year, tens of thousands of people climb a cold, steep, quartzite mountain in County Mayo, many of them in the dark before dawn, and some of them still climb it barefoot. The mountain is Croagh Patrick, and the day is called Reek Sunday.

The custom is old, far older than the Christianity that now frames it. Saint Patrick is said to have fasted on the summit for forty days, and a small chapel stands there now, but the pilgrimage sits directly on top of a much older tradition of climbing to a high place at the start of the harvest, the festival of Lughnasa. The mountain was sacred long before it had a saint.

What strikes anyone who goes is that it is not a spectacle staged for visitors. It is a genuine act, performed by ordinary people, often for someone, a promise made, a person remembered, a burden carried up and set down at the top. The reasons are private, but the mountain is shared, and for one grey morning a year it belongs to everyone climbing it.

Source: Born of Ireland