We burn to live. We burn calories—units of heat measuring the amount of available energy in food. Digestion is combustion. We burn coal. The combustion engine is a disembodied stomach.

It’s 2017 and I’m visiting a site of dual excavation: a pre-Homo sapiens hominin archeological site, situated in an open cast coal mine in Schöningen, Germany. I’m working on a short film.

In the foreground: the archeological site where pre-Homo sapiens hominins once hunted horses to extract their energy-dense bone marrow. The archeologists who studied the arrangement of the hominins’ 300,000+ year-old wooden spears and the horse bones they scattered—smashed to extract the calorie-rich marrow—make a case for the emergence of complex social behavior at an early moment in hominin evolutionary history. From the fat of bone marrow, a new, upgraded version of the hominin brain was forged emerging from the feedback loop between environment, energy, and complexity.

In the background: residues of compressed carboniferous era plants—soon to be metabolized by the coal-burning engines at the power plant—are like stored fat in the Earth. The Earth has been smashed open to extract this energy dense fuel. For me this is the same hominin behavior of smash and extract, the same hominin attraction to energy-dense fuels, just at a larger scale, a scale with almost exponentially more energy potential. There’s a shift in scale from one body digesting the fat of another animal, to a society digesting the energy locked into the Earth by plants absorbing the energy of the sun for millions of years. These vast vegetal graveyards have been incorporated—in the literal, bodily sense of the word—into the energy flows of social metabolism. A metabolic rift, as Karl Marx called it, arises when energy demands outpace natural cycles and the material flows of human societies become alienated from those of nature. This rift can also be seen as the opening of a new space, though, and the alienation as an entry into that unknown zone. The open cut mine is a literal rift in the Earth. The coal mine and other features of the landscape surrounding the archeology site point to the uncertain future of the Earth and uncertain fate of the last surviving members of the genus Homo, Homo sapiens.

But Hominins also emerge from a rift—the Rift Valley in East Africa.11See Nigel Clark’s “Anthropogenic Fire As The Hinge Between Earth System And Strata” for further discussion. The geosphere is always rifting, and in this light, humans seem to at once be a product of and an agent of ongoing geological rifting. The anthroposphere becomes a domain in which rifting has accelerated across vast time spans, now seeming to bend towards the exponential. A rift may initially annihilate as it opens new space, but also, as a result of this novel configuration, its opening also inevitably sets the stage for new forms and new forms of agency to emerge.

One of the excavator’s radios starts playing… “We didn’t start the fire / It was always burning / Since the world’s been turning.”22Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (1989): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g. In the context of the metabolic landscape, the coal mine, the surreal irony is not lost on me. Who … or what started the fire, then? … Some Promethean aerobic organisms invented a metabolic process incorporating oxygen as a fuel; it was 16 times more efficient than the cellular systems running on carbon dioxide. Jevon’s paradox tells us that gains in efficiency rarely result in an overall reduction in consumption, but rather an uptick in overall energy expenditure oriented around exploiting the new capabilities of the overall energy increase in the system. I think about all that spent coal from our overdrawn carbon budget. It has kept lights on, fridges cool, and iPhones charged. Was it necessary? Or was it simply the continual combustion of an accursed share?

When I look into the massive, open pit a kind of sublime vertigo consumes me; it’s not, however, some awe of the landscape, but the awful feeling brought on by the knowledge that all the CO₂ from the extracted and burned coal has gone into the atmosphere. And that this is merely one of thousands of mines. The landscape of extraction before me points to one of the primary, if invisible, archeological sites of modernity: Earth’s ruined atmosphere.

I’m here for a second summer, during excavation season, trying to figure out how to concretely register—how to image—something I can feel and think about, but not directly see. Last year it eluded me and the camera I had brought along. This year I will try again; I’ve brought a camera modified to register near-infrared. I make a first test and show it to one of the excavators. “Looks like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film,” he says.

Infrared radiation was originally called “calorific rays” since they were not visible to the human eye, but the thermal energy they carried could be detected with a thermometer. For me, the calorific rays were an invisible bridge between the ancient drive for calories and the contemporary metabolic rift. They suggest heat relations across scales, of bodies and the Earth, and of greenhouses and energy trapped by greenhouse gases. At the bodily scale, organisms produce waste heat during their metabolic processes. At the planetary scale, the Earth radiates back the thermal energy it has absorbed from the sun. At the archeology site, work is conducted inside hothouse-like structures, creating tropical microclimates; greenhouses, which one can still relate to at a bodily scale, appear as models of—and are the namesake of—the greenhouse effect produced by Earth’s atmosphere. Ultimately, the orange-tinged image of the near-infrared conjures both the landscape of Mars as well as a “hothouse Earth,” produced by the amplification of the greenhouse effect by fossil fuel emissions. While a thermal imaging camera might have a higher fidelity with this idea, I found that the near-infrared mixed with some of the visible spectrum better invites the imagination. It lies between our human sensorium and the invisible world of heat absorption and radiation.

The rift in the Earth before me becomes an uncanny valley where the deep time of the past and the deep time of the future fold together in a single, undifferentiated strata. I feel I stand on the cusp of both; I’ve tried to capture this Janus-like position in the film. I associate my time at the site with a larger feeling—one I no doubt share with many others—that once implausible, distant science-fiction scenarios seem increasingly close at hand. Exactly two years after finishing the film I would go to the theater to see Blade Runner: 2049 (2017). There is a scene from that film, in post-apocalyptic Nevada, which is very orange, full of dust, and where visibility is low. Walking through the deserted landscape, K, the blade runner, arrives at a casino where he meets Deckard, Harrison Ford’s character from the original film. When I was watching the film, I saw a blurry, out of focus painting on the wall in that scene; I was sure it was a J.M.W. Turner painting. After leaving the theater, I started looking up Turner paintings and figured out it must be Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844).33A link to Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844): https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-mallord-william-turner-rain-steam-and-speed-the-great-western-railway.  The painting depicts a coal-fueled steam locomotive barreling across a bridge, toward the viewer, carrying its Victorians into a new reality. It is as though it will break out of the frame. It seems almost to predict the infamous story that at the first public screening of “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” the audience moved out of the way in terror. In recent years wildfires from Australia to California paint the sky red-orange with increasing frequency. It is as though a fiction has escaped the cinema screen. And as with the Turner paintings themselves, the energy of the “thermochemical reactions” taking place inside of the combustion engines seem to escape and paint themselves across the sky.44See Nigel Clark, “Earth, Fire, Art: Pyrotechnology and the Crafting of the Social,” in Inventing the Social, eds. Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim and Alex Wilkie. London: Mattering Press, 2018.

I have a few books with me in Schöningen while I’m filming at the site. One of them is Charles Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), from which I would borrow the title of the film. Lyell’s treatise helped establish that humans have had a long history on Earth. It followed his Principles of Geology (1830-33) which popularized the foundational ideas for geology as a science that were laid out decades earlier by James Hutton in his Theory of the Earth (1788). Hutton’s work plunged industrialized humans into geological time. Appropriately enough, this geological thinking occurred in the same region of Scotland where James Watt first developed his steam engine, and Adam Smith articulated the new economy of capitalism. In 1765 Watt made the essential thermodynamic breakthrough that would allow him to improve the steam engine, making it efficient enough in terms of coal consumption for widespread industrial use. (Watt undertook the project at the request of the owner of a coal mine whose Newcomen engine was not powerful enough to remove the water from the mine. This case of a coal-fueled engine to remove water from coal mines can be seen as one of many feedback loops helping to bend the angle of the Great Acceleration evermore upward.) In 1776, in the decade between Hutton’s book and Watt’s engine, Adam Smith would publish his Wealth of Nations, outlining both the fundamental principles of modern economic theory and the capitalist system. These two engines of fossil capitalism,55Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016. the technological and the economic, would not only work in tandem to shape the dominant form of industrial modernity (along with colonialism and the Enlightenment), but also drive the Earth toward a new geological era.

We used to burn to live, now we live to burn. For almost 250 years we—the ever-growing number of industrialized humans—have been riding the energy high of fossil fuels through modernity without a lot of concern for the consequences. Like a steam locomotive barreling towards an unfinished bridge, there’s a tremendous amount of inertia, inherited in both fossil-fueled infrastructure/technology and capitalist ideology. The humanity of today thus inherits a world on fire.

Moving a bit farther beyond the immediate scope of the film for a moment, it is important to acknowledge the most marginalized and dispossessed among us are left to burn while the wealthiest fan the flames. Perhaps literal and symbolic justice could be served if a billionaire burns up in a rocket bound for the upper atmosphere. How can the economic top 1% responsible for double the emissions of half of humanity be held accountable?66“World’s richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam,” The Guardian, September 21, 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/21/worlds-richest-1-cause-double-co2-emissions-of-poorest-50-says-oxfam. I have a carbon footprint, too, even if it is an order of magnitude less. Where is the line between a high crime and a minor offense? Offenders of varying degrees are spread across the world and several generations. If we do not take it upon ourselves, how would we—the global carbon consumption class—all be brought to justice?

The victims of the violence of the climate crisis wrought by fossil capitalism are also spread around the world and will span generations. There are no systems of justice in place to deal with these kinds of crimes of combustion. The number of victims of the climate crisis driven by the industrial way of life will increase rapidly in subsequent generations. Climate justice—not simply as an idea but as a practice—is an urgent matter in the immediate present and foreseeable future. The window for “us”— however this may be defined and whoever we may include—to decide “our” future fates is closing, and it’s closing right now. “We didn’t start the fire / No we didn’t light it …” Will we be able to say “But we tried to fight it?”77Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (1989).

If not, Earth systems themselves will become the ultimate arbiters. Spectral agencies haunt the present, like eighteenth century models for extractive human social relations, like the Carboniferous life returning to exerting its influence in the form of fossil fuels. Or as incessant combustion drives the Earth into a phase never before witnessed by contemporary humans or human ancestors. In the film, I have tried to gesture toward forms of agency which elude our present understanding. Subtle aspects of the geosphere’s systems are becoming more visible, novel phenomena are appearing, and with them unfamiliar and synthetic forms of agency are emerging. New fuels, new metabolisms. It is not by accident that no humans appear in the film.

Everything will be digested.

Thank you to Caroline A. Jones88“Geological Evidences. A conversation between Caroline A. Jones and Matthew C. Wilson,” Resolution, no. 1 “Hot Pictures” (2019): pp. 59–71. and Charles Stankievech99“Matthew C. Wilson ‘Geological Evidences’ Introduced by Charles Stankievech,” Vdrome.org: https://www.vdrome.org/matthew-c-wilson/. for their conversations with me about this film; I have quoted directly from and also adapted some of those responses within this text.

Geological Evidences (2017) was filmed in Schöningen, Germany in and around the Schöningen spears pre-Homo sapiens hominid archaeology site and Schöningen open pit coal mine

Produced with the support of the European Commission / NEARCH fellowship and the Jan van Eyck Academie

Sound in collaboration with Francesco Cimino

Made possible with the generous assistance of Schöningen site director Jordi Serangeli (University of Tübingen / Senckenberg HEP), Thijs van Kolfschoten (Leiden University), Wolfgang Mertens (University of Tübingen), Andre Ramcharan (Leiden University), and Ivo Verheijen (PhD candidate, University of Tübingen); as well as the Schöningen excavation team; the 2016 and 2017 field school-team from Leiden University; paläon – Research and Experience Centre Schöningen Spears; Leiden University Faculty of Archeology; and Monique van den Dries (Leiden University).

Additional thanks to Lex ter Braak, Huib Haye van der Werf, and Tim Rutten

Matthew C. Wilson is an American artist, filmmaker, and researcher based between the Netherlands and Finland. In his videos, sculptures, and installations viewers meet a range of agents—mercurial materials, sites, non-humans, personae, and inter-subjective entities—that are entangled with natural processes and shape-shifting historical forces.

Please cite as: Wilson, M C (2022) Geological Evidences. In: Rosol C and Rispoli G (eds) Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context, Anthropocene Curriculum. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. DOI: 10.58049/ctnm-3703