Nan Evans of KPTZ and Seattle Naturalist David Williams, discussed “A Sense of Place – What is it?” This is a prelude to David’s March 18th lecture entitled “Secrets of Seattle Geology—Connections of the human story and the geology story.”
The interview was delivered for Nature Now, a weekly radio broadcast on KPTZ 91.9 MHz. The interview was recorded as a MP3 file and broadcast three times preceding David’s March 18, 2023 lecture for the Quimper Geological Society:
Show #610: David Williams—A Sense of Place: What does that mean?
Broadcast on March 15 at 12:30 PM; March 16at 5:30 PM; and March 18 at 12:30 PM
The Lecture. Unlike many regions in the country, the Seattle area is constantly reminded of its geologic past, present, and future. Whether it is our landslides, our glacier-carved topography, or our volatile volcanoes, this area’s geologic history is young, dynamic, and accessible. In this talk, David explained why we can blame California for some of our geo hazards, how coal influenced our economic development, and why it’s harder to travel east/west than north/south throughout the area.
Denny Hill, Seattle, 1910
The Lecturer. David B. Williams is an author, naturalist, and tour guide whose award-winning book, Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound is a deep exploration of the stories of this beautiful waterway. He is also the authorof Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography, Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology, as well as Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City. Williams is a Curatorial Associate at the Burke Museum and writes a free weekly newsletter, the Street Smart Naturalist.
Book sale/signing. David B. Williams brought a supply of his award-winning books for sale before and after the lecture.
Developing and calibrating the geologic timescale — reconstructing Earth’s past from the raw rock record — is one of humanity’s greatest, but least appreciated, intellectual achievements. But as a society, we are time illiterate, lacking a sense for the durations of the chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous intervals of climate instability, and the intrinsic timescales of ‘natural capital’ like groundwater systems. This matters because environmental wrongs, social conflicts and existential malaise are all rooted in a distorted sense of humanity’s place in the history of the natural world. Thinking like a geologist can simultaneously ground us and elevate us. Paradoxically, this Earth-bound, very physical science can yield transcendent insights.
Timefulness was longlisted for the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing and was a finalist for the 2018 the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, and the LA Times Book Prize in Science & Technology.
The Speaker
Marcia Bjornerud, Professor of Geosciences at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, is a structural geologist whose research focuses on the physics of earthquakes and mountain building. She combines field-based studies of bedrock geology with quantitative models of rock mechanics. She has done research in high arctic Norway (Svalbard) and Canada (Ellesmere Island), as well as mainland Norway, Italy, New Zealand, and the Lake Superior region. Bjornerud is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Oslo, Norway and University of Otago, New Zealand. A contributing writer to The New Yorker, Wired, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, she is also the author of several other books for popular audiences — Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth and Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities.
The Speaker