You lose humans in the first forty pages of Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands. With no announcement or great fanfare. They merely wink out of defined existence somewhere at the end of the second chapter set in the Pliocene. But their disappearance is not due to extinction. No, it is a soft and welcome unbecoming. Humans merely melt back into the “dynamic plurality” of a species that hasn’t yet branched off into distinct subsets. Halliday writes, “To talk of the first humans is to hammer a signpost into an ancient river saying ‘no humans beyond this point’, no matter the ever-flowing stream around its base. There is nothing essential to humanity, no single feature that intrinsically caused one creature to be a human where its parents were not.” Halliday, an award-winning paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and prehistorically oriented poet, wants to take you on a deep time journey, a sweeping 550 million years. But it will be one that interrupts our normalized assumptions about what stories matter and how narratives are supposed to unfurl. The story will be told backwards. This is not a story of progress. This is not even a singular story. It is a frayed, teeming ecosystem of narratives that generatively, explosively flow against the forward propulsion of evolution.
Approaching five major extinctions and millions of years, the task seems insurmountable; but Halliday demonstrates in craft what he explains in biology: beings adapt into shape to fit their ecological niche; and that niche is deeply informed by the particular pressures and textures of a situated location. The location is modern publishing and the pressure is modern science writing’s need to demonstrate rigor while also engaging a general audience. Otherlands relies on a neat place-based framework of fifteen chapters anchored by a temporal period and ecosystem. We begin in the Alaskan Pleistocene, 20,000 years ago, and end up, some 500 million years later in the Ediacaran Hills of Australia. What is remarkable about Halliday’s approach is its ability to walk the tightrope between inaccessible scientific jargon and blousy, unsubstantiated lyricism. Instead he manages to create a syntactical texture, part poetry and part practical precision, that has the same sweeping effect as the Sharovipteryx he illustrates in the chapter on the Triassic. Halliday tells us that with “the same wing-shape used in aeroplanes from modern fighter jets to Concorde…” the 225-million-year-old flying archosauromorph is as high tech as most modern flying technology. It is that ability to weave in and out of the modern, to stitch an abstract name Sharovipteryx to a somatic swoop, a contemporary visual, that makes Halliday’s book so effective. I would offer that while it reads backwards, it is really a polytemporal project, covertly undermining the very structure it seems to affirm, always sewing back and forth so that each epoch intimately perfuses the other. Halliday, at one point, remarks on the remarkable continuity of wasps, going back a 100 million years. The observation opens up a vein with deep time. At a moment when we feel so cut off from the past that we fetishize it with Paleolithic diets and exercise routines, it is refreshing to see someone put pressure on that temporal membrane, blow metaphors not just backwards, but both ways.
As someone who talks about ecological storytelling a great deal, I often struggle to find modern examples of what that might look like. I stress that storytelling is situated: the particular fruiting of a particular place, metabolically built from the spores, pheromones, funk, and microbiome you as reader and teller inhale and exhale. Ecological storytelling does not bend towards universal themes. Nor does it abide by linear, singular narratives. In all likelihood it will be less telling and more listening: to other species, elements, and patterns of behavior. I do not say this lightly, but I would offer that while Otherlands on surface description seems to fall prey to a generalist approach, it is in fact the best example of an ecological narrative I have encountered in recent years.
While it seems to share a “rhizome” with Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (another wonderful blend of poetry and science writing), Halliday’s project is distinct in its refusal to identify with one species, one creaturely focal point. Given the popular preoccupation with early man and with dinosaurs, it would have been easy for him to funnel most of his energy into descriptions of these beings. But humans disappear immediately and dinosaurs are a textual blip when compared to the pages he spends describing millions of years of giant glass coral reefs and scintillating bacterial mats. In fact, Halliday seems reticent to even identify species as being “finished” or legible. He is much more interested in the “ancient river” that meanders, forks, and flows to suit the gradient and texture of a landscape. Species don’t stay still. They move. Most, importantly they move and are articulated in relationship to place. They can’t possibly be lifted out of context and be understood. Halliday writes, “Environments shape their inhabitants as much as their inhabitants shape them. Remove all life from a place but its herbivorous animals, and line them up in a row, smallest to largest. The distribution of body size can be turned into a graph called a cenogram, and the graph is remarkably accurate at predicting the relative openness and aridity of the environment.” What Halliday is showing is that as beings, we are, in fact, photo negatives of ecologies and relationships that no longer exist, given the incredible slow pace of evolutionary adaption. As amniotes, Halliday demonstrates, we were not even adapted for dry land. Our watery womb genesis hints back at our embeddedness in aquatic environments. When shifting climate forced proto-animals into arid conditions over 30 millions years ago at the end of the Carboniferous and start of the Permian, they adapted by sequestering these aquatic environment inside their own bodies.
What Halliday has done so masterfully is what I want to encourage all writers – both fiction and non-fiction – to consider the most important aim of narrative. He has given shape to entire places, nested biomes of relationship all mutually bringing each other into being, rather than a deracinated protagonist, a single species lineage on a hero’s journey towards inevitable differentiation or extinction.
I would say that Otherlands offers a timely antidote to the anthropocentric echo chamber of projects like The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow and Sapiens by Yuval Harari. When faced with a planetary history that holds but a droplet of human existence, it might behoove us to learn from the ocean of otherness that has existed and created biological novelty for many, many millions of years without us. If our bodies are photo-negatives of past ecosystems and relationships, how better to learn about ourselves, not by writing another pompous attempt to explain civilization, tracking only back to the late Paleolithic, but to look at the ancient embedded places that shaped our very organism.
The great victory of Otherlands is its interruption of chronological storytelling. Yes, it goes backwards. But that is the simplest explanation of its mechanism. Right now we are faced with mass extinction – not just of species but of relationships, types of smell and song, sensory maps, languages, reclusive and nonhuman epistemologies. By going backwards Halliday is in a way resurrecting whole worlds, whole lost bacterial cosmologies, whole spectral kinship systems. He notes that many fossils are difficult to understand because they represent not a knot in a long rope of being, but the last frayed edge of a thread. With five major extinction events covered in the book, we see how many times most life has died, the survivors not selected for their fitness, but most often by blind chance. Around each extinction event he performs a spiral, placing us back several million years from the last chapter, weaving a richly textured scene not dependent on human narrative clichés of conflict or hierarchy, and then spinning forward to absolute destruction. For that is the very “matter” of his writing – crystallized disasters that managed to capture in sediment and mineral the relationships of a specific time and place. It is from these cataclysms that the book draws its texture, its colors, its sensory detail. And then again, backwards immediately, performing a retro-miracle. Once Halliday has extinguished most of life he swoops backwards again, resurrecting all those beings just destroyed and plunging into their past, the millions of years of evolution they, too spiraled through. By going backwards Halliday both confronts extinction and undoes it. He also complicates the moral projection that evolution leads to fitter thus better species. Evolution is braided with extinction events that do not slowly, carefully, shave off the less adapted. As we go backwards and resurrect lost oceans and geological forms, sloths and fungal prototaxites, we do not lose complexity, instead, often, we seem to gain it: the sky studded with more stars.
How best may we live right now? I think it may be by strengthening our empathy muscle: by trying our best to think like other beings, and most importantly, to think like entire ecosystems. To tell any story is to use a body that shares an evolutionary and ecological vein, an “ancient river”, with the glittering Ediacaran biota, with a sky with a bigger moon, with cyanobacteria harnessing their hunger for photons, with ancient Carboniferous swamps, with time so deep and thick it can hold you through cataclysm, it can offer an embrace in the face of a future of uncertainty.
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Recommended reading this week:
Intelligence on a Planetary Scale Study: Read here
I am really enjoying the memoir and essays of Finn Schubert. Check out his Substack
"He has given shape to entire places, nested biomes of relationship all mutually bringing each other into being, rather than a deracinated protagonist, a single species lineage on a hero’s journey towards inevitable differentiation or extinction."
Thank you, I cannot WAIT to start in on this book! (Also, thanks for the mention, that means a lot to me!)
Thank you for putting words to how I’ve been experiencing this extraordinary book. I’ve been reading it at the same time as Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Lost Language of Plants, which itself plays on many of the same themes, and together make me walk in the world newborn.