Assembling+I+EB

Evan Bower Assembling California- I

In McPhee’s //Assembling California,// he wants to communicate the damage done by hydraulic mining from after the California gold rush until the present. To do this, he doesn’t mention gold mining until about halfway through the nearly 50 page article.

He starts off telling us about plate tectonics, and how they have shaped the land we walk on. Specifically, he focuses on California, and how it was created when a shifting of the plates made a terrane called Sonomia collide with modern day Nevada and join each other. This collision came with the movement of magma and other geological goodies within the terrane, and created the supply of gold that humans would later gut.

The theme of cause and effect holds from the explanation of geology later still to the humans that live there. McPhee later tells us about Johann Augustus Sutter, a farmer who settles in California after a brief run in with the natives, in hope of cultivating a simple farming town. His sidekick in doing so, James Wilson Marshall, comes across a seemingly endless supply of gold, and madness ensues. As the land through mineral cultivation became a literal goldmine through dumb chance, so too did humans stumble upon that gold, and Sutter’s vision of a simple village was wholly lost and gone. Not just California, but the whole country is turned on its head, as newspapers denying California’s gold supply discontinue printing against it, since every writer the paper had left for California to get while the getting was good.

McPhee first must tell us of the history of geology before speaking about current day California, and the reason he must do this is because if we don’t care about California’s situation already, after reading an intro to an article about it, we still won’t. So we start off with learning about terranes, the three dimensional sections of lithosphere which we walk on, which move like hot cells when the Earth’s plates shift. We learn that mountains are just the remains of colliding terrane, and oceans of terrane which have pulled apart. When we learn that after billions of years of terrane whacking each other, kilometers of land hold rock from sections of terrane worldwide, we fall in love with the geology.

And now that we love geology, McPhee tells us that in California, the results of a billion years process is, because of us, nearly gone. He doesn’t ask us to regret the past two-hundred years of human action, but you innately do in so quickly gaining an appreciation for something to learn that it is gone.

Our guide, as well as McPhee’s, throughout the geological journey is Eldridge Moores, geologist and cellist, the kind of guy who, “runs up flights of stairs encircling elevator shafts, because elevators are so slow.” McPhee always seems to be in favour of moderation, including in ideas on in how an ideal is put into action. Since a love for the lithosphere’s natural process has now been stirred in the reader, it seems like Moores is present not only to share knowledge, but to keep the readers passion in check. While reading about California’s mining methods, the reader at this point may be organizing vendetta, but Moores shows us that after this knowledge marinates, we may have a more reasonable outlook.

Moores says, “Erosion occurs, for the most part, in what Geologists call catastrophic events- and in that category full credentials belonged to hydraulic mining, for scouring out and taking away thirteen thousand million cubic yards of the Sierra.” He adds, “In a couple hundred years we are doing a good job of extracting minerals deposited over billions of years.” However, when McPhee prods Moores for comment by suggesting humans are aware of what they’re doing but simply don’t care, Moores answers holistically, “You have to face the fact that if you live in an industrial society you must have places that will look terrible.”

The burden of being a geologist is starring everyday at the notion that the time in which human life overlaps the much larger life of the Earth is infinitesimally small. The struggle for Moores, as well as for the reader accepting the geological implications, is to reconcile the necessity of human activity upon a world seemingly better off without them. After a lifetime in the field, it seems Moores is able to do this, and while the character may seem frustrating to a reader moments ago converted, he is key to the impression McPhee wants the article to leave.

While the description of geology alone can leave the reader with an opinion favouring natural inevitably over human need, Moores does the job of reminding us of who we are, and holding that one’s integrity need not be distributed in accordance with ones time on Earth. Views on these matters always seem to swerve toward the extreme. This is why an environmentalist’s reading of McPhee could be that he fails to take up the cause. Concentrating on science alone, or otherwise, can explain away human existence toward the answer that we are nothing, or leave one blindingly believing we are everything. The mixture of science and humanism seems to be taken up in the character of Moores, the overall message being that and we take from the Earth, and are right to do so. But we’re small, and would the small ones take helpings more suited to the small, please and thanks?