Walking our past

Two friends of mine, Mick Carter and Aviva Reed, are on the recently created Gaia Walk at Windgrove looking out across coastal heath and pondering on the evolutionary history of our planetary home (as one would do when on the Gaia Walk).

Questions they might be considering:

When did the first flower announce its fragrance to the world?
When did bones first connect hip to thigh?
When did the dragon fly first zip?

Actually, for Aviva the answers come quickly as she has already done extensive work as both artist and scientist on these questions and more. The visual result is an imaginative series of evolutionary paintings. Three of which (out of 12) — The Jurassic Era, Carboniferous Era and Quaternary Era — are shown in today’s blog.

While not exactly fossils, for the past 20 years whenever I have come across bleached animal or bird bones, I have wondered about their evolutionary history. It is an intensely fascinating story. As paleontologists and other scientists discover more, dig deeper and build up the picture of how the earth has evolved over the past 4.6 billion years, the “unscripted” cosmic story that has led to you, the reader, being able to sit in front of a screen deciphering its scribbles, is almost beyond comprehension.

And what is most difficult to comprehend is the length of time required to get here. Hence, the 1.2 kilometer Gaia Walk; a walk that represents the last 600 million years of our evolution out of the 4.6 billion years since our earth was first formed. Upon completion, and seeing that our “modern civilization” and the formation of all the world’s major religions equals just a scratch mark on the final pole, one can only come away slightly sweaty and a little humbled over the tiny length of time humans have been around.

Still, its been a magical journey and if we humans can come to grips with our physical linkage back to the oozing slime and moss of the Silurian Era and before, than we might better understand how we connect to all that is and, therefore, work to maintain, not just a sustainable world, but a thriving one.

I mentioned the creation of the Gaia Walk in a previous blog. Its story is evolving also. This past week Aviva spent five days here getting familiar with Windgrove as a first step in the production of original artworks displaying the plant, insect and animal life from the Cambrian Era to the present Cenozoic Era. Her work will be reproduced on weatherproof panels and placed along the length of the Gaia Walk along with other panels of factual information.

How exciting.