Ponyo

"Well, the films of Hayao Miyazaki have been one of the great bonuses of being a parent. He is one of the great storytellers. He also has a genius for showing, in a non-judgemental and matter-of-fact way, how the world is changing in the Anthropocene. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . For example, in Ponyo , which is a film about the adventures of a young boy and a being from the sea, there’s an underwater scene in which a dredger is seen ploughing the sea floor. As it ploughs through the mud, a fish tries to get out of the way; we also see junk and plastic bottles being disturbed. Within a few seconds, we realise how the sea floor has been changed by people. There is no commentary, or sense of moralising: the scene is just there. And in fact, dredging has had an enormous impact on the oceans. Trawlers scrape through the mud and sand on the ocean floor, de-structuring the continental shelves, and completely de-structuring any biological community there. In recent years, trawling has attracted scientific attention, and has been recognized as being responsible for some of the most fundamental changes to the earth wrought by humans. In another scene in Ponyo , we see some Devonian armoured fish—the kind of things that one can hammer out from the Old Red Sandstone strata. It’s a beautiful vignette set within the overall narrative. These magical little fragments speak to me immediately as a geologist—a person who is interested in the Earth and how it works. In short, yes. I and my geologist colleagues are currently engaged in discussions and joint projects with artists, historians, philosophers, and lawyers. Together, we are trying to develop and convey an understanding of how the Eearth works, and how it is changing. I think that the concept of the Anthropocene has been hugely important in bringing these communities together. The more links we can make between disciplines, the better we can cope with whatever environmental changes will happen. Yes, one of the great things about the Anthropocene is that it has made people interested in the Geological Time Scale as a whole. Once people encounter the concept of the Anthropocene, they start asking about the Holocene, and the Pleistocene, how these time units are organized, and what they mean. One interesting development to have emerged over the last couple of years is the idea of an intermediate time scale. We have a human time scale, which is short: we typically deal with days, weeks, years and possibly human generations. Then we have the Geological Time Scale, which is huge and beyond imagination: it covers millions of years. This time scale is fascinating, but seems abstract and intractable. With the Anthropocene and the attempt to project trends into the future, there has emerged the idea of an intermediate time scale. This is a time scale on which both humanly- and geologically-significant things happen. This is a time scale on which we can still feel emotionally-connected, because it is only a few generations forward and backwards, and yet on which significant changes to the Earth and its biosphere can be detected. I think that working within that intermediate time scale forms a bridge from the present to the very big geological time scale of geology."