Deep Time: Christopher Dewdney’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth
A FILM BY BRIAN D. JOHNSON
Time is running out. In the past half billion years, life on Earth has been decimated by five mass extinctions. Now the sixth is in the air. And as humans destroy their natural habitat at an unprecedented rate, extinguishing some 150 species an hour, the planet’s apex predator is not immune. Every species goes extinct, or evolves into something else; it’s only a matter of time. DEEP TIME is about a scientist/poet who reflects on this as he travels to the ends of the Earth.
Christopher Dewdney may be the most significant Canadian writer you’ve never heard of. This award-winning author, who has published 16 books of poetry and non-fiction, translates broad spectrums of natural science into exhilarating visions of the Earth’s deep past and distant future. An original thinker with a sly wit, he has been compared to everyone from Aldous Huxley to Marshall McLuhan. In the words of one critic, Dewdney “combines a scientist’s passion for detail with the poet’s creative imagination and a vital, pervasive eroticism.” His favorite medium is the fossil, which he treats as a portal into a lost world, a virtual time machine.
DEEP TIME will follow Dewdney on an odyssey through the eons and into the moment, as he embarks on the field trip of his dreams. It will take him to four corners of the Earth, each representing one of the classical four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. He joins a dig for dinosaur bones in Hell Creek Montana (Earth); climbs the perpetually erupting volcano of Stromboli in Italy’s Aeolian Islands (Fire); observes the stars from a space observatory 10,000 feet above Chile’s Atacama Desert (Air); and swims the reefs of Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago, home to the richest marine diversity on the planet.
En route, what emerges is a quixotic portrait of the artist as a youthful elder testing the limits of his imagination, his body and culture. As Dewdney connects with Indigenous artists and scientists, he grapples with humanity’s devolution from pre-colonial harmony with nature to post-colonial havoc. Closer to home, he debates dystopia with Margaret Atwood in his kitchen—and canoes through Ontario lakes where his father, artist and anthropologist Selwyn Dewdney, mapped hundreds of petroglyphs to publish a ground-breaking book about Indigenous rock art in the early 1960s. Chris will untangle those roots with Liz Howard, a Griffin Prize-winning poet of Anishinaabe heritage who was born and raised in Chapleau near the Dewdney family cottage. She, too, is a science poet, who “braids Western physics with Anishinaabe sky knowledge.
Guided by a curious mind lighting up the circuitry between science and art, DEEP TIME is a film of wild ideas grounded in vivid physical evidence — the natural forces that have created, sustained, destroyed and renewed life on Earth for 3.7 billion years. For a species that’s only 200,000 years old, blind faith in human supremacy is the ultimate hubris. The Doomsday Clock has sounded the alarm and we’re sleeping through it. For Dewdney is gravely concerned humanity’s collision course with nature. But as a futurist with a soft spot for our single-celled ancestors, he doesn’t catastrophize. It’s the long game that interests him. He believes the extinction of our species, at least in its current form, may be inevitable. To grasp that fact can be strangely comforting—we can make sense of our existence by seeing beyond it. To embrace our mortality allows us to view the world with new levels of empathy, awe and wonder. And that is exactly what the long lens of DEEP TIME aims to do for its audience.