When Science Is Art

Can you love science – maybe even be a scientist yourself – and still be awed, even spiritually moved, by natural wonders?

No one answers that question better than my friend and colleague Sue Baugh. Her new book Echoes of Earth, which comes out this fall, is filled to the brim with photos of ancient mineral sites. These colorful, dramatic rock formations are a geologist’s dream. But the book deals equally with what these sites mean to us as living beings, and their potential to inspire us.

The Book

Echoes of Earth has been Sue’s passion and labor of love for several years. She and her co-author traveled to far corners of the earth (including Greenland, Australia, the Northwest Territories) to take these stunning photographs. Check them out (and order the book) at their website, www.wildstonearts.com.

I wish I could share what it is like to watch Sue present. Last weekend, to an audience at Fritz Pastry in Chicago, she showed slides of her photographs and her journey around the world, and shared the lessons she’s taken from that journey. Her sense of wonder and appreciation of these natural phenomena is contagious.

And, I confess, the decorator in me is salivating over the textiles being created as companion products. If those hoodies get finished anytime soon, Sue, my birthday is in September!

Can Science Be Spiritual?

I’ve always loved science. It’s why I majored in biology. I love knowing how things work, and how we can create medicine using natural processes and plants.

Science – and nature itself – can often seem dry, cold, clinical, and dispassionate (which is one reason I left the lab to pursue more creative lines of work). Yet nothing on this earth is more spiritual to me than standing in the middle of a vast forest, or on the side of a mountain. Nowhere on earth do I feel more inspired, more humbled, more imaginative, or more at peace. I’ve never been able to explain that. I just know it’s true.

I think Sue gets that. Her book covers the science: how minerals create colors and patterns in stone; how continental drift created similar geological sites on opposite ends of the planet; how colossal shifts in the earth’s crust can turn million-ton slabs of rock onto their sides so that horizontal deposits now point at the sky. But ultimately it’s about what happens to you when you witness these phenomena. It’s about how taking yourself into nature itself creates an experience that is incomparable with anything man-made.

I encourage you to check it out. I think you’ll like it.