Deeper Roots

Deep Earth Time

Six hundred million years ago, large portions of the southeastern United States were submerged under the waters of a large inland sea called the Appalachian Basin. Streams and rivers from mountains on the eastern edge of the Basin deposited countless tons of sediment in ever-changing patterns as three entire ranges rose and eroded over a period of three hundred million years.

Beds of limestone and sandstone were laid down. Shorelines shifted, deltas transformed into swamps, repeatedly rising and submerging, building layers of shale and coal, until finally, the last inundation occurred about two hundred and fifty million years ago, at the end of the Paleozoic. This was at the beginning of the most recent period of mountain building in the area, called the Allegheny Orogeny.

Africa was pushing up against the coast of southeastern North America with sufficient pressure to fold, buckle and lift the pre-Cambrian bedrock of the previous ranges over 15,000 feet into the sky. Today these peaks have eroded well below 7,000 feet, and people call them the Smokies.

Because the force of the collision dissipated as it moved westward, inland areas were not as severely deformed and great slabs of rock hundreds of miles in length responded to the pressure by uniformly rising as a tableland stretching from the southern border of New York to northeastern Alabama. Millions of years later, this feature remains 2,000 feet above sea level and is known locally as the Cumberland Plateau.

Located on the remnants of an eroded spur off the extreme western edge of the plateau in what was once the depths of the Appalachian Basin, a hill shaped like the shell of a box turtle rises in the midst of a sea of rolling ridges, almost a thousand feet above sea level. Turtle Hill is akin to a natural stupa or earth mound and is blessed with an abundance of Terrapene carolina.

The Present Call to Renunciation and Global Transformation

From a religious perspective, the problem with market capitalism and its values is twofold: greed and delusion. On the one hand, the unrestrained market emphasizes and even requires greed in at least two ways. Desire for profit is necessary to fuel the engine of the economic system, and an insatiable desire to consume ever more must be generated to create markets for what can be produced.

Within economic theory and the markets it promotes, the moral dimension of greed is inevitably lost; today it seems left to religion to preserve what is problematic about a human trait that is unsavory at best and unambiguously evil at its worst.