This sculpture in onyx by Emily Young is similiar to one
she created in hard chalcedony called "Time in the Stone,"
featured in a recent issue of New Scientist magazine, with
her short essay, "A message to the future." In it she points
out that it was in studying stone and fossils that geologists
in the 18th and 19th realized the immense age of the planet.
Her sculpture in chalcedony could well last a million years.
"When I carved this face, I felt that I was carving my own
consciousness onto it," she writes. "If the Earth suffers
some searing catastrophe, this chalcedony head will survive...
if we don't all make it to an acceptable future, happy and well,
as scientists tell us is extremely possible, I hope my stone
carvings will be waiting to be read in some futurescape of
strangeness, and be a memorial to us. The Earth is and has
been so powerful, so wild, so beautiful--the source and surrounding
of all that we are and are capable of. But our deep respect for her
is dribbling away, and we are destroying her. This is my protest:
I want to shout down the years, and tell the future of that bit of
its past that was us."