Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
tunnels could trigger earthquakes.
45
“Induced seismicity,” as this hazard is
known today, has recently been recognized as a major problem for twenty-
first-century schemes of energy production and waste disposal.
Swiss seismology thus proceeded according to the principle that nature
should be used only “according to its possibilities.” This was the principle
behind Switzerland's burgeoning nature protection movement, in which
Heim and other members of the Earthquake Commission took leading
roles.
46
The nature protection movement had its immediate origins in
the effort to preserve a mammoth rock, fondly known as the “Pierre de
Marmettes,” from the hands of a granite speculator. This two-thousand-
cubic-meter landmark was an “erratic block,” one of the massive boulders
poised at precarious angles on the outskirts of the Jura Mountains. These im-
posing objects had long been treasured as curiosities. In the late nineteenth
century, they came to be recognized as relics of the last ice age, transported
by glaciers to their unlikely perches. In 1906, an alliance of Swiss scientific
societies paid over thirty thousand francs to rescue the Pierre de Marmettes.
Thus was a movement born that stressed the aesthetic, scientific, and his-
toric value of natural monuments, against their mere economic worth.
47
The Pierre de Marmettes came to symbolize nature's need for protec-
tion against human self-interest. Tellingly, Heim likened himself to nature's
physician. Writing of rock slides, he described the geologist as providing
“diagnosis,” “prognosis,” and “therapy.” Implicit was an analogy to the
work of Heim's wife, Marie, Switzerland's first female doctor. Marie Heim
herself saw the similarity: “My husband's occupation and mine are actually
very alike and therefore make equal demands on us. As I get called to suf-
fering people, he is suddenly called to avalanches, failures of tunnels and
dams, and potential rock slides. Like the physician, the geologist is also very
often exposed to dangers. Just as the physician first observes and judges and
then must prescribe and treat, the main activity of the practical geologist is
likewise observation, thorough investigation, and considered judgment.”
48
Indeed, Albert Heim seems to have worked according to a kind of geological
Hippocratic oath—a recognition of his limitations as planetary healer and
a promise, at worst, to do no harm.
for Heim, enlisting lay observers was not a last resort but an end in
itself. Heim went so far as to suggest that nonexpert observers might have
an advantage over scientists themselves. In an essay on “Seeing and Draw-
ing,” Heim argued that modernity had dulled man's alertness to nature.
Pointing to the verisimilitude of prehistoric cave drawings, Heim noted,
“The savage sees much more consciously than civilized man; he devotes
himself to sensory impressions with his full interest, without allowing his
