American Scientist

THE WHISPERS OF ROCK: The Stories that Stone Tells About Our World and Our Lives. Anjana Khatwa. 336 pp. Basic Books, 2025. $30.

In the preface of The Whispers of Rock: The Stories that Stone Tells About Our World and Our Lives, earth scientist Anjana Khatwa writes that the traditional, objective scientific approach to geology “can create distance between yourself and nature. To bridge this gap, appreciating and understanding spiritual approaches toward nature (even if you are not spiritual yourself) can provide a guiding sense of purpose, meaning and responsibility.” This “alliance of science and spiritualities” underlies Khatwa’s approach to geology and Earth history in this deeply personal narrative. The book addresses environmental issues and authoritatively tracks geologically-driven human tragedies, but it also asks readers to reconsider how we approach our planet, its history, and science. However, along the way, the book has numerous errors in its descriptions and understanding of many geological features, processes, and lithologies.

Khatwa attempts to integrate spiritual Indigenous beliefs with the scientific. The book begins with the author's journey as a child of Indian parents and Hindu faith who was entranced by rocks, to an earth science professional—a woman of color in a male dominated field—who was derided by her traditional Indian community, and "an outlier in professional spaces." Khatwa finds solace and perhaps a sort of kinship in rocks, especially those removed from their native habitat by human enterprise or natural processes. Khatwa is not a member of an Indigenous minority, as she states upfront in the book.

She explores how a variety of Indigenous cultures listen to rocks, as well as how she personally listens to rocks. The rocks are quoted, and frequently complain about their treatment by humans. Chapters cover the Precambrian period, fossils and biogenic rocks, igneous rocks and volcanoes, caves, canyons, coal and finally, displaced rocks, especially the large rocks eroded and transported by glaciers, called glacial erratics.

The book’s strength lies in its emphasis on spirituality, especially Indigenous spirituality, as a way of developing a reverence for rocks. She rightly decries the forceful removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands, and credits these populations for their understanding of landscapes, ecosystems, and rocks as living entities. Khatwa relates numerous Indigenous stories, such as the Blackfoot story of Otokat, the largest known glacial erratic on the planet, which was split when, according to Blackfoot legend, bats called up by the “demi-god” Naphi, dived onto the huge boulder, splitting it in two. Although Khatwa cautions that some Indigenous stories are not factual representations of events, she also includes some ethnogeological examples of Indigenous understanding of volcanic and other processes, including the Lakotah oral tradition of the Black Hills. They are examples, she says, of a relationship of "empathy and custodianship" with the geological world.

Most of the book’s Indigenous and ancient Old World cultural stories focus on reverence and spiritual connections to stones. Few offer ethnogeological insight to geological processes or history. For example, the arches of Utah's Arches National Park and Natural Bridges National Monument are considered sacred time-portals by the by Pueblo and other Indigenous peoples, but stories or explanations of how the arches formed are not included in the book. The sparse examples of geologically relevant Indigenous information include a Hawaiian story of Pele fleeing her vengeful sister, demonstrating that Native Hawaiians understood the age progression of the island chain. And there's the Pacific Northwest Plateau Tribes' oral traditions recounting devastating Ice Age floods. But many other geologically based Indigenous stories of the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere—including the Klamath Tribe's accurate documentation of Mount Mazama’s catastrophic eruption, Northwest Coastal Tribes’ accounts of great Cascadia earthquakes and tsunamis, and Klickitat Tribal accounts of the great Bonneville landslide and related volcanic eruptions—are not mentioned in the book.

Khatwa tends toward melodramatic hyperbole when quoting what stones whisper to her. For example, when she finds a vertebra of a juvenile ichthyosaur on a Dorset, England beach, she hears it whisper to her: “Oh how it feels to bask in a mother’s love again! I was once young and reckless, joyfully chasing shoals of fish and ammonites across the rolling waves. . . . Now I am a treasure for you to love—a part of me to call your own.”

Unfortunately, real stories about rock origins told by the fabrics, textures, patterns, and compositions of rocks are seldom revealed. For example, standing on an outcrop of Jurassic Navajo sandstone and knowing that the curving layers told which way the wind was blowing 160 million years ago, can transform stolid, static rocks into a lively, living landscape almost as much as Indigenous stories do. Because many Indigenous traditions have been lost, or are still held as sacred and, thus, not available to other cultures, utilizing the patterns in stone to tell their living stories can be important to conservation.

The most glaring problem with this work lies in its liberties with geologic and archeological facts. Khatwa seems familiar with sedimentary rocks; the last third of the book is the most geologically accurate. But the first two-thirds contains substantial errors in petrology, plate tectonics, Earth history, and other disciplines. For example, she writes that in the Earth's mantle, "rock exists in a semi-molten state called magma . . ." The peridotite in the Earth's mantle is in a solid state. Although it is extremely hot and can flow over geological time scales, it is not a liquid or magma. The peridotite acts as a viscoelastic solid or viscous fluid on long time scales, enabling mantle convection (slow movement). Under short time scales, such as seismic waves passing through it, it behaves as a solid rock.

She goes on to write that basaltic lavas cool to "form a range of volcanic rocks like basalt and obsidian." Basalt lava cools to become basalt. Obsidian may be black, but its composition is radically different than basalt. Although basaltic magmas may differentiate over a long time to produce a variety of compositions, including a minuscule amount of granitic melt with a composition equivalent to obsidian, this process simply does not occur in the very short time it takes for a basaltic lava to solidify. Lastly, there is the statement "Native American communities had lived on the [California] lands for 40,000 years.” The oldest documented human site in the Americas goes back a little more than 18,000 years and is at Rimrock Draw Rockshelter in Oregon, and the oldest documented evidence of human presence are 21,000- to 23,000-year-old footprints at White Sands, New Mexico.

Although some errors are trite, the misrepresentations of numerous basic geological processes and facts tear at the fabric of credulity for geologists and misinforms the general public. We live in a time when facts, the scientific method, and scientists themselves seem to be optional, if not obsolete. Geology is perhaps the least taught, most inaccessible, and most publicly unfamiliar among the sciences, yet it is also a subject of much public curiosity and speculation. Accuracy and clarity are especially critical in conveying Earth science information.

The Whispers of Rock provides valid moral, spiritual, and cultural imperatives for sustainability. Khatwa introduces readers to Indigenous stories about Earth's creation and development. At the same time, she often weaves inaccurate elements into geology that strain scientific credibility. Nonetheless, this book has many merits. It issues a clarion call for more judicious and sustainable use of resources, respect for Indigenous knowledge, and integration of Indigenous understanding with the geosciences. Khatwa encourages the reader to exist in a "space of duality” type of understanding with both science and spirituality. This goal is laudable. But readers should consider The Whispers of Rock a work of spirituality, culture, and environmental concerns, rather than one that brings Indigenous understanding and science together.