Western Colorado author Craig Childs will join filmmaker Larry Ruiz on Friday night for “Mammoths in Durango: A Multimedia Adventure into the Ice Age.”

Childs is the author of more than 10 books, including Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth; Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession; and House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest.

He spoke with The Durango Herald over the phone this week, touching on everything from ice age people to climate change to cleaning dishes.

Q: Why is it important to study ancient people?

A: I think it just points out there is a layer of history most people aren’t familiar with. We tend to focus on the last few thousand years, but people were in North America at least 13,000 years ago. And so, if nothing else, it points out that something significant happened here. The site that’s not very far away (from the location of the mammoth rock art) has ice age tools – part of the first migration of people into the continent. That’s a pretty significant period of time we’re not necessarily connected with. The mammoth, whether real or not, at least puts us back there in that time frame.

Q: What do we lose when we don’t look back that far into history?

A: We just have trouble thinking in deep time. We live lives that are so momentary, that considering something beyond your life, or your children’s lives, is difficult just because it’s not there. It’s not real. It’s not in front of you.

I think we’ve got our daily routines and chores, so we say, why think about mammoth hunters? It gives us a complex. Our daily lives give us a place to be, a place in history. (Ancient people provide) not just a history of centuries, (they provide) a history of thousands of years and even tens of thousands of years. It’s hard for us to think in those time frames. We just get tunnel-visioned in our own lives.

Q: Do you get caught up in the daily routine of life? How do you deal with that?

A: I see deep time better than a lot of people because it’s my job, but yeah, my life becomes the work that I need to do, the dishes that need to be cleaned, the kids that need to be packed up and sent to school in the morning. Those things dominate my life. But then it helps to step out of this time frame and look at what’s been happening on a larger scale. But even if I get stuck in a routine of mortal existence, I’m aware of immortal patterns going on all around me, which I think people seek for different reasons. I seek it so that my life has some context outside of just me and my civilization.

Q: Were you always that way? Or was there a turning point in your life?

A: I was always that way. Maybe everyone starts off that way. Kids are so interested in dinosaurs, and that must fill their imagination. I just kept doing it. I think it’s easy to stop, it’s easy to say thinking about dinosaurs or thinking about the ice age is like believing in fairy tales. Except, we know it’s a fairy tale that’s real. I’ve just kept studying that fairy tale.

Q: How do the ice age people compare to people of today?

A: In a way, looking back at the first people, we forget we are also the first people now. We are always the first in the coming world. And right now, we’re on the verge of a very different world, which you could argue we always have been. People who left tools outside Bluff, Utah, were at the edge of an enormous change. The ice age was about to end. There were radical changes in the climate that would completely upend North America. I look at them, and then look at us, and think, “Oh, we’ve been on this boundary before.” Whether this tells us the right thing to do or not, I don’t know. I look back and see how people were making refined weaponry and killing off the large animals, and I think, “Oh, that’s exactly what we are doing.”

Q: Are you optimistic about the future?

A: I know we’ll be handing future generations some big difficulties, but this goes beyond generations, I think. There’ll be adaptations all the way along. But I’ve heard the argument this isn’t the time to be having children, that it seems too sad to bring children into this world, and I’ve thought that you could say that of any point in history. In a way, this is the time to be bringing children into the world. We need people who are going to adapt and make good choices.

Q: But with so much terrible news reported on the environment, how do you hold hope for the future?

A: It’s not going to be the same world that it was, but it never was going to be the same world. I don’t say that meaning we should just sit back and watch it happen and that the change is inevitable. We are steering the course of that change, and that is why we need children. We need good people to be steering that course.

You can drive yourself insane knowing what’s happening. I think we have to be careful with despair. I guess I try to look at it and keep going forward. I look for the good news also. I look at conservation work. Without it, things could be much, much worse. It’s pretty rough right now, but it could be a lot rougher.

There’s a difficult balance between an industrial civilization and the natural world. And we are very new at this. We’re facing challenges we’ve never faced before, and it’s an awkward and destructive time. We’re figuring out what we need to do to keep from destroying everything on this planet.

Q: What are you working on right now?

A: I’ve been studying ice age people across the whole continent, spending a lot of time at earlier sites up in Oregon and Florida, Maryland and Texas. There are older sites that go back 19,000 years in Pennsylvania, and possibly 20,000 years on the East Coast. They just keep getting hazier the farther back you go.

Fifteen thousand years ago, you really see people across the continent. Thirteen thousand years, you see the first settlement of North America, the first people really pinning themselves to the map. Before that, early arrivals that didn’t survive. Who knows what happened to them, but there are appearances here and there. Maybe they survived. There’s just not enough evidence to say very much past 13,000 years ago.

I also like to step away from human history. My last book was more about large earth processes over millions and billions of years. So I take a break from ghosts now and then and write about rocks and animals.

jromeo@durangoherald.com