previous planetary upheavals makes it clear that there may be
a long period of biogeochemical capriciousness before a new,
stable regime emerges.
C H A P T E R 6
T I M E F U L N E S S
U T O P I A N A N D S C I E N T I F I C
The distinction between the past, present and future is only a
stubbornly persistent illusion.
— A L B E R T E I N S T E I N , I N A L E T T E R TO M I C H E L E B E S S O, 1 9 5 5
L E V I AT H A N
For a few weeks each February, small towns pop up like Briga-
doons on the ice of Lake Winnebago, the largest inland water
body in Wisconsin. Winnebago is a vestige of the much larger
glacial Lake Oshkosh, which formed from ponded meltwater
late in the Ice Age and left behind heavy clay sediment that is
the bane of gardeners in our area. Lake Winnebago is shallow,
and often alarmingly green in the summer as a result of runoff
from lawns and farms, but it still supports a healthy population
of lake sturgeon. Each year, before they head into upstream
tributaries to spawn, the sturgeon in Lake Winnebago congre-
gate in a few areas, and the temporary towns start to appear on
the ice, mirroring the fish communities below.
Sturgeon are large fish— the record setter for this area was
240 pounds (bigger, as the local paper pointed out, than a
popular Packers linebacker1). Their lifespan is longer than
that of humans, and their lineage has been around since the
Early Cretaceous. They are caught not with delicate hooks and
lines dropped through narrow auger holes but with trident- like
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spears plunged into large rectangular openings sawn in the ice.
If spearing sounds brutal, it is at least a fair match between
humans and fish. Spearers wait for hours or days in dark shan-
ties illuminated only by the otherworldly glow of secondhand
sunlight that shines through the ice and reflects off the bottom
of the lake. If a sturgeon happens to swim by, it is a feat of ath-
leticism to plunge the spear with sufficient force at the precisely
right moment to strike it, and then to wrestle it out of the frigid
water. Some people have sat in sturgeon shacks for 30 seasons
without getting a single fish. Some fish have been swimming in
the lake for more than a century without being caught.
As early as the 1910s, there was concern about the declining
sturgeon population in Lake Winnebago and connected waters.
Both the flesh and the roe of sturgeon fetched high prices, and
year after year, commercial fishing operations caught as many
fish as possible. In the winter of 1953, when almost 3000 fish
were taken, the public awoke to the possibility that the stur-
geon could soon be harvested to extinction. Sturgeon spearers
and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources began to
work together to monitor the population and set catch limits.2
During the spring spawning season, citizen volunteers (the
“Sturgeon Patrol”) stand guard along the tributary rivers where
the females come halfway out of the water to lay their eggs on
shallowly submerged rocks, and males follow to fertilize them.
DNR biologists keep a close watch on the winter sturgeon har-
vest. As soon as the quota for a given year is reached, the season
ends, sometimes just hours after it opened, and spearers, know-
ing this protects the sturgeon stock for the future, respect the
system. Weigh stations are set up on shore at the spots where
the ice roads to the shanty towns begin. Each fish is sexed and
weighed, and its age is estimated by cutting a slice of its dorsal
fin, which has growth bands like tree rings. That one’s older than
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 161
great- grandma! This one hatched when Coolidge was President!
The weigh station is itself an ephemeral village, where people
of all ages gather to see the giant fish pulled from this parallel,
primeval world that exists so close by but can be glimpsed for
only a few weeks each winter.
I N S E A R C H O F L O S T T I M E
French philosopher Bruno Latour has argued that a defining
characteristic of modern society is “a peculiar propensity for
understanding time that passes as if it were abolishing the past
behind it.3” We think that our worldview represents an “epis-
temic rupture so radical that nothing of the past survives” in it
and that our technologies lift us above the oppression of natu-
ral history that for so long defined the human experience. As
permanent exiles from the past, we have mixed emotions about
it. We allow ourselves moments of nostalgia but scold people
for “living in the past.” The prevailing consensus is that the past
must in fact be abolished to make way for better things (Do
you remember those old flip phones?). We caution each other
about becoming Luddites, slipping backward, returning to the
dark ages.
But stranded on the island of Now, we are lonely. When I see
people crowded together in the cold each year to see big, old,
ugly fish being weighed, I sense a very unmodern yearning to
connect with the past. And I suspect that our self- imposed exile
from it is the source of many ills: environmental malefactions
and existential malaise are arguably both rooted in a distorted
sense of humanity’s place in the history of the natural world.
People would treat each other, and the planet, better if we em-
braced our shared past and common destiny, seeing ourselves
more as lucky inheritors and eventual bequeathers rather than
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permanent residents of the Earth estate. In short, we need a
new relationship with time.
Our modern conviction that time is a one- way vector and
the past is irretrievably lost itself represents a break with the
past. Earlier societies and cultures were permeated with the
presence of ancestral spirits and the practice of ancient rituals
that knitted the living, the dead, and the not- yet- born together
into a unified temporal fabric, blurring the concepts of past,
present, and future. The Buddhist concept of sati is typically
translated as “mindfulness,” or being attentive only to the
Now, but it actually means something closer to “memory of
the present”— that is, awareness of this moment from a vantage
point outside it.4 The Ghanaian idea of sankofa, usually symbol-
ized by a backward- looking bird, is a reminder to move forward
but also keep the past in view. In Norse mythology, Ygdrassil,
the World Tree that holds up the cosmos, is maintained by
three women, the mysterious Norns, called Ur∂r, Ver∂andi,
and Skuld. Sometimes interpreted as Past, Present, and Future,
their names literally mean “Fate, Becoming, and Necessity,”
suggesting a strange, circular conception of time in which the
future is embedded in the past.5 Each day, the Norns nourish
the tree from the sacred Well, which holds ancient waters, and
recite the Orlog, the eternal laws that
have always governed the
world. Both acts embody the Norse idea of wyrd, or the power
of the past upon the present.6
In many ways, geology is about understanding “wyrd”— the
ways that the secret stories of the past hold up the world, en-
velop us in the present, and set our path into the future. The
past is not lost; in fact, it is palpably present in rocks, land-
scapes, groundwater, glaciers, and ecosystems. Just as one’s ex-
perience of a great city is enriched by an understanding of the
historical context of its architecture, there is deep satisfaction
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 163
in recognizing the distinctive “styles” of past geologic periods.
And we, too, dwell in geologic time.
I often feel I live not just in Wisconsin but in many Wiscon-
sins. Even when I try not to, I can’t help but sense the lingering
influence of the many natural and human histories embedded
in this landscape: the forests still recovering from nineteenth-
century clear- cutting; the rivers that governed ancient trade
routes, themselves shaped by moraines shoved up by the
great ice sheets; the golden sandstones marking the shores of
the Paleozoic seas; contorted gneisses that are the surviving
roots of Proterozoic mountains. The Ordovician is not a dim
abstraction; I was there with students just the other day! For
geologists, every outcrop is a portal to an earlier world. I am
so accustomed to this “polytemporal” way of thinking that I’m
caught by surprise when I’m reminded that it’s not the norm.
Wisconsin is a water- rich state, bounded by two Great
Lakes, dotted by thousands of smaller ones, veined by rivers,
and graced with reliable aquifers that are refreshed each year
by rain and snow. But the growth of urban areas and corporate
farms has led to groundwater crises in some parts of the state.
Until recently, state law limited the installation of high- capacity
wells to areas where natural replenishment rates could keep
pace with withdrawals. Depending on the nature of the local
rocks or glacial sediments, natural groundwater flow rates can
range from feet per day to feet per year, and depending on the
depth of a well, the groundwater it taps may have been there
for years, decades, or centuries. So knowing both the geologic
backstory and the human history of groundwater use in an
area is critical to maintaining aquifers. But the state’s business-
minded attorney general has ruled that the Department of
Natural Resources does not have the authority to consider the
compounding effects of wells in any given area, arguing that it
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is “unfair” for the DNR to issue a well permit for one industrial
dairy operation and then deny a permit to another.7 In so doing,
the attorney general decreed both past and future irrelevant.
Only the present matters.
An irony of our technological advancement is that it has
created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naïve
than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned
physics through backbreaking work and understood climate
through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he
or she was exempt from the laws of nature. The “modern” kind
of magical thinking is characterized by the belief that repeating
falsehoods like incantations can transform them into scientific
truth. It is also yoked to a quasi- mystical faith in the free mar-
ket, which, according to the prophets, will somehow allow us
to live beyond our means indefinitely.
The problem, in essence, is that rates of technological prog-
ress far outstrip the rate at which human wisdom matures (in
the same way that environmental changes outpace evolution-
ary adaptation in mass extinction events). Critic and author
Leon Wieseltier contends that “every technology is used be-
fore it is completely understood. There is always a lag between
an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences.”8
The rapid obsolescence of digital technologies and the cul-
tural flotsam they deliver corrodes our respect for what lasts
(“That was so five minutes ago”). And just as reliance on GPS
navigation systems causes our capacity for spatial visualization
to atrophy, the frictionless, atemporal instantaneity of digital
communications weakens our grasp on the structure of time.
Our “modern” idea that only Now is real is arguably delusional,
while the medieval concept of “wyrd” seems positively en-
lightened. And our blindness to the presence of the past in
fact imperils our future.
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 165
L I K E T H E R E ’ S N O T O M O R R O W
It will not be easy to break the habit of thinking about Now as
an island separated by wide straits from the rest of time. We
like our Now— the way the insistent chimes of our digital de-
vices keep us from dwelling too much on the past or planning
too carefully for the future. A lifetime’s exposure to advertis-
ing has allowed the corporate promise of eternal youth to bur-
row deep into our brains, impelling us to buy the next novel
thing, to maintain the illusion that we are exempt from the
passage of time and that this Now will never end. The highest-
compensated workers in our culture are hedge fund managers,
rewarded for writing algorithms that make decisions on time-
scales of seconds— now and now and now.
These days, a Google search for “Seventh Generation” re-
turns links to the official website and social media accounts of
the cleaning products company by that name (now owned by
Unilever, a multinational corporation). But the Seventh Gener-
ation idea, articulated more than 300 years ago in the Iroquois
Gayanashagowa (the “Great Binding Law” or “Great Law of
Peace”9), remains as radical and visionary as ever: that leaders
should take actions only after contemplating their likely effects
on “the unborn of the future Nation . . . whose faces are yet be-
neath the surface of the ground.” Seven generations, perhaps a
century and a half, is longer than a single lifetime but not beyond
human experience. It is the span from one’s great- grandparents
to one’s great- grandchildren. From the standpoint of the Seven
Generations principle, our current society is a kleptocracy steal-
ing from the future. What would it take for this old idea to be ad-
opted in a modern world that does not even acknowledge time?
What do we owe the future? After all, as the bumper- sticker
bon mot goes, “What have future generations ever done for
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us?” The philosopher Samuel Scheffler posits that they actu-
ally do a lot. He points out that if we knew that the human
race would die out soon after our own death, our experience
as humans would be radically different: “The knowledge that
we and everyone we know and love will someday die does not
cause most of us to lose confi
dence in the value of our daily
activities. But the knowledge that no new people would come
into existence would make many of those things seem point-
less.”10 Inspired by the plot of P. D. James’s dystopian novel
Children of Men, Scheffler suggests that our capacity to live
full lives depends on the belief that we occupy “a place in an
ongoing human history, in a temporally extended chain of lives
and generations.”
So as thanks for keeping us sane, how can we compensate
future generations? From a purely economic standpoint, we
should invest in preventing future environmental problems as
long as the future benefits are greater than the present costs—
and every economic study of the expected effects of climate
change indicates that any investment now will repay itself many-
fold. The real problem is shifting the timeframe for economic
decision- making from fiscal quarters to decades or longer. In a
provocative paper published in Nature, “Cooperating with the
Future,” a group of economists and evolutionary biologists de-
veloped a model, in the form of a game, to identify economic
incentives or governance strategies that might encourage inter-
generational decisions about resource use.11 In the game, they
found that a resource is almost always depleted within one gen-
eration if decisions are made at the individual level, usually by
one or two “rogue” players who extract more than what the
others consider a fair or reasonable share. This is of course, the
classic tragedy of the commons— the despoiling of a collective
resource (like a pasture) that could be maintained indefinitely
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 167
through collective restraint if not for selfish behavior by a mi-
nority of bad actors (shepherds who graze too many sheep).12
But the “Intergenerational Goods Game” found that if each
generation was allowed to vote on the amount of the resource
that would be extracted in their lifetime, and each player was
then allotted their share of the median amount suggested in the
vote, at least some fraction of the resource was passed down
through multiple generations. Voting enables fair- share takers,
who are usually in the majority, to restrain the bad actors. It
also helps convince those who might be tempted, in an unreg-
ulated system, to violate the commons that it is in their own
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