best interest to observe the collectively determined limit. The
system works, however, only if the voting is binding. It didn’t
require game theory and statistical analysis for the Iroquois
Confederacy to figure this out.
B I G T I M E
Our problem is that we lack both the appetite and political-
economic infrastructure for intergenerational action. The habit
of blinkered thinking is hard to break, but a group of time-
transcending art projects may serve as inspirations. Photogra-
pher Rachel Sussman13 traveled around the world to take for-
mal portraits of living organisms older than 2000 years (the real
Millennials): a brain coral that has been alive since the time of
Plato; baobabs and bristlecone pines that were seedlings when
Stonehenge was built; Australian stromatolites doing what they
have done since the Proterozoic; Siberian soil bacteria that
slumbered for 700,000 years, through six ice advances, now
reawakened by Anthropocene warming. These Old Ones open
our eyes to alternative relationships with time. They help us,
vicariously, to see beyond the horizon of our own mortal limits.
168 Ch a pter 6
The work of Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara explored
chronos— the raw experience of time, stripped of narrative.14
Between 1966 and 2013, he created a series of thousands of
paintings collectively called Today, which consist only of the
date painted in white on a uniformly colored background. From
1970 to 2000 he sent hundreds of telegrams to art dealers and
friends all bearing the message “I Am Still Alive” (in this case,
the project outlived the medium). In the notes to accompany
his exhibitions, he would give his age as the number of days
he had lived up to the opening of the show. His 20- volume
piece One Million Years is a list of dates from 998,031 BC to
AD 1,001,997 (a million years before and after 1997). Much
of the first half of the work overlaps with the (arguably more
interesting) ice- core record from Antarctica. Public readings
of One Million Years are still being made and recorded in an
ongoing project; at the fluent rate of 100 numbers per minute,
it would take seven 24- hour days to count to a million.
Katie Paterson’s “Future Library” project in Oslo pairs
humans and trees as artistic collaborators in a meditation on
kairos— time imbued with meaning. A committee, whose cur-
rent members will eventually die and be replaced, is charged
with selecting one author to submit a short story each year for
the next century (Margaret Atwood was the first). The manu-
scripts will be stored, unread, in Oslo’s Deichmanske Library.
Meanwhile, in a specially planted forest north of the city, fir
trees are growing. In 2114, when they are 100 years old, they
will be harvested and used to make paper on which the stories
will be printed as an anthology. The project is underwritten
by a trust that will allow its continuation after the people who
initiated it are gone.
An organ work by experimental composer John Cage,
“ORGAN2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)” is being performed
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 169
in a 639- year concert in the fourteenth- century cathedral in
Halberstadt, Germany.15 Since the piece began in September
2001 (on Cage’s 89th birthday) there have been only a dozen
chord changes. Each chord is sustained over periods of months
to years by applying weights to the pedals. As in the case of
the Future Library, this centuries- long concert will require the
cooperation of people across multiple generations.
Inventor Daniel Hillis designed a “10,000 Year Clock” that
is being built inside a mountain in western Texas by The Long
Now Foundation.16 Powered by stainless steel bellows that ex-
pand and contract as the outside air temperature varies, the
clock will have a 10- ft corrosion- resistant titanium pendulum
and a sapphire window through which it will detect the Sun’s
position in the sky and periodically correct itself. Hillis points
out that designing an object to last as long as the span of human
history necessarily makes one think very differently about time.
For example, over 10,000 years, ignoring leap seconds would
cause the clock to be off by 30 days. In that time, Earth will be at
the opposite extreme of its precession cycle, with the Northern
Hemisphere tilted toward the Sun on what is now the winter
solstice. Internal environmental changes over that timescale
must also be considered. If climate change accelerates and ice
caps melt, Earth’s orbit will be subtly affected by the transfer
of mass from the poles to the oceans.17
It may be tempting to dismiss these projects as gimmicks or
follies, but their purpose is to reframe the way we think about
ourselves in time. They may even provide templates for how
we might design infrastructures for intergenerational gover-
nance. At present, hardly any public or even private entities
are configured in a way that allows planning on timescales lon-
ger than an election cycle or a few fiscal years. The increasing
concentration of global wealth in the hands of a tiny minority
170 Ch a pter 6
means that for most of the world, short- term survival always
takes priority over preparing for the future. Private philan-
thropic foundations built from the fortunes of the super rich
do have the luxury of thinking on generational timescales and
can undertake humanitarian projects that may require decades
of sustained effort. Their work is undeniably laudable but it
is also deeply undemocratic; it means that a small number of
extremely wealthy people are the only ones in charge of the
future. And some of them have delusional ideas about it.
Growing numbers of the super rich are investing in lavish
“climate bunkers”— the twenty- first century version of fallout
shelters— where, in the event of climate catastrophe, they can
live out their days in comfort while the rest of humanity deals
with scorching heat, encroaching seas, and failing crops.18
Many of these people are Silicon Valley billionaires whose
high- tech companies would seem to be predicated on opti-
mism for the future. Instead, their plan seems to be to sell that
illusion to the masses while quietly preparing themselves for
apocalypse. Moreover, among the super wealthy there are also
starry- eyed futurists who confidently assert that terraforming
Mars is a real possibility when the time comes to abandon this
planet— and is even the natural and inevitable extension of the
human quest for new frontiers. This thinking reveals profound
temporal dysmorphia— a deranged understanding of time: not
only complete ignorance of the long coevolution of Earth and
life but also willful denial of our own history as a species. When
have we humans ever been able to execute, over many centu-
ries, a constructive international project (i.e., something other
than the devastation of aboriginal civilizations) that required
immense expenditures without immediate payback? And how
can we imagine that we might prosper on a planetary body
with which we have no evolutionary connection? We haven’t
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 171
even learned to take care of each other on this old, friendly,
hospitable planet.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, a different
model for long- view leadership comes from Native American
tribes that have managed to persist— despite centuries of geno-
cide, treaty violations, and grinding poverty— through what
cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.” To Vizenor,
an enrolled member of Minnesota’s White Earth Ojibwe, “Sur-
vivance is the continuance of stories . . . the heritable right of
succession” rooted in a deep ancestral attachment to land on
small reservations— finite worlds.19 It values endurance over
conquest; restraint over consumption; continuity over novelty.
It is stubborn, ironic, and self- deprecating, with a clear- eyed
view of both the benevolence and capriciousness of Nature and
the best and worst of human nature.
In recent years, many Native American tribes have emerged
as leaders in environmental stewardship, collecting long- term
data sets, organizing grassroots protests, and launching legal
challenges to mines and pipelines that threaten public waters.
Tribes in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan pool their re-
sources in the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commis-
sion (GLIFWC, or “Glifwick“), which works as a hub that also
helps nonnative environmental organizations coordinate legal
actions, public education, and conservation initiatives.20 When
the governor declared: “Wisconsin is open for business,” and
the state legislature gutted four decades of science- based en-
vironmental laws in a matter of months, GLIFWC spoke out
for the Public Trust Doctrine, which obligates the government
to protect lakes and rivers for the collective good. There is a
profound, tragic irony in that after so many years of maltreat-
ment by the U.S. government, these tribes are in many ways
the truest patriots, committed to saving America from itself.
172 Ch a pter 6
F U T U R E T E N S E
When we peer into the geologic future, a paradox emerges:
to some extent, we can see what lies in the far distance more
clearly than what is in the foreground. The Sun, as a G- type
star, is about halfway through its life expectancy, and in 5 billion
years or so will enter its red giant phase, engulfing the Earth and
other inner planets. Three billion years before that, however,
the Sun’s increasing luminosity will lead to an extreme green-
house effect from the vaporization of Earth’s oceans. Once the
planet’s water is lost to space, the carbon- silicate weathering
system that has acted to sequester volcanic CO2 over geologic
time will shut down, creating an even more intense greenhouse
state that will likely make surface conditions intolerable for
all life about 2 billion years from now.21 The Earth’s tectonic
system, whose character is intimately wrapped up with the
presence of water, will also be profoundly changed. Seawater
carried into the mantle with subducting slabs will allow arc vol-
canism to continue for a few hundred million years after surface
water disappears. But without the cooling effect of ocean water,
ocean crust will stay hotter and more buoyant longer, inhibiting
subduction and altering the pace of tectonics.
For at least the next billion years or so, plate tectonics will
continue to shuttle continents to new positions around the
globe. The Atlantic Ocean will begin to close, and in about 250
million years, the Americas will be reunited with Europe and
Asia in a new supercontinent that has already been named “Pan-
gaea Ultima” by geophysicist Christopher Scotese.22 Meanwhile,
rivers will have erased the Himalaya, Alps, and Rockies.
In about 80,000 years the Earth will reach the point in its
Milankovitch eccentricity cycle at which another ice age could
happen, but this will depend on greenhouse gas concentrations,
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 173
ocean circulation, the state of the biosphere, and many other
variables. The next thousand years— the same amount of time
that separates us from the Viking age— are even harder to bring
into focus. If human carbon emissions have not been sharply
curbed, and powerful positive feedbacks in the climate sys-
tem are activated, the Earth could experience a replay of the
Paleocene- Eocene Thermal Maximum. Sea level would rise
tens of feet, inundating many of the world’s most populous cit-
ies. Altered weather patterns— more ferocious storms, longer
and deeper droughts— would stress world food production. In-
creasing proportions of government budgets would have to be
channeled into crisis management. The balance of geopolitical
power would shift depending on how well nations were faring
in the new climate regime.
But none of this is foreordained. We have the power to write
a different saga for the coming millennium. Rather than lapse
into existential despair that we won’t be here in a billion years,
let us reclaim at least the next few centuries.
C H R O N O T O P I A
It is empowering (or at least therapeutic) in these dark times
to imagine what a time- literate society might look like. In his
last public interview, Kurt Vonnegut said: “I’ll tell you . . . one
thing that no cabinet has ever had is a Secretary of the Fu-
ture, and there are no plans at all for my grandchildren and my
great- grandchildren.”23 Let us adopt Vonnegut’s suggestion as
our first proposal: a representative for the yet- to- be born to
serve among the top advisors to the president. The Department
of the Future would set in motion a realignment of priorities
in all aspects of society. Resource conservation would again
become a core value and patriotic virtue. Tax incentives and
174 Ch a pter 6
subsidies would be rebalanced to reward long- term steward-
ship over short- term exploitation. Putting a price on carbon
might help us get a grip on our fossil fuel addiction, sober up,
and let us prepare for natural disasters that will happen without
our assistance— like the hundreds of large earthquakes that will
happen in the next century— rather than expending resources
on self- created climate catastrophes.
Poverty and class- based disparity of opportunity would be
recognized as problems with deep historical roots that cannot
be solved without sustained commitment over commensurate
timescales into the future. Public school teachers and others
whose work represents an investment in the future would be
paid well and held in high esteem. Geology would be fully in-
tegrated into science curricula, perhaps serving as a capston
e
course in which students would apply concepts of physics,
chemistry, and biology to the immensely complex Earth sys-
tem. With a solid understanding of how the planet works, stu-
dents would go on to become educated voters who would hold
public officials accountable for wise governance of water, land,
and air. Legislators, governors, and mayors who embrace the
Seventh Generation principle would point proudly to what they
are working toward and be reelected by grateful constituents.
More generally, schools would help develop children’s
knowledge of and appetite for history and natural history, in-
stilling in them a deep instinct for their place in Time and a
keen curiosity to understand more. The dramatic narratives of
the geologic past are perfectly suited to the human appetite for
storytelling. A noteworthy psychological study suggests that
resistance to the concept of evolution is rooted more in existen-
tial dread than religious doctrine, and that it declines as people
become more familiar with stories from the natural world.24
A series of controlled experiments showed that reminders of
Timefulness, utopian and scientific 175
mortality make many people— across a wide spectrum of reli-
gious beliefs— more likely to rate tenets of creationist “intelli-
gent design” favorably, presumably as a source of reassurance
in the face of psychological threat. But the investigators also
found that the same people, after reading short nontechnical
pieces on natural history, were less susceptible to anti evolution
assertions and seemed to find similar comfort in scientific nar-
ratives. As Darwin wrote so lyrically in the closing lines of On
the Origin of Species:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed into a few
forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone
cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so
simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and
most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
That grandeur has always included us; we have simply tor-
mented ourselves with the idea that we are outside the garden.
In 1973, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, exasperated
with “scientific creationists” who were attempting to influ-
ence the content of biology textbooks, wrote a classic essay
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