Human beings are strange and complicated and fiddly creatures who are astonishingly good at being in two places at once while not being anywhere at all.
Case in point, the noted physicist Freeman Dyson, who was both a source of genuinely profound insights about the universe and our place in it — and a climate change denier. This makes it a lot harder to use a Dyson quote in an essay about the realities of climate change — no matter how apposite and useful it may be — when you’re aware of this aspect of the man’s life and work. (There’s a great live concert recording by Charles Mingus that I can’t listen to anymore, because the whole thing was emceed by...Bill Cosby. Goddamn it to hell.)
Well, then. What’s an essayist on a deadline to do?
Write a couple of meta-level opening paragraphs using Dyson as a hook, and then get down to business, that’s what.
Other diarists in the Climate Brief working group are doing brilliant work presenting news, science, and policy. I want to talk about timescale and ways to think slow.
The Six Time Scales Of Species Survival
Dyson was wrong on climate change, but he was right about a lot of things.
“The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.”
Freeman Dyson, quoted in Stewart Brand: “The Clock of the Long Now,” p. 35
Building on this elucidation, Stewart Brand offers this nifty illustration of “the order of civilization.” It is useful and instructive to analyze a particular society or geographical location from each of these six perspectives.
For example, looking at the American South from a long time-scale perspective reveals that the fertility of the soil in Alabama and Mississippi comes from millions of years’ worth of sea life during the Cretaceous period.
“Over millions of years, as ocean critters died, their little shells fell to the floor of the then-Gulf. After the water receded, the remnant exoskeletons turned into land that is packed with calcium. Calcium is great for plants not only because it is a nutrient, but it also helps the soil maintain moisture balance and the correct salinity and acidity.”
“The region, “Black Belt,” was originally named for the color of the soil — a dark, rich black that indicated high concentrations of carbon nutrients.”
Link
Those microscopic beasties became soil so fertile that farming there was massively profitable, which in turn enabled an economic model based on enslaving captured Africans and forcing them to work the land without compensation.
Nature — the lowest, slowest level of Civilization’s Order — set up conditions that made slavery economically viable millions of years later.
Influence moves upwards.
Influence moves downwards, too.
Fashion — the fastest level — is by nature evanescent. Celebrities rise and fall; the latest spring fashions are awesome; here’s a list of the TOP TEN TRAVEL DESTINATIONS FOR YOUR VACATION GETAWAY; the newest line of trucks feature air-conditioned seats and an optional penis sheath so you can relieve yourself directly onto the highway without slowing down (I made that up; if it’s real I don’t want to know).
Normally, influence moves downward only one or two levels at a time. To offer one example, the presence of more LGBTQ+ people in positions of popular visibility translated downward from Fashion into changes in Commerce, Infrastructure, and Governance. Which is how it should work.
“The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize.”
Once in a while, something out of the ordinary happens. Nature — the slowest level — occasionally exerts a direct influence on Commerce and Fashion — the fastest — with results that are usually, shall we say, problematic for the folks on the receiving end.
We can make a general formulation: impacts more than 3 temporal layers apart mean Bad News.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, the flittering, glittering, evanescent mayflies of the Fashion layer are no more capable of influencing the slow motions of the Nature layer than the mites that live in my moustache can change my mind about which book on my metastasizing TBR pile will go to bed with me tonight.
But…
Suppose, just suppose, that all of Fashion’s flittering and glittering and evanescence is made possible by a shit-ton of easily-accessed, convenient energy into the Commerce layer.
If the energy comes from “contemporary” sources (the sun that shone on those PVs yesterday, the wind that turned that turbine last week), then everything stays on the top layer.
No problem.
If, however, that energy comes from the sunlight that shone on trees 450 million years ago, then Brand’s diagram looks like it’s been defaced by an idiot with a Sharpie:
Fashion reaches right down through the intervening layers and starts stirring up shit with Nature. Millions of years’ worth of fossilized sunlight gets released pretty much all at once, with increasingly visible impacts on our lives.
There’s Another Layer At The Very Bottom: Geology
The geologist Marcia Bjoernerud notes, in her mind-boggling and so-very-beautiful “Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save The World,” that
“...the pace of biological evolution is well matched with the rates of tectonic and surface processes over geological timescales. This is particularly evident in the Hawaiian Islands, which have formed in sequence from northwest to southeast, as the Pacific Plate has passed over a deep-seated ‘hotspot’ where mantle rock wells up and melts through decompression. A study of biodiversity on each island over time shows that adaptive radiations — bursts of evolutionary innovation — coincided with the growth of each island through volcanism, then leveled off as erosion gained the upper hand, reducing an island’s area and elevation range. And of course, Darwin’s original insights about evolution came from the diversity of species on the equally youthful Galapagos Islands (whose age was, however, not known to him). One could imagine an alter ego planet where surface morphology changed too quickly for evolutionary adaptation of macroscopic life, like a ballet orchestra that is playing so fast the dancers can’t keep up. Fortunately, all members of the Earth ensemble — volcanoes, raindrops, ferns, and finches — perform in synchrony.”
Marcia Bjoernerud: Timefulness, p. 80.
Slow Ecology
In a recent article in The Guardian, the always on-point George Monbiot makes a prescient plea for “Slow Ecology.” I encourage you to read the whole piece.
“We have a slow food movement and a slow travel movement. But we’re missing something, and its absence contributes to our escalating crisis. We need a slow ecology movement, and we need it fast.
“The majority of the world’s species cannot withstand any significant disruption of their habitat by humans. Healthy ecosystems depend to a great extent on old and gnarly places, that might take centuries to develop, and are rich in what ecologists call “spatial heterogeneity”: complex natural architecture. They need, for example, giant trees, whose knotty entrails are split and rotten; great reefs of coral or oysters or honeycomb worms; braiding, meandering rivers full of snags and beaver dams; undisturbed soils reamed by roots and holes. The loss of these ancient habitats is one of the factors driving the global shift from large, slow-growing creatures to the small, short-lived species able to survive our onslaughts. Slow ecology would protect and create our future ancient habitats.
“At the moment, we’re going in the opposite direction. Self-serving nonsense cooked up by governments and their advisers, such as “natural capital accounting” and “biodiversity net gain” treat one habitat or feature as exchangeable for another. Don’t lament the twisted old oak we’re felling: we’ll plant 10 saplings in plastic rabbit guards in its place. Then we’ll call it a “net gain”. “
Link
How to Be A Good Ancestor
Roman Krzarnic’s book, “The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking” is full of insights, suggestions, and reporting on the work people around the planet are doing to build the foundations for a society that gives generations yet unborn representation in governance.
Krzarnic gives four general categories.
Guardians of the Future — “public officials or institutions with the specific remit to represent future citizens — not just children, but also unborn generations — who are left out of traditional democratic processes. Many of these bodies have found inspiration in Finland’s parliamentary ‘Committee for the Future,’ which was established in 1993. ...the committee reviews government policy for its impact on future generations — especially around technology, employment, and environmental issues — and engages in long-term planning.”
He goes on to mention Sophie Howe, the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, whose talk on “Leaving The World Better Than You Found It” is very much worth your time.
The next on Krzarnic’s list is CItizens’ Assemblies — he says, “Here’s a future I would like to see across the democratic world: Every few years, citizens aged 12 and over would be randomly selected to take part in a ‘good ancestor’ sitizens’ assembly, broadly based on Japan’s Future Design movement and Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly. These ‘intergenerational juries’ would debate the long-term issues of the day...[they] would take place across the country, would draw on expert witnesses and give an equal voice to all participants, including young people. They would have powers rivaling elected legislatures or town councils, with the authority to delay or veto policies that impacted negatively on the basic rights of future people, and the ability to initiate legislation in key long-term policy areas such as energy, water, housing, and child poverty.”
I’d like to see that future myself. Wouldn’t you?
Next up is Intergenerational Rights.
“A third design principle of an effective deep democracy is to embed the rights of future generations in the legal system, especially in constitutional law. Law matters not just because it is a way to safeguard the interests of futureholders and protect them from the short-termism of incumbent politicians, but because it acts as a reference point against which Future Generations Commissioners and Citizens’ Assemblies can judge governments and hold them to account.”
Our current SCOTUS predicament makes this idea even more urgent — and even more unattainable under the present system. But “without vision, the people perish.”
Finally, Krzarnic offers us Self-Governing City States.
“This final way of redesigning democracy is not aimed directly at expanding the voice or rights of future generations, but would serve their interests by dispersing decision-making power from central government, where it is typically captured by corporate interests and other power brokers bent on short-term gains. Analysis based on the Intergenerational Solidarity Index supports this: The more decentralized a government is in its decision-making, the better it performs in terms of long-term public policy. Making this shift would promote what the Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom called ‘polycentric governance,’ where political authority is spread among multiple nexted layers of governance from the local to the global levels.”
With the ongoing crisis of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, it seems likely that much of the responsibilities of governance will necessarily devolve to states and cities. Perhaps there’s a pony somewhere in that pile of manure?
I Haz A Bumper-Sticker
Much of the time our interaction with Climate Change NewsTM is just that: news: the most recent catastrophe unfolding in real time before our horrified eyes. This is necessary. Turning our gaze aside is not an option, any more than we can afford to ignore systemic racism or systemic misogyny or any of the ways in which our species’ follies have brought us to this fraught historical moment.
But there is another perspective which needs to be held in our minds and our hearts and our actions.
We badly need “temporacy” — temporal literacy, if you will — if we are to decouple the gyrations of Fashion from the burning of Nature.
“Think Globally, Act Locally” is an oft-seen bumper sticker here in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. Do the work you need to do, in your neighborhood, in your own backyard, in your own life — but always remember that you are part of a far greater Web of Being.
Thanks to CafePress.com, I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads:
When we act on climate, there is no Wait-And-See; the time for Wait-And-See is long past. The moment for immediate and decisive action is Now. And Now is already too late to head off the full 200-car freight train of Climate Chaos barreling down the tracks toward us.
But…
Remember that we humans are in this fix because we’ve abandoned whatever limited ability we once had to think in longer timescales — something that was hardly ever part of the cognizance of individuals, but could be found in particular human cultures and subcultures.
Yes, we are in a crisis, and it’s moving way too goddamned fast for us to keep up.
But this makes it more imperative than ever for us to remember:
Slow down.
Wisdom is long time-scale intelligence.
Yes, we must act immediately.
And Think In Eons.
This Diary Haz A Bumper Sticker
I have this on my car, too. It’s not relevant to climate change, but I’m putting it here because the rear end of my diary deserves a bumper sticker.
Honk!