num_pages: 208
description: A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth.We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far futureto become as he terms it more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge he says is to learn to inhabit a longer now.Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertisetoday's popular mockery and institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis he argues is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists geologists historians evolutionary biologists climatologists archaeologists and others can teach us the art of long-termism.For a case study in long-term thinking Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository Safety Case experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations climate changes earthquakes and more over the coming tens of thousandsor even hundreds of thousands or millionsof years. They are not pop culture futurists but data-driven disciplined technical experts using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.
language: English
title: Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now
publisher: The MIT Press