Finland’s nuclear waste repository “safety case” experts have spent decades forecasting ecological and geophysical events that could occur over the coming tens and hundreds of thousands of years. They have developed sophisticated computer models of distant future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and human-animal relationships.
Drawing from his thirty-two months of anthropological fieldwork among these uniquely longsighted experts, Elliott School Assistant Research Professor of International Affairs, Vincent Ialenti, offers practical strategies for lengthening the time horizons of environmental governance. Nurturing societal time-literacy, he argues, is increasingly vital as our planet's ecological crisis is complicated by a deflation of public enthusiasm for liberal arts education and scientific inquiry.
For more information check out the review of Deep Time Thinking in Science.