In this essay, Stewart Brand uses an unconventional system of writing dates: He places a zero at the start of the year — for example, 02001 — to encourage us to think about the future. The extra zero reminds us that humanity, if we’re lucky, will someday reach the year 10000 and beyond.
He also favors the more modern method of indicating era, in which C.E., meaning “of the Common Era,” replaces the overtly Christian A.D. (Anno Domini, or “in the year of our Lord”). Likewise, B.C.E. (“before the Common Era”) replaces B.C. (“before Christ”).
— Ed.
The sociologist Elise Boulding diagnosed the problem of our times as “temporal exhaustion”: “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imaging the future.” In a 01978 paper, Boulding proposed a simple solution: expand our idea of the present to two hundred years — a hundred years forward, a hundred years back. A personally experienceable, generations-based period of time, it reaches from grandparents to grandchildren — people to whom we feel responsible. Boulding, a mother of five, wrote that a two-hundred-year present “will not make us prophets or seers, but it will give us an at-homeness with our changing times comparable to that which parents can have with an ever-changing family of children as they move from age to age.”
Two hundred years is good; there is emotional comfort and behavioral discipline in it. If what we want is to change our cultural mind-set, however, two hundred years is too readily imaginable, too incremental. Frames of mind change by jumps, not by degrees.
Ten thousand years is the duration of civilization thus far. In that time, a number of individual civilizations and dozens of empires have risen and fallen or receded, but the overall advance and convergence of civilization on the planet has been steady. It has reached the point where people now talk comfortably about the emergence of global governance, not by conquest but by merging of interests.
The original trigger was agriculture. By 8000 B.C.E., the ice had receded from most of the Northern Hemisphere. Starting sometime before 7000 B.C.E. in the Mideast — where, according to physiologist Jared Diamond, the greatest number of plants and animals were candidates for domestication — formerly nomadic tribes settled down around their new crops. Villages formed; some grew into cities, and cities are where civilization happens. States and empires became the standard control apparatus for managing regional economics (e.g., markets, taxes) and resources (e.g., irrigation, food storage). They co-opted religion as a behavioral stabilizer and built armies for use as internal police as well as in combat with other empires.
Over time, the empires and religions told larger and longer stories about themselves, many of them overlapping and referring to one another. Around 1000 B.C.E., thanks to the Jews, history emerged as another form of storytelling. Eventually, archaeology was able to revive stories and histories thought dead, such as those of ancient Egypt and the Mayans. Humanity now shares a complex of stories reaching all the way back to the villages; this is our Long Now.
Ten thousand years is not all that long. It is only four hundred generations — counting a new generation every twenty-five years, four to a century, for a hundred centuries. “Ancient” Egypt was relatively late in the game. The pharaohs started two hundred generations ago (3000 B.C.E.) and built their greatest pyramids within seventeen generations, about the same time as Stonehenge (2575 B.C.E.).
Those original farmers ten millennia ago were the first systemic futurists. They mastered the six-month lag between sowing and reaping, and they remembered enough crop experience and matched it with enough astronomy to be able to use the sky as an accurate indicator of when to plant. Such tricks confer advantage. Agriculture-based civilizations replaced hunter-gatherers and in time were able to prevail over even the fiercest marauders.
Other long-term frames of reference may be used, as well. Geologically, the last ten thousand years is the Holocene — the thin slice at the top of the stratigraphic epoch charts. In astronomical terms, civilization is microscopic. It is best measured in comets, such as Halley’s, whose seventy-five- to seventy-nine-year return interval has been documented for twenty-two centuries. The name “Halley’s” has only been around since 01759 C.E. The comet named Hale-Bopp in 01997 C.E., when it put on a dazzling show, was previously seen in 2214 B.C.E.; we do not know what it was called then. When it returns in 04377 C.E., will anyone mention the name “Hale-Bopp”? Returning comets will let us know whether civilization is developing more continuity of knowledge or less.
Might humanity pay consistent attention through one complete precession of the equinoxes, as the earth’s axis pirouettes around a point in the sky near the Pole Star? This 25,784-year cycle is known as the Great Year. How about keeping track through one rotation of our galaxy — 220 million years? The earth has existed for nearly twenty-five of those galactic rotations, life on earth for nineteen rotations. Humans may well eventually affect the periodicity of ice ages — we have been frozen by one every hundred thousand years for a million years and are now enjoying an “interglacial” period — but it seems unlikely that we will have much influence on the rotation of our galaxy or anyone else’s, nor will we tally their spin. The human time frame is narrower than that of life, of the planet, and of galaxies.
The concept of the Long Now places us where we belong, neither at the end of history nor at the beginning, but in the thick of it. We are not the culmination of history, and we are not start-over revolutionaries; we are in the middle of civilization’s story.
The trick is learning how to treat the last ten thousand years as if it were last week, and the next ten thousand as if it were next week. Such tricks confer advantage.
Global warming, the dominant environmental issue of our time, might not be an issue at all but for a study measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide begun in 01958 in a Hawaiian hut by Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle. High on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano, downwind of thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean, their instruments have shown a steady forty-year increase in the human-exacerbated greenhouse gas CO2 — from 315 to 362 parts per million. Fateful numbers! Since they are largely the result of the aggregate metabolism of civilization, the trend will be an enormous task to reverse, but if it is not reversed, civilization faces a drastically different earth over the coming century.
Maintained through four decades of budget worries and changes in scientific fashions, the Mauna Loa CO2 records show the beginning effects of global warming (and thus proof of it) as well as one of its major causes. You can see an annual cycle in the chart, with atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels going down in the spring — when Northern Hemisphere plants take up carbon for their growth spurt — and then rising again in the fall, when decay takes over. The amplitude of this cycle has increased some 20 percent in forty years, indicating that the earth is “breathing deeper.” The probable cause is a gradual overall increase in vegetation, fed by the higher CO2 levels and perhaps stimulated by higher temperatures. Greenhouse, indeed.
Enormous, inexorable power is to be found in the long trends, but we cannot measure them or even notice them without doing extremely patient science. These days, science is more often driven at commercial or even fashion velocity than at the deliberate pace of governance or the even slower pace of nature. As history accelerates, people become fast learners, and that’s good, but it is also a problem. “Fast learners tend to track noisy signals too closely and to confuse themselves by making changes before the effects of previous actions are clear,” says decision analyst James March. Quiz shows and classroom teachers reward the quick answer. This is not helpful in domains where the quick answer is the wrong answer.
A nine-year study in Africa concluded that burning new woody growth in open grassland could not prevent the woods from taking over. A forty-year study of the same subject proved the opposite: that annual burning was an ideal way to keep the grasslands open. It takes more than a decade of fires to keep woody rootstocks from resprouting, that’s all.
Nearly half of ecological field research spans only one year. The two longest animal studies are George Schaller’s Serengeti lion research — twenty-seven years so far — and Jane Goodall’s work on chimpanzees: thirty-six years. The longest time-lapse film (such as the often seen speeded-up flower opening) covers just a week. No one has yet studied the entire life span of a termite nest, which may extend to a hundred years or more, with several queens reigning in succession.
Really extended studies are highly uncommon. The world’s longest and most fruitful agricultural research (later understood as also ecological) was begun in 01843 at the Rothamsted estate, near London. John Bennett Lawes and Joseph Henry Gilbert worked together there for fifty-seven years, producing 150 scientific papers and three hundred popular articles and establishing themselves as the founders of scientific agriculture. Their original studies continue to this day at the Rothamsted Experimental Station, more than a century and a half later. What began as a series of experiments on the nutrient requirements of crop plants soon raised a whole new set of questions about plant diversity, soil development, community ecology, and even evolution. The longer the data set grew, the more valuable it became. Particularly crucial was the preserving of 150 years of soil and plant samples, which could later be examined with tools and lines of inquiry (such as pollutant analysis) unimagined by the founding scientists.
Rigorously collected old data keeps finding new uses. In 01790, the U.S. Constitution instituted the modern world’s first regular population census of a nation, to ensure that the population-based House of Representatives reflected accurate figures. This record later provided a precise profile of the growth, movement, and changing composition of the American people. In the 01990s, the extensive marshlands of the south end of San Francisco Bay began being restored to their original teeming richness, thanks to an exquisitely detailed early map of the area by the nineteenth-century cartographer David Kerr. Sometimes natural systems can be mined for invaluable data sequences: polar ice cores showing the composition of the atmosphere for millennia past; tree-ring studies covering three thousand years in the American Southwest and eight thousand years in Nepal; wood-rat middens in Nevada preserving thirty-three thousand years of seed and pollen samples in columns of amber-like rat excrement.
One ecologist, Jim Brown, is trying to reverse the trend toward ever smaller and shorter field research projects by founding the study of “macroecology,” focusing on “phenomena at regional to global spatial scales and decadal to millennial temporal scales.” In that perspective, the otherwise diverging disciplines of ecology, biogeography, paleobiology, and macroevolution are forced to come together and make sense of each other. Effective macroecology relies not on short, clever experiments but on patient observation, correlation, and statistical analysis. Brown points out that this level of study is essential now that human impact is global in scale: “Ecologists have studied the effects of starfish, largemouth bass, sea otters, beavers, and other ‘keystone’ species, but they are strangely reluctant to study the most key species of all, their own.” (An example: there were once ninety-nine species of land birds in Hawaii. The arrival of Polynesians removed fifty of them, the arrival of Europeans another seventeen, with nineteen more now in great danger of extinction, which leaves only thirteen of the original ninety-nine bird species intact in the company of humans.)
So, in light of their great accumulative value, why are long-term scientific studies so rare? Well, (1) they’re not about proving or disproving hypotheses, the coin of the scientific realm; (2) they don’t generate quick papers, the coin of a scientific career; (3) they bear no relation to scientific fashion, where the excitement is; (4) they’re not subject to money-making patent or copyright; (5) the few that exist usually die when their primary researcher dies; (6) they’re extremely difficult to maintain funding for; and (7) ever growing archives are an expensive hassle to service and keep accessible. (“We can’t stop the future to take care of the past!”)
Science and art are always inspiring each other. Maybe some works of slow art could shame science into durational ambition. Paul Saffo likes hiding Easter eggs: “A brilliant ceramic sculpture hidden within rocklike concrete which slowly weathers away to reveal a ‘Hi there!’ from another era. Something wonderful buried in a flood plain where the river snakes back and forth and in time will carve a bank into the treasure. One could develop the genre to where lots of people do it for a while, making the world a very slow, very amazing Advent calendar.”
“The Long Now” is excerpted from Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. © 1999 by Stewart Brand. It appears here by permission of Basic Books. All rights reserved.
