“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries.”
The Long Now Foundation “hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s ‘faster/cheaper’ mind set and promote ‘slower/better’ thinking [and] to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” You won’t find a lot of discussion on sustainability and environmentalism on the website, and although the foundation is geared toward scientific studies of time, technology and complex societies, the issues they are promoting drive at the heart of the sustainability problems today.
One of the graphics from their website, featured below, shows a relative timeline in society’s attention span from fashion to culture, each change rate slowing. It is underscored by the rate of natural change and response, which although extremely slow underscores all of the above.
- Layers of Time (from longnow.org)
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Of course, each layer affects and is affected by the others. The implied questions when dealing with ecosystem services to humanity are:
- Can the quickly changing layers of commerce and culture outstrip the ability of nature to sustain us and our livelihoods?
- If our short-term thinking has led us to the environmental problems we now face, can a longer-term vision of the future help us to solve these problems?
Certainly when dealing with problems of environmentalism, we are not taking the typical 5 year business model approach of typical market economics. We are facing the challenges of adequate resources, climate and ecosystem support for generations to come – that is we are focused on perpetually sustaining human life rather than continually increasing consumption.
In such a view, looking 100 to even 10,000 years ahead, as The Long Now Foundation suggests, does not seem so ridiculous. They are doing some really interesting projects including the Rosetta Project to preserve language knowledge and building a 10,000 Year Clock. As we understand more of our natural world and the extremely long-term effects we can have on it and our survival, it is definitely worth considering a cultural shift in thinking to the ‘Long Now’.
Tags: 10000 Year Clock, Rosetta Project, The Long Now Foundation
