HOW TO ZOOM IN AND OUT ON DEEP TIME FROM DIFFERENT ANGLES
2013 CE, field notes: Late one night in October, I woke up from a restless dream. It was centuries ago; I was part of a military platoon. We were preparing to raid a nondescript foreign enemy. The enemy was based at an encampment in a forest outside Helsinki. As we marched, the landscape was flat. It was covered mostly by pine trees of uniform height, but also spruce and birch trees. It was summertime, around 10 p.m., and the sun was beginning to set. We knew the forest was home to hare, lynx, deer, bear, wolves, and flying squirrels; we saw none. Our noisy troop must have scared them away. As we drew closer, moving quietly, we peered through the shrubs at our foes. Then they spotted us. Our enemies began shouting at us, and we at them. Weapons in hand, we exchanged threats in two different, mutually incomprehensible tongues. Then, out of nowhere, my perspective switched. Suddenly, I was seeing the world from my enemy’s point of view. I was looking at myself in the third person: watching me stand there, waving my fist in the air, yelling aggressively in Finnish, clutching my gun. I felt ridiculous for embarking on the raid in the first place. Shifting my perspective, and changing the angle from which I viewed the situation, had altered my sense of mission. I wanted to resolve the conflict peacefully. But then, just as suddenly, my perspective shifted again. I woke up. It was all a dream. From the perspective of my bed, the whole situation felt inconsequential. It had seemed so gravely important just moments ago. Lying there, I began thinking about how a simple change in viewpoint can reorient how we approach the challenges we face.
I once asked a Safety Case expert named Laura, “What is the most challenging thing about your work?” She replied:
It’s the one million years. That is so mind-boggling. It is much longer than anything we have known in recorded history. And then think that we have to build canisters that are supposed to last hundreds of thousands of years. Nothing has lasted so long, nothing. We have stuff built by man that is two, three, four thousand years old. There are [rock] paintings in Finland, but how old are these [rock] paintings? A few thousand years. That’s nothing. It is this timeframe that is really hard to understand for us and only geology can help us with this type of timeframe because we get into the ore formations, like copper ore formation and geologic-like movements, the continents coming together. … Sometimes I think I would like to be immortal just to see what happens in one hundred thousand years to the canisters and then, hopefully, be like, “Ah, you see, I told you so!”
Laura had grown up in Italy, getting her PhD in chemistry in France. She had worked for a government funded agency there that focused on defense, energy, and security research. After that, she had worked in the United States for a large national science policy research organization. She now lived in Finland with her American husband, who was also a scientist with a PhD. He did laboratory research on bentonite clay for Finland’s repository project. Laura’s backstory was testament to the sort of highly specialized, globally mobile, policy-aware, and transnationally connected expertise optimal not only for managing nuclear waste, but also for reckoning deep time. Recalling the factors that led her to settle in Helsinki, Laura told me how, in Finland, workplace culture allowed her to take her kids to the dentist without first having to beg her bosses for permission to do so. Her kids could play safely in the streets without her worrying about crime.
When I met Laura, she was helping develop a Safety Case report that gave an overview of how the portfolio’s many models, datasets, and reports wove together. It was titled Models and Data. Later Laura would become one of Posiva’s lead research managers. To put Posiva’s far future forecasts into perspective, she reached back into Finland’s human past. She reflected on its ancient rock paintings and how continents came together and separated over millions upon millions of years. Doing so helped her appreciate not only her work’s immense time spans but also the Safety Case’s immense ambition as a human project. Like Laura, other Safety Case experts were also fascinated by how happenings of the past had developed historically into the moments in time that Finns now inhabit. They too saw the past as a font of learning. To quote a Finnish geologist, reflecting on his youth:
We used to dig up old German helmets. There were some friends of mine, and we were all are interested in history. And there are some famous fighting places from the Finnish-German War in Lapland: Lapland’s War. There was one spot where there were heavy fights. The Finnish were coming from the south, and the Germans had their headquarters or their frontline there. It was a small straight. There were lakes and there and a small escarpment … maybe two hundred people probably died there. And you can still find the remnants of it. We found one place where it was this evacuation place for wounded Austrian German soldiers. We looked through old maps. I was like twenty or something at the time. And when we had a metal detector with us, we found some even medals and some kinds of historical objects. … Another time we found this trash site for German soldiers. It had cans and even some blades and some mugs. Back then, the Germans always put some serial number or some eagle on every object, every screw, every small thing. And we found dozens. We found tin cans from Croatia, from Hungary, and wine from France because the labels were still there. So actually, you could see that Germany’s Army was really well, you know, how to say it, equipped … because of the foodstuff from all over Europe, conquered lands … they have been drinking French champagne here.
For this geologist, human histories were sources of intellectual intrigue. He told me about how digging up military trash as a youth motivated him to help bury nuclear waste in the ground at work as an adult. For other informants, however, human histories’ complex contingencies were reasons for uncertainty and dread. They reflected on the Safety Case’s position within the Earth’s longer-term timescales, expressing concern for the Olkiluoto repository’s fate. One informant told me:
One thing that cannot be handled well over these distant future timescales is the human. What kind of society will we have? Will we have humans here after ten thousand years? Wars? These kinds of scenarios have not been taken into account very carefully. I am afraid of them. We know we can understand the physical world as engineers, but the human is the part we cannot understand. What will they do with nuclear waste? You don’t know what will happen to humankind or Finnish civilization.
Deep time reckoners like these are skilled at toggling back and forth between visions of human, ecological, and geological pasts (near and distant) and human, ecological, and geological futures (near and distant). As in many other lines of thinking during the Anthropocene, distinctions made between these timescales tend to blur into one another. Learning to better perform these intellectual gymnastics in zooming in and out across time is, my fieldwork taught me, a key Anthropocene talent. Pursuing thought experiments in learning this talent from the world’s most long-sighted experts can help us counter the deflation of expertise, especially if this practice someday comes to gain public support.
To this end, this chapter will take three learning-journeys across time. First, it will zoom way out by approaching the entire Safety Case project as one momentary blip in the deeper history of Finland. Doing so will provide a bigger-picture basis for appreciating how the Safety Case itself was a product of history. It will show Posiva’s repository work to be a brief episode that emerged from a dizzying array of past causes and effects that occurred over decades, centuries, millennia, hundreds of millennia, and beyond. After that, the chapter will zoom way in on the Safety Case’s everyday workplace project timescales as they appeared when I studied them anthropologically from 2012 to 2014. Doing so will show how the Safety Case organized a complex array of expert perspectives together into a workable collaboration over the project’s months and years. Third, it will take a step back from Safety Case experts’ professional time and explore what they did in their personal leisure time, to show how informants recharged their minds after work. This recharging helped them avoid occupational burnout and sustain the energy necessary for persisting with knowledge-intensive Safety Case work, day in and day out.
Learning to hop more nimbly around these timescales can inspire a more refined multiscale, multiangle, or multiperspective sensibility. This kind of multidimensional thinking must, I suggest, be cultivated during the Anthropocene. For the purposes of this case study, this means learning to swing from Finland’s deep time to the Safety Case project’s months and years to my informants’ day-to-day lives. As in chapters 1 and 2, I will close this chapter with five reckonings. However, here, and in the next chapter too, the reckonings have a different target. They will focus less on how individuals can do introspective thought experiments and become shrewder deep time reckoners themselves. Instead, they challenge us to ask: How can today’s societies better support the highly trained, prolific deep time reckoning experts already in our midst? Can existing deep time reckoning experts, the organizations that employ them, and the infrastructures, colleagues, and administrators working alongside them adopt new policies, programs, or working culture norms to foster long-termism? How can organizations with long-term impacts—from plastics manufacturers to chemicals companies to the fossil fuel industry to the financial services sector—reform their attitudes toward time? Future changes in lay and expert cultures alike are needed to avert planetary collapse. That is why deep time reckoning requires greater institutional support. With this in mind, let’s stretch out our minds by traveling back in time again, taking a learning-journey to an alien Earth as it appeared over seventy millennia ago.
Our story of Finland’s long-term history can begin around 70,000 BCE, with the expansion of the enormous glacial ice sheet that covered it throughout the previous Ice Age. At its peak, the ice was three kilometers thick. Dubbed the Weichselian glaciation, the ice sheet once covered most of what are now called Europe’s Nordic countries. About 20,000 years ago, it began its retreat. After years of melting, Finland’s glacial period ended around 9000 BCE. With an immense weight off its shoulders, the landmass we today call Finland began rising. Its coastlines extended outward, gaining ground. Settlers moved to Finland shortly after the ice sheet retreated, most likely from the south and southeast. The climate was cold and dry. Birch forests displaced tundra. Coastal areas near what is today called the Gulf of Finland emerged from the ice around 10,000 BCE. Glacial melting hastened rapidly a thousand years later, leaving behind the Salpausselkä ridge in Southern Finland. This region has seen human habitation for more than 10,000 years. By 7000 BCE, the ice sheet was gone; deciduous and pine trees sprouted up in droves. Seminomadic communities hunted, fished, picked berries, and foraged for plants. Inhabitants used elk bone to make spearheads and ice picks. They used elk antler to make axes and combs, elk hooves to make cups, tendons for string, bladder for water conditions, brains for tanning, and eyes as a binder for painting.
By 6500 BCE, most of Finland was covered with pine forests. Pottery found in Finland dates back to 5300 BCE. Around 4000 BCE, parts of Finland were as mild, wet, and warm as present-day Central Europe. Clay pottery-making practices were adopted from the east. About 500 years later, some inhabitants began decorating and embroidering their clayware using combs. Today’s archaeologists call these the “Comb Ceramic cultures” or “Pit–Comb Ware cultures.” Human and animal populations thrived. Luxury adornments made out of amber were imported from the Baltic Sea’s southeastern shores. Furs from Northern Finland made their way to the South via trade routes. Many humans’ tools were adorned with figures of elk, waterfowl, and bear heads. Over the years, various inhabitants left behind rock paintings, which captured the Safety Case chemist Laura’s imagination in 2013 CE. The rock paintings depict images of snakes, people, moose, boats, fish, birds, and more.
Around 2500 BCE, Finland’s climate grew drier and cooler. Many of its deciduous oak, alder, and birch trees died; spruce trees sprouted up and spread. A new group of Indo-European peoples arrived in Southeastern Finland. They brought new languages and animal husbandry practices. They made battle axes shaped like boats and adorned their pottery with cord-like ornamentation. Finland’s Bronze Age, beginning sometime after 1500 BCE, drew Germanic influences into the region through Scandinavian immigration and coastal contacts in the west. “Nordic Bronze Culture” influenced coastal regions of Finland. Finland’s Iron Age (~500 BCE to ~1300 CE) saw increased contact with the Baltic regions, which today comprise the countries of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. Finland’s climate became colder and wetter around the dawn of the Common Era.
At the end of the Iron Age, one could discern a few distinct language dialect groups across Finland: Hämälaiset (Tavastia), Varsinaissuomalaiset (Finland Proper), Karjalaiset (Karelia), and Saami (Lapland). During pre-Christian times, Finns and Vikings were known to one another through plundering and trade. Some archaeologists have noted evidence of Swedish settlement in Finland’s southwest. Christianity gained a foothold in the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. Finland’s Catholic medieval period began around the twelfth century and continued until the Reformation in the 1520s. Practices of writing down events came to Finland only after the rise of Christianity. By the thirteenth century, Finland was a key battleground between Orthodox Russia and Catholic Sweden.
Most regions of what is today called Finland were part of the Swedish Empire from the thirteenth century until 1809. Lutheran clergyman Mikael Agricola established a comprehensive writing system for the Finnish language in the 1500s. Parish population registers were established in the 1600s, keeping records of Finns’ births, marriages, and deaths. From 1695 to 1697, Finland suffered a massive famine that killed about one-third of its population in just two years. From 1866 to 1868, Finland faced suuret nälkävuodet (“the great hunger years”)—a famine that killed almost 9 percent of its population in three years. In 1809, most Finnish-speaking regions were ceded to the Russian Empire, and the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland was established.
Finland declared independence from Russia in 1917. Soon after, a civil war flared up. The anticommunist White Guard defeated the socialist Reds. From 1939 to 1940, Finland defended itself from Soviet invasion in the Winter War. From 1941 to 1944, Finland fought the USSR as a cobelligerent aligned with the Axis powers. In 1944 and 1945, after signing an armistice agreement with the USSR and the United Kingdom, Finland fought the Lapland War. This was an effort to expel Nazi German forces from Northern Finland. The helmets and wine bottles that the German occupation left behind would, decades later, capture the imagination of my geologist informant when he unearthed them in his youth. By the end of these conflicts, Finland was forced to cede, as reparations to the Soviet Union, not only its Petsamo region, but also parts of Karelia and Salla, plus four islands as well.
Since then, Finland’s economy developed to boast one of the world’s highest per capita GDPs. Finland’s welfare state expanded significantly between 1970 and 1990. Two nuclear reactors, in the municipality of Loviisa on Finland’s southern coast, were turned on in 1977 and 1980. Some industry insiders playfully nicknamed Fortum’s Loviisa power plant “Eastinghouse” because its Soviet-designed reactors were fitted with Western safety systems and controls made by the Westinghouse and Siemens corporations. Two other nuclear reactors were located right next to Posiva’s repository on Olkiluoto Island. They began commercial operation in 1979 and 1982. Finland’s research reactor at Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) was originally purchased from the United States. Located in Espoo right outside Helsinki, it was turned on in 1962. Responsibilities for it were transferred to VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in 1971. During my fieldwork, Finns still had memories of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster’s fallout raining down on their country’s soil. Cesium from Chernobyl was still detectable in Finland’s mushrooms, elk, and reindeer meat.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, an economic recession welled up in Finland. This turmoil was mostly resolved by the rise of Finnish mobile phone and IT companies, including Nokia. The nuclear waste management company Posiva was established in 1995. Finland joined the European Union in 1996, and adopted the euro in 2002. Olkiluoto was formally chosen as Posiva’s repository site in 2000. Excavation of Posiva’s Onkalo underground laboratory began in 2004. After years of twenty-first-century decline, Nokia was sold in 2013 to Microsoft for €5.44b. During my fieldwork, many spoke of the retraction of Finland’s traditional pulp, forestry, and paper-processing industries. They spoke of Finland’s struggling mobile phone businesses. Many wondered, with guarded anxiety, what the country’s next “national project” would be.
Meanwhile, Finland’s new Olkiluoto 3 reactor was still not yet operational. It saw serious cost overruns. It was originally slated to go online in 2009. The Finnish power company purchasing the reactor, TVO—and the French-led Areva-Siemens consortium that signed on to design and build it—were suing one another for billions of euros in compensation. TVO’s plan for a fourth reactor in Olkiluoto was abandoned by Finland’s government in 2014. The plan may be revisited someday. At the same time, Fennovoima was seeking an entirely new power plant called Hanhikivi 1. Fennovoima signed on Russia’s Rosatom as its technology supplier. Established in 2007, Fennovoima was Finland’s newest nuclear power company. When I was conducting fieldwork, TVO, Fortum, and Posiva sought to prevent competitor Fennovoima from having access to burying its spent fuel in their Olkiluoto repository. As I write in 2020, the Olkiluoto 3 reactor remains a costly work in progress. Fennovoima’s new reactor is expected to see further delays. It is now scheduled to begin operations in 2024.
Learning more about longer-term histories like these can help us, as it did for informants like Laura, to put both the Safety Case project and its far future forecasts into a broader perspective. After all, every event I just covered occurred only within the last 72,000 years. Finland’s commercial nuclear reactors were built only in the past half century. Finland’s first repository safety analysis was published only in 1985. In short, all of this occurred within timescales that were but tiny fractions of those forecasted by, say, Posiva’s Radionuclide Transport model. The transport model looked hundreds of thousands of years into the future.
These historical events comprised even smaller fractions of the timescales covered in the Safety Case scenario The Evolution of the Repository System beyond a Million Years in the Future. They comprised a remarkably small fraction of the time since the Lappajärvi meteor slammed into what we now call Finland about 73 million years ago. From the long-termist vantage point of someone who has achieved immortality—to use Laura’s example, quoted above—the Safety Case, and Finland itself, have been instantaneous episodes in Earth’s deeper history. Comparing the brevity of human pasts with the Safety Case experts’ ambitions to reckon far futures can, informants noted, provide a “mindboggling” encounter with deep time’s breadth. As philosopher Edmund Burke put it back in 1757: “Greatness of dimension, vastness of extent, or quality, has the most striking effect.”1
However, zooming way out to view the Safety Case project as a mere instant in history can also help us appreciate the countless past events that first had to elapse in order for the specific cast of characters I met in Finland to have been born, enculturated, and educated into the expert people they ultimately became. After all, if we were to hop into a time machine and change the course of events that led up to their births, my fieldwork informants may have never come to exist in the first place. If Finland’s multimillennial human migration and famine histories had occurred differently, the composition of the country’s population may have turned out so different that their parents may never have met (or existed). This could also be the case if Finland’s Civil War, World War II, or the Cold War had played out differently. If Finland had spent the Cold War as part of the Soviet Union, the twenty-first-century economic conditions and cultural mentalities I observed there may have evolved into something quite different. This ethnography would, as a consequence, read very differently. If the Finnish government’s immigration policy histories had been different, Laura may never have been allowed to settle there. If twentieth-century globalization trends had been less powerful, Laura may have never received her uniquely tailored international training. If Finland had not seen a post–World War II economic upswing, the country may not have been able to afford nuclear reactors. Having no spent fuel to manage, my informants would likely be working in other fields, living rather different lives. That is, in the unlikely event that they would exist in any recognizable form in the first place.
In other words, the Safety Case experts’ lives were, in these ways, products of histories. They were contingent on, or culminations of, endlessly complex chains of causes and effects that wound far back through time. This included deep histories. For instance, if Finland’s glacial ice sheet had never melted, the country may have stayed uninhabited altogether. If Finland’s bedrock had never formed the way it did, Posiva may have chosen a different repository type. The crystalline granite bedrock’s hardness and durability was, after all, central to Sweden’s and Finland’s KBS-3 design’s functioning. Zooming out and viewing the Safety Case from this longer-term standpoint can help us appreciate how an unfathomably huge series of past events were always alive in the Safety Case project. It can help us reflect on how my informants’ collaborations emerged out of distinct historical circumstances that brought a specific group of people, material conditions, technologies, expertise, and government apparatuses into being.
Viewing the present from a longer-term geological or historical perspective can help us take a step back. It can, in geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s terms, teach us “timefulness.” That is, it can make us more “mindful that this world contains so many earlier ones, all still with us in some way—in the rocks beneath our feet, in the air we breathe, in every cell of our body.”2 With that in mind, let’s now toggle way back in the other direction in time, as my Safety Case informants often did. Let’s extend an adventurous spirit of deep time learning to the very short-term forces that held the Safety Case collaboration together. These short-terms spanned only days, weeks, months, and a few years. They are the mundane time horizons that structured Posiva’s deep time reckoning projects, as they geared up for submitting their construction license application to regulator STUK.
Chapter 2 described how, when Safety Case experts collaborated together, no single expert was able to simultaneously comprehend the details of all of Posiva’s individual reports plus how these many reports linked together to form a whole portfolio. As one put it, “No one person can describe how the whole system works based on what we know anymore.” Given the Safety Case’s tremendous growth over time, it had to be reckoned by a group.
Pondering this, I asked a geologist named Taimi how she personally saw her work feeding into the Safety Case project.3 She, like Laura, answered me by reaching back into human history. Taimi compared the Safety Case collaboration to the building of Peru’s Nazca Lines geoglyphs between 400 and 600 CE. Taking a zoomed-in view from the ground, she explained, the Nazca Lines merely look like long walls or arbitrary lines of stones. Taking a zoomed-out view from a helicopter, however, the Nazca Lines take form as images of hummingbirds, monkeys, lizards, and sharks. To create the Nazca Lines or to create the Safety Case, Taimi reasoned, each collaborator must understand how the smallest parts of one’s own work will be scaled up to feed into the project’s bigger picture:
As for the Nazca Lines, flying above you can see that there are patterns. Nobody knows how they were made, but you can see their broader logic only from above on an airplane. They’re unremarkable when you view them from the ground. To figure out what they represent on the ground, you would have to case the things and sketch it and make measurements. … Viewing the Nazca Lines from an airplane, you are not lost in the rainforest trying to understand the whole by tracing it out from a point or single report, a single part of the larger fabric.
Taimi’s doctorate was in geophysics and engineering geology. But she shared an interest in archaeology with her daughter, who was studying it at university. Her Nazca Lines analogy gestured to how each Safety Case expert’s highly specialized work (just one part of just one Nazca Line) contributed to a larger group achievement (the powerful images visible to those who view the Nazca Lines from on high). Taimi sometimes discussed this with her colleagues. Her aim was to get each Safety Case expert feeling as though he or she was building something larger than him- or herself: something greater than the sum of its parts. This challenged individual experts to zoom out from their everyday perspectives. It nudged them toward taking a step back from their own work. It dared them to try to see their own work as it would appear from a vantage point outside of themselves—viewing the totality of the Safety Case collaboration all at once, from on high.
The trick, for Taimi, was to train one’s intellect to zoom in and out between the ground-level details of one’s own work and its airplane-level overview. This could get one appreciating both (a) the inevitable incompleteness of any single expert’s perspective and (b) the great mutual reliance necessary among experts to reckon deep time. Adopting this sensibility was, in her view, key to achieving effective teamwork relationships. This became especially important in a project that could be understood only when many different experts with many different perspectives were viewing the Safety Case from many different standpoints all at once.
I also brought up these issues of project coordination and scale with Laura. She replied with an analogy of her own, and compared the Safety Case collaboration to a forest. Like Taimi’s Nazca Lines analogy, this analogy called on experts to do an intellectual exercise of zooming in and out on one’s own perspectives. The aim was to achieve a more holistic, or bigger-picture, understanding:
In the Safety Case, you have the forest and the trees. The forest is the big overview; the trees are the details. … When you say, “You’re looking at the trees, you’re not looking at the forest,” we mean “Look at the big picture, don’t get bogged down focusing on the details.” And that’s what we do. We try to look at the big picture. Try to keep in mind the whole ecosystem, not the individual details that can go very deep down to the roots. That’s where the modelers work, to make sure that everything works. If you have only the top without knowing a little about the roots you have just this big green mass. And then if you have only the roots, you only see grass and brown stuff and you don’t have the whole gamut. … Seeing both comes with experience and time. … You cannot isolate one branch from the rest of the tree. It has to be organic. We need the food from the roots. And the roots need the treetops for light and life—for money to do their research.
Laura’s forest analogy emphasized how it was the job of some experts and managers to take a zoomed-out view of the portfolio’s “treetops.” This meant ensuring that more broadly scaled reports properly grasped how the Safety Case’s many models, datasets, scenarios, and engineering designs connected together. These metalevel reports included the Synthesis and Models and Data reports discussed in chapter 2. Other experts, meanwhile, were to take a zoomed-in view of the portfolio’s “roots.” This meant grasping the details of how, say, highly specific datasets (e.g., data about groundwater chemistry or fish populations in Western Finland) got fed into Safety Case models. Still other experts were to zoom to a middle level of the portfolio’s “branches.” This referred to the reports and models that, to use chapter 2’s terms, took in other models’ outputs as inputs of their own, but still were not at the end of the Safety Case model chain. These “branches” models still produced outputs that fed into other, more-encompassing metalevel models closer to the treetops.
For the Safety Case forest to maintain its aura of comprehensibility over the months and years, it needed to be viewed by dozens upon dozens of living professionals from many different perspectives, scales, and levels. Laura sought to help build up this multiperspective spirit of teamwork. Her forest analogy drew her colleagues toward seeing themselves as inhabiting a network of interconnected workplace roles. They were to view themselves as responsible people positioned within a larger division or hierarchy of responsibilities. The challenge, for each individual expert, was to better grasp how their unique perspectives were positioned in relation to others’ unique perspectives and vice versa.
Like Taimi’s Nazca Lines analogy, Laura’s forest analogy highlighted the impossibility of any one human mind simultaneously comprehending the full intricacies of each and every part of the Safety Case, and also how those parts wove together to form a whole portfolio. She nudged her colleagues toward reflecting on how their projects were nestled in specific niches within a much larger collaborative ecosystem, and encouraged them to avoid getting bogged down in details that may be insignificant to the Safety Case’s bigger picture. For her, one should routinely attempt to envision oneself zoomed out from one’s own trees (one’s individual projects) by considering them in light of a larger forest (the Safety Case collaboration as a whole). One should try to imagine how one’s work would appear when viewed from other Safety Case colleagues’ perspectives within a larger forest of work. This means trying to grasp other perspectives zoomed in and zoomed out on various positions in the project’s roots, branches, or treetops. Doing this could, for Laura, help experts reflect regularly on the limits of their own expertise, and get them thinking about how other experts’ expertise filled the gaps in their own knowledge.
Laura’s and Taimi’s analogies had something common: they both advocated routine efforts to shift the angle and/or scale of one’s perspective. This meant intentionally altering the perspective—and level of generality or specificity—from which one approaches a problem. Doing these thought exercises helped the Safety Case experts attain a more robust sense of how to pursue their grandest ambition: to reckon far future Finlands with greater sophistication. The ultimate goal of these shifts in perspective (that is, to more wisely organize an expert collaboration in short-term timescales) was different from that of the previous section’s shifts in perspective (that is, to take a step back and gain a deeper perspective on the Safety Case project by viewing it in deep timescales), but the intellectual route there was similar. Both were about trying to view a set of present-day challenges afresh by zooming in and out on them from many different vantage points. Both were about embarking on holistic, adventurous learning—considering and valuing all sorts of different perspectives.
As the next section will show, a related set of perspective-shifting practices were at play in how certain informants took steps back from, or zoomed out from, their daily professional labors. Doing so, they refreshed themselves and their intellects during their personal leisure time. This zooming out helped them achieve distance from their work before they “circled back”4 to it again the next day and saw it afresh. With that in mind, let’s now explore how Safety Case experts saw time outside the workplace as a space for rejuvenating themselves. This supported their aspirations as deep time reckoners, enhancing their ambitiousness, inner calm, and alertness when they returned to their highly technical Safety Case work the next day.
The Safety Case’s visions of far future worlds emerged from a host of unique expert perspectives, by bringing together a host of specialized, fallible, distinctive people to collaborate together in a particular place at a particular time. Some experts, as one informant put it, had more “ancient Greek” mentalities (more interested in hard logical relations, data, calculation, and syllogisms). Others had more “ancient Mesopotamian” mentalities (more interested in soft intuitions, broader phenomena, and general patterns of relationship). Some experts were better at skating perfect figure eights (executing procedures perfectly or performing research with rigorous exactitude). Others were better at improvising like a jazz musician (inventively troubleshooting in ad hoc or on-the-spot ways). Some higher-ups could be good managers (organizing people, projects, knowledge, and things efficiently) but were poor leaders (failing to inspire a team’s morale or self-motivations). Some experts had a calm, sober, disciplined interior that enabled them to keep a cool head when things went wrong. Others became panicky and flailed under pressure. Some tended to be eccentric, jumpy, or nonconformist but became focused, serious, and dependable when challenges arose. Some were geologists, others mathematicians, others engineers, others chemists, others physicists, and so on. Different types of scientists understood and troubleshot the Safety Case in different ways. It took a village to make far future Finlands appear.
Each citizen in the Safety Case village had his or her own ways of replenishing, or failing to replenish, his or her inner reserves of energy outside work. These activities helped keep them going. One soon-to-retire manager described how he enjoyed cooking, yard work, gardening, and making renovations to his home. He listened to the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Baroque chamber music helped him achieve a meditative calmness. An engineer who worked on the repository canister design took winter breaks vacationing in the Canary Islands. In the summer months, many informants relaxed in rural Finland at their family’s lakeside kesämökki (“summer cottage”). A hydrogeologist in her early forties saw horseback riding as an enjoyable counterpoint to her expertise, which helped her clear her mind in the forest. A biologist in his thirties described how long-distance running helped him “empty his head” and made his “thinking” processes “vanish.” The biologist saw the sauna not only as a place where he could “think more clearly,” but as a “holy place” for Finns: “We do it from the beginning when we are children. … It’s the thing that’s constant throughout Finns’ lives. … Sauna is always sauna.” A physicist in his sixties started taking group acrylic painting lessons after his mother and daughter bought him art supplies as a gift. He kept a picture of a bear on his wall, looking at it daily to try to get a clearer “mental model” of its details, so he could paint it. The physicist contrasted painting with his scientific work, seeing painting as offering more “freedom,” allowing him to “release” his mind from the “limitations” his scientific work imposed.
These many activities seemed, on the surface, to be unrelated to the Safety Case experts’ professional projects. They could be athletic, artistic, or musical in character—or even tasks resembling physical labor. But they were all essential to keeping the experts going. They provided my informants with counterpoints to their work: spaces of refuge that enabled them to routinely take breaks from, take steps back from, or achieve distance from their knowledge-intensive and often mentally taxing workplace projects. Some of these activities were refreshing because they had clear endpoints or discrete final products—like planting flowers or cooking a meal. This contrasted with the air of neverendingness that Safety Case work entailed. Other activities, such as painting, were relaxing because the stakes were much lower than those of managing nuclear waste.
The key, for these informants, was to carve out places and times in which overactive minds could take breaks. This meant focusing on non-work-related hobbies that helped their wound-up ruminations subside. The informants I met who did not have (or who simply did not have time for) these counterpoint activities appeared more likely to struggle with occupational burnout, exhaustion, or pessimism, which could dampen their aspirations to reckon deep time. To keep on growing, the Safety Case needed to be continually infused with hard work, intellectual energy, and rigor by its living authors. As chapter 4 will show, the project depended on engaged human physiologies and alert expert minds to persist. Declines in team morale could mean a stagnant collaboration. I once observed a nuclear energy industry insider with a background in the US nuclear navy put it this way:
When you take a look at a nuclear reactor, you realize that we as nuclear workers have a unique responsibility to take care of that core above all else. When you don’t protect the core, bad things happen. So, our challenge is to become the conscience, the voice, the person who cares for what happens inside of the reactor core. This is inherent in the nuclear business. But to do this, one must also protect one’s personal core, the core of one’s body, the core of who one is. All of us have a personal core: it is who we are, what we’re made of. This is equally as important as protecting the reactor core. … Respect the personal core or else bad things happen.
To protect their personal cores, many informants spent leisure time zooming out from their sometimes nerve-wracking technical work. They were not alone. Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz has cast “play” as his key to achieving “tremendous amounts of energy,” noting his love for “opera, hiking and museums.” Filmmaker David Lynch has described the challenge of overcoming the “heavy weight of negativity,” which, to him, is the “enemy” of creativity. Lynch has also embraced quiet meditation practices. Reflecting in 1917 on how “enthusiasm” and “work” combine to “entice” ideas from the mind of the scientist, sociologist Max Weber declared that “ideas occur to us when they please, not when it pleases us.” Big ideas, for Weber, were more likely to sneak up on us when walking down the street or “smoking a cigar on the sofa” than when “brooding and searching at our desks.” At the same time, a fresh idea would be stopped in its tracks “had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion” in the first place.5
In this same vein, my informants’ leisurely counterpoint activities did not compete with their expert work, and neither did the feelings of personal replenishment that their extracurricular activities delivered. Rather, these elements were essential to the success of the Safety Case project. This may seem counterintuitive. As Pope Francis has lamented, many people today “demean contemplative rest as something unproductive and unnecessary.”6 Yet, when it comes to reckoning deep time, having no time to think can stultify the intellect and drain creativity. This can deprive a Safety Case expert of the dynamism that comes with taking a step back from work, achieving some distance, and then circling back to it the next day. There is so much to be gained from viewing one’s ideas in a new light, from a fresh perspective.
This chapter presented what social scientists might call a multiscalar perspective.7 It put forth an analysis that tacked back and forth between several scales of generality and particularity, approaching the topic from many different angles and levels. It began by viewing the Safety Case from the zoomed-out perspective of Finland’s multimillennial human and geological histories. It then zoomed in on how Posiva’s collaborations achieved more robust organization across weeks, months, decades, and years. Next, it zoomed in even further on how Safety Case experts maintained their motivations to endure their work’s sometimes exhausting day-to-day demands. This could be called a multitemporal analysis: it approached a case study from a variety of different time spans simultaneously.8 Yet this chapter also explored the value of approaching problems from multiple angles, perspectives, and viewpoints. Taimi’s Nazca Lines analogy and Laura’s forest analogy helped us understand how such a diverse group of experts came together to form a project greater than the sum of its parts. This required them to work toward viewing the Safety Case from different positions, roles, and disciplines. What emerged was a more dynamic, multidimensional form of deep time reckoning.
The most skilled deep time reckoners were adept at hopping around between different scales of time. They attempted to see their own thinking from others’ perspectives. They appreciated how any technical issue can be understood in many different lights. They knew when it was time to achieve distance from their work’s hairsplitting details. They knew when to dig deeper into its weeds. They knew how to avoid going too far down any one rabbit hole of thought. They knew when and how to take breaks, too—taking a step back from their knowledge-intensive professions and personal ruminations.
Yet one does not need a PhD, or even a high school diploma, to cultivate these intuitions: anyone can embark on a learning-journey of discerning how any given event, entity, or vision of the future can be viewed in several different ways—depending on the perspective from which one approaches it. Inspired by this, we can begin asking how today’s shortsighted organizations, especially those with long-term impacts, can adopt more multitemporal worldviews. We can ask how communities of skilled deep time reckoners can be given more say in today’s societies. The big question is how to better orchestrate experts’ and citizens’ relationships with time, with one another, and with the Earth’s future ecosystems. This means ensuring that experts and laypeople alike work toward envisioning future worlds from several different scales, levels, and vantage points simultaneously.
The ways Safety Case experts toggled back and forth between histories and futures near and deep can serve as models for personnel training courses at any corporation, agency, or research institute with long-term impacts. Companies could host workplace retreats, boot camps, or office workshops that cultivate their staff’s long-term thinking patterns and multitimescale awareness. These could be taught by geologists, climate scientists, cosmologists, anthropologists, nuclear waste experts, archivists, astronomers, philosophers, or other kinds of deep time reckoning experts. Casting long-sighted physical scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars as professional mentors for lifelong learning can do more than just raise awareness about Anthropocene perils; it can also help empower the virtues of careful and rigorous expertise. This empowerment, if accepted by the wider public, can help counter the deflation of expertise.
For example, teams from a fossil fuel company could learn all about the deep geological history of West Texas’s Permian Basin oil field. They could learn about the long-term human migration and settlement patterns that ended up peopling the oil industry’s executive teams and labor forces. Participants could be challenged to reflect on, say, how their organization’s short-term timescales of quarterly earnings, executive turnover, and financial transactions relate to, compare with, or have been affected by these deeper histories. They could then envision the fossil fuel industry’s longer-term consequences. These range from carbon emissions causing climate change, to the challenge of Earth’s limited fossil resources, to how resource extraction can affect local ecosystems. They could cover positive impacts, too: they could reflect on how their organization’s ongoing job creation stimulates the economy or how injecting energy into the grid can raise standards of living—extending the timescales of human lifetimes.
Workshop attendees could also be introduced to social scientific perspectives on multitemporality, including sociologist Barbara Adam’s books about timescapes. Her work explores how different paces, scales, or “scapes” of time—from democratic electoral schedules, to the tempo of capitalist commodity production, to communication and transportation speeds—converge to stoke environmental problems.9 To help achieve critical distance from their everyday office lives, participants could then learn about anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of time-reckoning practices among Nuer communities in South Sudan.10 Evans-Pritchard made a distinction between Nuer oecological time (concepts of time derived from local environmental circumstances, like scheduling one’s day around the “cattle clock” of milking cows, taking them to the meadow, putting them in a stable, and so on) and Nuer structural time (concepts of time derived from people’s relationships with other people, lineages, clans, political groupings, statuses and ages, and so on). Present-day anthropological case studies, such as this chapter’s multitemporal analysis, could be discussed as well.
The goal of these exercises would be to nudge employees at all levels and positions toward approaching problems from multiple timescales, which would help the workforce think in spans more in sync with Anthropocene challenges. Enriching one’s time consciousness can be eye-opening for any employee. This includes high-level executives, accountants, administrative staff, communications professionals, and others as well. It can remind anyone how, during the deflation of expertise, we cannot ever allow ourselves to stop learning—even after our formal educations are complete. If this sounds unrealistic, just think of how unrealistic diversity training, sexual harassment training, or management training must have seemed to corporate leaders just a few decades ago. Yet these office programs are now commonplace. In any case, even if, say, today’s oil companies do not have any interest in implementing multitimescale awareness training programs on their own, voters can still push for laws requiring them to do so.
During the Anthropocene, many private companies have long-term impacts on the planet. These range from plastics manufacturers to fossil fuel extractors to those in the chemicals industry to the financial sector. Yet most companies are remarkably short-lived. In the late 1990s, Arie de Geus of Royal Dutch Shell warned that Fortune 500 companies usually do not last more than fifty years.11 By 2017, Credit Suisse showed that the typical lifespan of an S&P 500 company had fallen to twenty years. This is just one-third of the sixty-year average found only six decades ago.12 What can short-lived companies like these learn from initiatives like the Olkiluoto repository project, which must maintain continuity until the facility is decommissioned around 2120? Why don’t more companies have long-term safety departments like those at Posiva or its contractor Saanio & Riekkola? How can companies be made to take responsibility for environmental impacts that will outlast them?
To improve an organization’s ability to zoom in and out across timescales, perhaps it could institute a days division, a decades division, a centuries division, and even a multimillennial division. The days division could focus on the organization’s short-term balance sheets, inventories, human resources, branding approaches, management hierarchy, public relations, audits, and so on: the familiar hallmarks of a modern organization. The decades division, however, would explore how these strategies could later be readapted given a variety of future scenarios that could materialize over the next generation or two or three. For some, this could mean modeling future lines of evolution that society or technological innovation could follow. For others, it could mean hiring strategic foresight consultants. Such consultants already use methods with names like “alternative futures exploration.” However, the forecasts would be most robust if highly trained PhDs were hired and multiple lines of reasoning were deployed. This means involving experts from several academic fields, industries, and government agencies, as they were in the Safety Case project.
Formalizing multitimescale learning by establishing days and decades divisions could be in a corporation’s self-interest: it could increase its longevity. Legislation may be necessary to mandate the centuries divisions and multimillennial divisions, though. The centuries division could be required to publish long-term impact statements that aim to model, describe, or graph the organization’s costs and benefits to environmental and human flourishing over, say, the next five hundred years. These could be modeled on the environmental impact statements that the US National Environmental Policy Act requires of polluting companies. Or they could resemble a Nordic nuclear waste repository project’s Safety Case portfolio, except with shorter time horizons. Or they could be modeled on product lifecycle analyses. Such analyses aim to forecast a commodity’s total effects on human health and the environment from its cradle (the time of its development and production) to its grave (the time of its recycling or disposal).
The multimillennial division would need to think bigger picture. It could be assisted by evolutionary biologists, archaeologists, philosophers, epidemiologists, Earth system scientists, nuclear waste experts, and/or other kinds of long-term thinkers. These experts would define exactly what, if anything, the organization can bring to the table, for our species and planet, across the coming millennia. This could mean developing something like a Safety Case. It could mean making quantitative models, qualitative analogies, or prose scenarios to envision far future impacts. Or it could mean devising a corporate “mission statement” espousing ethical goals that extend far beyond the expected lifespan of the organization itself. If the company finds itself unable to articulate its big picture contributions to humanity in a credible or convincing way, it must bear the criticism of skeptical publics and media pundits.
This chapter revealed how deep time reckoning worked best when several different kinds of experts envisioned far future worlds from several different scales, levels, and frames of analysis simultaneously. But how can we ensure that more collaborations like these come about? How can long-sighted expert teams transcend the deflation of expertise by obtaining greater prominence in the public eye? How can they gain more influence in the halls of power?
Today’s deep time reckoners must organize into a more cohesive group with greater solidarity. They must forge deeper bonds based on their shared self-identifications as long-term thinkers. Climate scientists must collaborate more with nuclear waste experts. Paleontologists must talk more with archivists. Evolutionary biologists must seek greater mutual understanding with theologians who ponder God’s eternity. All must commit to learning more from one another. They must work toward a more textured, multifaceted, multidimensional long-termism that defies insular information silos and disciplinary echo chambers.
To facilitate this greater cohesion, we could set up an international Deep Time Reckoning Association. This group could be modeled on highly interdisciplinary expert organizations, such as the Society for Social Studies of Science. It could be a United Nations project, an association funded by big philanthropies, or an offshoot of several professional organizations. The organizations could collaborate to establish a more broadly framed “supra-association” focused on long-term thinking. It could hold events in the spirit of the Aspen Institute: a global nonprofit think tank for idea exchange and leadership devoted to the common good. It could have a journal, conferences, a magazine, a website, and a yearly global summit. To enhance public outreach during the deflation of expertise, it could take cues from the space exploration advocacy organization, the Planetary Society. The Planetary Society is led not only by prominent astronomers and NASA scientists, but also by public icons like Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Star Trek actor Robert Picardo.
One of the Deep Time Reckoning Association’s goals would be to work toward incorporating more rigorous portrayals of far future worlds—seen from multiple angles, levels, and scales—into mainstream movies, television shows, podcasts, and books. For that, it could follow the lead of University of Southern California’s “Hollywood, Health & Society” institute. That institute advises entertainment industry professionals on human health, security, and safety issues to improve popular media accuracy. However, the Deep Time Reckoning Association’s main mission would be to nudge long-sighted experts toward self-identifying as a pragmatic multidisciplinary community that global society must rely on to avert planetary collapse. After all, only when today’s deep time reckoning experts start working in tandem can a more holistic and united front against ecological and intellectual degradation take root. This means tens of thousands approaching Anthropocene problems from different time spans, perspectives, and disciplines.
The Deep Time Reckoning Association could set up social clubs or conference rooms where deep time reckoners from many different fields can work, socialize, and network together. Members could, for example, attend presentations inspired by the Long Now Foundation’s monthly seminars, which strive to assemble a “compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking.” They could discuss ideas in settings akin to large universities’ alumni clubs, like the Cornell Club in New York City. Or the club could be modeled on the Cosmos Club, a private club in Washington, DC, which brings together major contributors to science, literature, public service, and art. Its membership has included three US presidents, three dozen Nobel Prize winners, sixty-one Pulitzer winners, over fifty Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients, and twelve Supreme Court justices. If a new merit-based club focused squarely on long-termist expertise were to establish its own interdisciplinary network, what sort of Anthropocene breakthroughs could emerge?
The Safety Case experts showed how cross-pollinating many different kinds of long-termist expertise can help an organization reckon deep time. Deep Time Reckoning Association members would, in a similar spirit, break down barriers between expert communities and hone long-sighted knowledge together. To facilitate this, they could do perspective-exchanging exercises modeled on Laura’s forest analogy. They could routinely ask one another:
What does my work look like from your perspective? What does yours look like from mine? What does the year 22,000 CE look like from your viewpoint? What are the key phenomena we should consider? How is what you see similar or different from what I see? What about 220,000 CE? What are the blind spots in my and your expertise? How can we illuminate them for one another?
Questions like these could be posed at informal gatherings. These could resemble a more casual, inclusive version of the salons common among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French intellectuals (and still mimicked by certain intellectual types today). There, learned people would meet to exchange ideas, tell amusing stories, and refine their knowledge and taste over snacks and drinks. The camaraderie and intellectual stimulation this offers could help deep time reckoners build community. It could give them a space to playfully think outside the box and attain a more robust, multiscale, multiperspective grasp of far futures. When events like these are not in session, the parlor could serve as a relaxed lounge or break room where deep time reckoners can achieve distance from their intense work. They could partake in counterpoint activities like playing music, painting, drawing, or reading—whatever reflects the interests of the community. They could play games likes chess, poker, Trivial Pursuit, Risk, or Settlers of Catan. This would help them take a step back from their work, as this chapter’s Safety Case experts did, and sustain the aspirational motivation and intellectual energy that deep time reckoning requires.
Professionals from all sorts of different organizations’ multimillennial divisions could pool ideas at a yearly global conference, hosted by the Deep Time Reckoning Association. Yet deep time thinking must be seen as a year-round activity, just as it was for Safety Case experts. It must be the duty of employees across entire organizations. So, when long-termist experts are struggling alone in their offices, worrying they are missing the forest for the trees, perhaps they ought to pause for a few minutes and do long-termist thought experiments. These could be inspired by how the Safety Case experts tacked back and forth across time and between others’ perspectives. Introspective self-inquiries like these can cultivate experts’ capacities to shift and reshift their thinking. And remember, one can engage in this activity from a wide range of backgrounds. An American farmer, for example, could do this thought experiment:
How does this year’s low crop yield look from my view versus Vegetable Buyer X’s view? How about US Department of Agriculture Bureaucrat Y’s view? How would a locust or a crow see my situation? How do seasonal weather fluctuations affect my profit fluctuations? How would a meteorologist, ecologist, and banker see my situation differently? How is the multigenerational history of my family farm alive, or not alive, in my current way of life? How was my land’s history shaped by America’s homesteading settlement patterns, government programs to mitigate the Dust Bowl, Native Americans’ effects on the landscape, and the extinction of North American megafauna like the mastodon? How is my agrarian cultivation of land, and my provision of food to today’s populations, feeding into the long-term future of humanity?
Embarking on these sorts of multiscale, multiangle, multiperspective learning-journeys can be useful to today’s deep time reckoning experts and to society as a whole. Doing personal research online or at libraries can refine one’s accuracy in grasping different viewpoints, time periods, and their implications. Anyone can reinforce one’s multiperspectival efforts by asking friends and coworkers lots of questions about their work’s time spans—a bit like an anthropologist does. This can sharpen one’s capacity to understand others’ points of view. If this practice were to be widely adopted, it would not only help lay more multidimensional intellectual, institutional, and societal foundations for tackling long-term Anthropocene threats; it could also help reinvigorate enthusiasm, among skeptical members of the public, for interdisciplinary expert engagement during the deflation of expertise.
1. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958 [1757]), 39, 72.
2. Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 178.
3. Taimi was originally from elsewhere in Europe, but wanted her pseudonym to be “Taimi,” a Finnish name.
4. Annelise Riles, “Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 52–65.
5. Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures, trans. R. Livingstone, ed. D. Owen and T. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett Books, 2004 [1917]).
6. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, encyclical (May 24, 2015).
7. Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 221–222.
8. Hirokazu Miyazaki, “The Temporalities of the Market,” American Anthropologist 105, no. 2 (2003): 255–265.
9. Barbara Adam, Timescapes of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1998).
10. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Nuer Time-Reckoning,” Africa 12 (1939).
11. Arie de Geus, The Living Company (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
12. Michael Sheetz, “Technology Killing Off Corporate America: Average Life Span of Companies Under 20 Years,” CNBC.com, August 24, 2007, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/technology-killing-off-corporations-average-lifespan-of-company-under-20-years.html.