HOW TO FACE DEEP TIME EXPERTISE’S MORTALITY
35,012 CE: A tiny microbe floats in a large, northern lake. It does not know that the clay, silt, and mud floor below it is gaining elevation, little by little, year after year. It is unaware that, thirty millennia ago, the lake was a vast sea. Dotted with sailboats, cruise and cargo ships, it was known by humans as the Baltic. Watery straits, which connected the Baltic Sea to the North Sea, had risen above the water thousands of years ago. Denmark and Sweden fused into a single landmass. The seafloor was decompressing from the Weichselian glaciation—an enormous sheet of ice that pressed down on the land during a previous ice age. After the last man died, the landmass kept on rising. Its uplift was indifferent to human extinction. It was indifferent to how, in 2013 CE, an anthropologist and a Safety Case expert sat chatting in white chairs in Ravintola Rytmi: a cafe in Helsinki. There, the Safety Case expert relayed his projection that, by 52,000 CE, there would no longer be water separating Turku, Finland, and Stockholm, Sweden. At that point, one could walk from one city to the other on foot. The expert reckoned that, to the north—between Vaasa, Finland, and Umeå, Sweden—one would someday find a waterfall with the planet’s largest deluge of flowing water. The waterfall could be found at the site of a once-submerged sea shelf. The microbe, though, does not know or care about Vaasa, Umeå, Denmark, long-lost boats, Safety Case reports, or Helsinki’s past dining options. It has no concept of them. Their significances died with the humans. Nor does the microbe grasp the suffering they faced when succumbing to Anthropocene collapse. Humans’ past technological feats, grand civilizations, passionate projects, intellectual triumphs, wartime sacrifices, and personal struggles are now moot. And yet, the radiological safety of the microbe’s lake’s waters still hinges on the work of a handful of human Safety Case experts who lived millennia ago. Thinking so far ahead, these experts never lived to see whether their deep time forecasts were accurate.
We have seen Safety Case experts make multiple analogies when describing their deep time reckoning projects. Some evoked imagery of living organisms and ecosystems. In chapter 3, Laura’s forest analogy saw the Safety Case as a living project that required ongoing feeding. It absorbed life-giving “light” in the form of financial support from Posiva managers in and above the portfolio’s “treetops.” If all funding to this “forest” were to be slashed, then the Safety Case ecosystem would be deprived of its sustenance and nutrients, and it would die. For Laura, it was also the job of the experts who input data into the Safety Case’s “roots” to give their “organic” collaboration the “food” it needed to grow. Another informant similarly explained her roots-level job to me as one of “feeding” the “raw” data she collects into her colleague’s model so it can be “processed” and then made “ingestible” by the Safety Case as a whole. Others, as I have noted, described their long-sighted collaborative efforts as a “colony” of “ants” caught in the throes of a larger “group organism.” Another scientist spoke of how the Safety Case’s workings emerged, in part, “organically” through informal gossip networks and interpersonal chats among experts—through what he called puskaradio (“bush radio”) or viidakkorumpu (“jungle drum”).
As my time in Finland progressed, it became clear that these lively organism and ecosystem analogies were more than just figures of speech or fun expressions. The Safety Case was, after all, in a sense itself alive. It was a collaboration of living people who had to infuse their lively professional energies and intellectual vigor into the project to breathe life into it and keep it growing. But, like any living thing, the Safety Case collaboration could die. Parts of it could necrotize. Any event causing human managers, experts, or technicians to cease to pour their energies into the project could put the Safety Case portfolio at risk of withering. The most obvious examples of such life-sapping events could be a manager’s unanticipated death, or the retirement of a key scientist. Or it could be an irreplaceable modeler abruptly quitting work out of frustration.
This point can be stretched further. If all of the living experts working on the Safety Case project were to simultaneously die, the portfolio would not only cease to grow, it would also lose its meaning. It would become a pile of mysterious paper artifacts decked out in barely comprehensible gibberish, strange charts, and graphs that mean little to nothing to surviving Finns. The reports would become, momentarily at least, like untranslated hieroglyphics. Unless, of course, another group of living experts were to pick up the hundreds of reports once more—putting in the interpretation work necessary to figure out the Safety Case artifact’s big picture for the world.
The pragmatic, optimistic, worldly form of deep time reckoning I advocate in this book is sensitive to the possibility of death. An abrupt death of a key expert could cause, for a body of collaborating Safety Case experts, something like an organ failure. As one scientist at the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT) put it:
We’re extracting information from old-timers. … This is a response to a risk [of expert death] that has been realized here a number of times. … Perhaps we should just set up some alcohol jars in the corridors and take their brains!
I broached these issues of expert mortality with my informants. Many emphasized how it can take a long time to become a top expert in the globally scarce field of repository safety assessment modeling. This steep learning curve, they told me, can make the consequences of a surprise death of an expert all the more severe. A chemist in her late fifties put it this way:
Nuclear waste is such a specialized field. At least in Finland, you cannot get enough background information at any university or in any academic course. It is something that you have to learn at the workplace. … The process takes five or ten years, depending on the kind of work. The youngest have been here for about four to six years. You can say that the one who has been here six years has fully learned one specialized kind of work. But to get them good enough to do multiple types of jobs … ten years.
Human mortality can be a threat to expert communities and their knowledge. It can also be a threat to societies’ and institutions’ capacities to think long-term. When a key deep time reckoner dies, his or her wisdom can evaporate, and the fight against the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise can lose a key intellect. This chapter explores this challenge by telling the story of the death of a vital nuclear waste expert and its aftermath. This expert, Seppo, was described to me, with playful hyperbole, as the Safety Case’s former “dictator” who “pulled all the strings” back in the 1990s and early 2000s. One insider called him Posiva’s safety assessment project’s Kekkonen, in a reference to Urho Kekkonen, Finland’s longtime former prime minister and president from the 1950s to the 1980s. Seppo was known for his hot temper, great competence, caustic personality, salty straightforwardness, and unyielding dedication to his scientific work.
Seppo died suddenly on a Saturday evening in the summer of 2005. This dealt the Safety Case project a serious blow. The cause of Seppo’s death was probably a fall on the ice. Some informants said it was a bicycle accident. Others speculated that Seppo had tripped on his shoelaces and fell. Seppo’s body was found in Helsinki’s Ruoholahti area near the city’s Kaapelitehdas (“Cable Factory”) building. He had recently left a graduation party at a friend’s house. Paramedics tried to resuscitate him, to no avail. This tragedy brought the Safety Case, to use one informant’s words, to a temporary but screeching halt. Posiva realized that the Safety Case work had come to rely so heavily on Seppo that it, as another informant put it, had become sort of a one-man show. Seppo’s surviving colleagues struggled to revive their project’s workflows for months. They faced thorny questions about whether it is even possible to replace highly specialized experts like Seppo.1 From then on, some of Finland’s Safety Case experts experienced “secondary haunting.”2 That is, while no informants reported literally seeing ghosts walking the halls of their workplaces, many described feeling haunted by the tragic loss of Seppo. They referenced Seppo’s “specter” figuratively to underscore his ongoing impact.
In this chapter, stories of Seppo offer us a window into how the problem of expert death played out among my informants. The goal is to mine this case study for lessons about how to build more securely long-sighted institutions. Today’s organizations must be more resilient to the loss of vital deep time reckoning experts. To achieve this, they must learn more about how facets of an expert’s thinking and personality can disappear or persist after his or her biological death. To this end, this chapter first tracks how a dead expert’s influence lived on in my informants’ predecessor parables: the cautionary tales they told about Seppo, which conveyed lessons about how Safety Case experts ought to engage with their colleagues and their deep time knowledge. Second, the chapter delves into how Seppo’s longtime “right-hand man” Gustav felt haunted by Seppo’s intense personality, scientific vision, and sharp tongue. This led Gustav to, on the late Seppo’s behalf, prod his colleagues to reconsider their work’s direction. Studying this anthropologically revealed how lingering traces of Seppo’s influence continued to infuse living experts’ worlds with many different moods, debates over professional values, points of scientific debate, and invitations to reimagine how they modeled far future Finlands.
With all this in view, this chapter concludes with five more reckonings. Each explores how learning from Seppo’s expertise’s “afterlives” can offer lessons for tackling the challenges of replacing experts. These are challenges that commonly face rare but essential deep time reckoning specialists. In response, today’s societies must embrace an ethic of predecessor preservation. This means carefully absorbing, tending to, and disseminating insights from prolific deep time reckoners so their contributions to humanity’s long-termism do not die off upon their biological deaths. Talented long-term thinkers like Seppo merit special treatment, responsibilities, and caution from those around them. This can foster greater societal appreciation for the fragility of expert knowledge. Bringing these matters to the attention of a wider public can help us run against the grain of the deflation of expertise.
After Seppo’s sudden death in 2005, his surviving colleagues were left confused and saddened. They scrambled to fill the leadership gaps and knowledge vacuums that his unexpected departure opened up. Some searched through folders in Seppo’s personal computer for clues to his lost thinking. Others tried to interpret notes that Seppo had scribbled in the margins of earlier drafts of his reports. Posiva hired several new personnel.
Some associated Seppo’s passing with the large, visible tumor on his face. Most had known that Seppo had had a vascular disease since childhood. Many had also known that he could die if the growth’s blood vessels were to rupture. Seppo’s health vulnerability was literally staring his colleagues in the face. Yet many still reported feeling shocked by his death. They called it “unnatural” or “untimely.” One informant told me how people’s tendencies to deny death can be a real liability for expert organizations. Adept at making forecasts about the Earth’s radical long-term, Posiva had failed to adequately prepare itself for a completely predictable event in the radical short-term: the abrupt death of a key PhD-holding consultant who was known to have health problems. As Seneca, the Roman philosopher of Stoicism, once said two millennia ago:
We never anticipate evils before they actually arrive. … So many funerals pass our doors, yet we never dwell on death. So many deaths are untimely, yet we make plans for our own infants: how they will don the toga, serve in the army, and succeed to their father’s property.3
After months of workflow instability, Posiva formed the SafCa Group. This was a team of under ten specialists who collaboratively led the Safety Case project in Seppo’s absence. It was overseen by Posiva’s managers. This transition from single-expert to multiple-expert leadership had been underway before Seppo’s death, but it accelerated greatly after it. The SafCa Group made it so that Posiva, as one informant put it, no longer “put all their eggs in one basket” with a single Safety Case knowledge chief. When I arrived in Finland in 2012, the SafCa group was in charge. Yet I was often struck by how Seppo, nearly a decade after his death, seemed to be on the tips of so many of my informants’ tongues. His “specter,” as some told me, still “haunted” the Safety Case expert community. As a younger Safety Case expert put it: “I’ve never met him, but everyone talks about him. Seppo would have said this, Seppo would have done that … What would Seppo do here?”
Some recalled how Seppo used to storm out of meeting rooms banging doors. He only sometimes returned afterward once he cooled down. Others explained how, at meetings, Seppo was often only half following along. He rudely read through reports and listened in only when he thought something interesting was being said. He was always multitasking and looking busy. One informant described how he would fly off the handle at his secretaries. He would “directly devalue” his colleagues when he thought they were underperforming. Another speculated that Seppo, discontent with the imperfections of the world around him, yearned to live in “the perfect world of his models.” One informant attributed Seppo’s dogmatic tendencies to the communist leanings of his university years. He noted how, even though Seppo had abandoned his political leftism long ago, his rigid mentality toward life, work, and science had retained a fundamentalist spirit. Others associated Seppo’s laconic, combative, and prideful toughness with stereotypes about Western Finland’s Pohjanmaa (Ostrobothnia) region, where Seppo was raised. When Safety Case experts discussed these matters, they addressed how differences in individual political leanings, regional cultures, and emotional tendencies had affected their workplace relationships over the years.
Others judged Seppo’s detractors to be the uptight ones. I once witnessed two Safety Case experts chuckle together, reciting one of Seppo’s old jokes: “There are three types of people in this world: those who can count, and those who cannot!” Some told stories of Seppo’s more jovial demeanor during sauna nights, workplace parties, or trips abroad. They recalled how Seppo enjoyed cycling and traveling across the world for vacations. The workplace, they said, was where Seppo’s stubbornness, irritability, and intellectual intensity manifested most acutely. But even this intensity was thought to have its upsides. Some valorized Seppo for being so passionate and serious about his vision for the Safety Case; they found inspiration in his forefather mystique. Seppo, after all, had been a member of Finland’s founding group of geologic disposal experts, nicknamed the Paskaporukka (“Shit Gang”).
Two informants described Seppo’s attitude toward Posiva as “more Popey than the Pope”: more pro-Posiva than Posiva itself. Calling him a “skillful leader,” another put it this way: what really angered people was that, despite being a somewhat ambiguous character, Seppo was “usually right.” One cast Seppo’s intellect as brilliant and his straight-to-the-point personality as charismatic. Seppo was, in these warmer recollections, summoned as an ideal role model to which today’s Safety Case experts ought to conform. “Being careful was his hobby,” an informant recalled, with admiration. On the other hand, memories of Seppo were also sometimes summoned to discourage peers from being nitpicking pilkunnussijat (“comma-fuckers”)—too detail-obsessed for one’s own good.
Many, though, held Seppo up as an example of how not to interact with one’s colleagues. They spoke of Seppo’s fraught working relationship with Gustav. Gustav was seen as Seppo’s former lackey, henchman, or sidekick. He had a background in physics and engineering. Seppo was a systems analyst. Some cast them as what a social scientist might call a double charismatic pair.4 Seppo was the “tyrant” with the big-picture vision; Gustav was the “right-hand man” who did the nitty-gritty calculation labor that Seppo assigned to him. An enraged Seppo fired Gustav twice. Others had similar stories. Seppo once fired Rasmus, whose modeling expertise Seppo denigrated as “like playing computer games.” Both Rasmus and Gustav were promptly rehired after Seppo cooled down.
Multiple informants emphasized how Seppo had never been promoted to a management position. With many overlapping layers of authority above him, Seppo was left to micromanage his renown informally among those with whom he worked closely. Gustav told a story of how Seppo once became upset when drunk at a party. He had received news that Rasmus was promoted above him in Posiva’s hierarchy. Seppo then, sadly and seriously, announced that if Gustav were ever to be promoted above him, it would be the lowest point in his life. One informant recalled how Seppo rarely talked about his private life. Another called him a lonely rider and a lone ranger. Gustav told me he had learned to keep his “personal defense lines up” when around him.
When I met Gustav, he described Seppo as an “ambiguous Angry Bird” who sometimes wore “raging bullhorns.” When Safety Case experts told stories about their tense working relationship, it opened up tough conversations. They discussed how experts with controlling personalities can create difficult working environments, as they jockey to uphold their chiefly positions. Some told stories of Seppo to critique the inhumanity of experts who seem to value technical information over people. Others raised awareness about experts who seek to reinforce their mystiques as people elevated above others. Seppo’s esteem, after all, relied on his standoffish charisma. Telling stories about Seppo fostered an appreciation for how, when authority is not routinized in rules—when it becomes overdependent on the potency of a single charismatic person—its leader–follower relationships may not survive the charismatic person’s death.5
Still other Safety Case experts told tales of Seppo that warned of how experts with controlling personalities can weaken collaborations. They criticized experts who need to “hold all the reins” at work. Yearning to be the Safety Case’s irreplaceable puppet master, Seppo had groomed no heirs. Instead, he hoarded his knowledge. He made himself indispensable to Posiva by strategically managing, guarding, transmitting, producing, and concealing highly coveted Safety Case information. He empowered himself by accumulating and obsessively controlling specialist knowledge that nobody else had.6 To reinforce this, Seppo maintained a personal distance between himself and his colleagues. He ultimately became, as one informant put it, almost impossible to fire.
This set the stage for work environments that were sometimes toxic. Seppo’s status enabled him to get away with being uniquely impolite, volatile, and demanding of his colleagues. Had Seppo’s specialized expertise been less rare, he would have been less of a scarce human resource. Had his great competence been more replaceable, he would have had more reason to fear losing his job when he lashed out at others. But with his authority uncontested, his irascibility went unchecked. Seppo’s knowledge-hoarding was enabled, in part, by his personal volatility. This volatility was itself enabled by his status; these were two sides of the same coin. As a consequence, Safety Case experts were no more likely to reminisce about the afterlives of Seppo’s scientific contributions than they were about the aftershocks of his lack of collegiality. Many informants felt positive about Seppo. Others discouraged peers from regressing into outdated mentalities like his. They stressed how Seppo, while looking hundreds of millennia into the future, was a backward product of his times.
In so many fieldwork situations, Seppo’s specter returned to stir up reflections on the Safety Case experts’ values, relationships, and habits. My informants summoned, conjured, and channeled aspects of his past vision, character, and ideas into the present. These little everyday dramas took place over days, weeks, months, years, and decades, yet they affected how Posiva reckoned multimillennial futures. Stories about Seppo were derived from the past, yet they were told to convey value judgments about the present. Since Seppo’s death, his surviving colleagues have shared cautionary tales about how uneven distributions of unique expert knowledge can become liabilities for organizations that rely too heavily on a single specialist. They referenced Seppo when sharing opinions about favorable versus unfavorable, and polite versus impolite, styles of expert behavior among the living. This was just one way that traces of Seppo’s past life influenced the Safety Case experts’ professional community.
Studying these predecessor parables anthropologically revealed how aspects of a lost expert can, in philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s terms, be “recollected forward” from the past into the present.7 These aspects included Seppo’s past emotions, technical knowledge, dreams, personality quirks, ideas, visions of the future, and more. When summoning Seppo’s specters, informants often characterized him as strong-willed, competent, and reputable—but also intense and best kept at arm’s length. This reinforced Seppo’s role, in death as in life, as what anthropologists call an exemplar. He was a figure placed on a pedestal. He shaped his community’s imaginations, values, and ways.8
Telling stories of Seppo, my informants taught lessons about expert collegiality, authority, vision, temperament, passion, charisma, kindness, politeness, social distance, mystique, and leadership. They did so with solemnity, awe, respect, nostalgia, aversion, or warm friendliness, for different reasons at different moments. Seppo’s successors curated memories of their lost forerunner. They empowered Seppo as an influential predecessor. Recollections of him intervened in the Safety Case experts’ worlds, opening his surviving colleagues up to negotiating and renegotiating how they related to one another and to their scientific work. In these ways, remnants of Seppo’s past impact lived on to subtly affect the organization of Posiva’s Safety Case collaborations, influencing how their visions of far future Finlands took shape.
When I met with Gustav in February 2013, he showed up mildly hungover. He had two candy bars, a pack of cigarettes, and a few cups worth of coffee in hand. He complained of working long hours; he was tired of recalculating his datasets every time new information was found or flashy new computer programs were released. He griped about having to leave his kesämökki in mid-July to recalculate his radionuclide transport models, and about his workplace’s new scientifically inexperienced “business-oriented” managers. He criticized Posiva’s pressures to write lengthy Safety Case reports in “Oxford English.” He mocked a colleague who had recently denigrated his work as “only mechanical calculation.” Sitting in front of his computer, Gustav walked me through why crunching chemical inventory datasets on today’s “cutting edge” software was clumsy compared to the simpler, more straightforward UNIX software of the 1990s. He was fed up, as Seppo used to be, with scientific research’s twenty-first-century corporatization. Gustav was also no longer so big a “fan” of the USA, either. He had stopped voting for Finland’s conservative party Kokoomus. He had begun voting for Social Democratic politicians and, as Seppo once did, even a Left Alliance candidate.
These days, Gustav insisted, the Safety Case community is “all about market economics and competition,” with everyone trying to “advertise” their expertise to everyone else. He was displeased at how many experts today feel that their own work is of the utmost importance. If Seppo were still alive, Gustav explained, he too would dislike these trends. In the 1980s, Finland’s nuclear waste expert community felt, to Gustav, more “like brothers” or a “big family.” In his eyes, it used to be a band of “crusaders” working toward a “good and honest safety assessment” and nothing else. Gustav felt sick when he heard rumors of fellow VTT colleagues hiding research findings from one another, seeking only to advance their own careers. He was tired of today’s Safety Case experts self-servingly arguing for extensions to Posiva’s funding contracts. Their goal, he said, was to “keep the problem alive” by claiming again and again that still more research had to be done. Gustav lamented how the “spirit of our times” is “formalist” and “cosmetological”—lacking in substance.
Gustav once described Seppo as ugly. Another time he compared him to Stalin. But he missed Seppo’s willpower in “standing up” to the private consultants who, as he saw it, sought never-ending funding from Posiva. Before he died, Seppo was irked by Posiva’s decision to start modeling highly unlikely scenarios—such as the total failure of a copper canister, or the complete disintegration of a bentonite clay buffer. Seppo was displeased with how Posiva approached its transition from the 1990s’ static safety assessment models to the early 2000s’ time-dependent models. He spent his final years insisting that the models must be kept simple enough for a single talented scientific brain (like his) to understand them in their entirety. Like Seppo, Gustav did not want the Safety Case to become more bloated, costly, or mucked up by excessive documentation rules. One colleague noted how Seppo believed that the nuclear waste problem had already been solved. The only task left was to write reports explaining to “all the mentally retarded people” why Finland’s and Sweden’s repository designs made it a “piece of cake.” As Seppo’s computer screensaver used to read: “No More Research Is Needed.”
Gustav told me how Seppo’s past vision still inspires him to “be more aggressive with bullshit,” helping him muster the courage to speak out against those who he saw as degenerating the Safety Case. After one contentious meeting, a colleague looked to Gustav and asked, “Are you missing Seppo right now?” Gustav responded by criticizing the SafCa Group’s new corporate-managerial spirit. He cited Seppo’s “No More Research Is Needed” mantra. In these moments, Seppo’s specter drew Gustav to lobby for “another way—an old way, but also, potentially, an alternative way—of doing things.”9 Seppo’s vision became, for Gustav, an inspiration for prodding his colleagues, on his late boss’s behalf, to rethink the Safety Case’s direction. Through Gustav, Seppo’s influence helped steer Posiva’s deep time reckoning efforts, even after his passing.
Gustav still felt Seppo’s oversight over him. Once he half-joked to me that he sometimes imagined his late boss, sitting on a cloud in the sky, disgusted with the SafCa Group’s efforts. In Gustav’s daydream, Seppo begs God, “Please, give me a pistol, I will shoot myself!” God replies, “Seppo, you are already dead; that will not work.” Seppo then pauses and exclaims, “Then send me to Hell so I cannot watch this anymore.” Seppo had, to use the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s terms, a powerful “visor effect” over Gustav. He had feelings of being watched by Seppo’s judgmental gaze without being able to watch Seppo back.10 The late systems analyst’s watchful eye pressured him to perform. It controlled him even in death. Seppo’s influence left Gustav with a feeling of something-to-be-done11—a nagging “this aspect of this dataset on Olkiluoto’s hydrogeology needs to be more like that” or a judgmental “today’s models are unnecessarily complex.” These somethings-to-be-done called on Gustav to pursue his work in alternative ways. Seppo’s past vision for the Safety Case thereby shaped Gustav’s relationships with other experts, as well as his scientific work.
Echoes of Seppo’s sharp tongue and angry outbursts still rang in Gustav’s ears. He once loudly mimicked Seppo’s hollering “ARAGHGHH!!!!” when relating how Seppo in 1992 furiously told him that their scenarios about far future postglacial periods were “rubbish.” Gustav told Seppo he had thought the same thing, but that Seppo “was not the type of person you give advice to.” Gustav then did more supercomputer tests and printed out his findings. Seppo responded “ARAGHGHH!!!!” Another time, Gustav reenacted for me Seppo’s rage in 1995 after he discovered that Gustav had requested data from Finland’s state Game and Fishing Services unit without his permission. Gustav had been skeptical about the accuracy of certain modeling assumptions they had made about Finland’s far future fish and animal populations. Seppo angrily shouted at him, “Gustav, your job is to solve problems, not create them!” When I met him years later, Gustav still felt his workplace emotions and moods periodically agitated by the spell of Seppo’s past oversight. Colleagues joked that Gustav “deserves a medal” for working with Seppo for so long.
Yet Seppo haunted Gustav as both the cause and the solution to his problems. He channeled his late boss to both initiate and resolve workplace conflicts. Seppo was seen as intensely rational; he used to propose that, when scientific arguments begin to get out of hand, everyone should “put it on paper” before debating further. Writing down one’s logic and calculations can give each party time to clarify their positions and discover potential errors in their reasoning. After he died, Gustav started advocating this same practice among those working for him. He drew on Seppo’s scientific approach to try to elevate the Safety Case work, and the discussions surrounding it, to what he saw as a higher ground. Sometimes Gustav’s sentiments toward Seppo resembled the great ambivalence, documented by many anthropologists, that many of us feel toward the influence our ancestors, forebears, or dead elders have over us.12 Other times I worried that Gustav was weighed down by what philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called ressentiment.13 He seemed mired in the will of an idol-adversary from a frozen past. What was clear, though, was that many of the 2010s SafCa Group reforms that Gustav loathed were, ironically, sparked in part by lessons that Posiva learned from Seppo’s passing.
As the previous section explained, the predecessor parables that Safety Case experts told about Seppo’s death nudged Posiva to reconsider the risks associated with relying too much on a small handful of highly specialized mortal experts. This was seen as especially important when dealing with experts, like Seppo, who were reluctant to document the assumptions and methods underlying their calculations. Posiva responded to this by upping its documentation requirements and “knowledge management” oversight programs. This meant accelerating and expanding certain reforms that Seppo himself had, ironically, long despised. After Seppo passed away, Posiva started devoting entire sections of its reports to “transparently” describing its own uncertainties, “traceably” outlining its methodologies, and “conservatively” formulating many possible future scenarios. This included extremely pessimistic and unlikely scenarios. Posiva released new reports like Models and Data, which summarized how various models and datasets were made, how they linked together, and how their knowledge gaps could be filled. One informant called Models and Data the Safety Case’s “phonebook.” Its goal was to present both knowledge and uncertainties in accessible formats for Posiva’s many stakeholders. These stakeholders included STUK regulators, the Eurajoki community, international reviewers, the Finnish public, politicians, and civil servant experts in government ministries.
Gustav disliked this new paradigm. But it was in part inspired by memories of Seppo’s knowledge-hoarding. When Seppo died, Finland’s nuclear waste repository safety assessors’ old guard lost a fierce advocate. Gustav gritted his teeth as projects on Olkiluoto’s far future biosphere “exploded” with what he saw as expensive, unnecessary, excessive reportage. The biosphere models changed substantively too. Seppo’s 1999 safety assessment report presented models of generic ecosystems that could exist in many other locations globally. He used to criticize costly proposals to develop ecosystems models that are far more specific to Olkiluoto. Yet, by the time I began fieldwork, biosphere assessors were measuring local fish, monitoring the area’s forests, sonar-scanning sea bottoms, simulating Finland’s changing shoreline, and plotting out a food web of over fifty regional species. With Seppo no longer alive, Gustav lacked a strong ally to help him oppose these reforms.
At the same time, traces of Seppo’s past were also working against Gustav’s biosphere modeling agenda. Seppo’s volatility was part of what initiated the biosphere model’s transformation in the first place. Juha, a Safety Case expert in his thirties, described his early-2000s work to tirelessly master the Safety Case’s biosphere model as a reaction to Seppo’s inability to accept criticism. Seppo used to periodically highlight Juha’s inferior understanding of the safety assessment project as a whole. Juha’s tactic was to counter him by highlighting Seppo’s inferior understanding of its biosphere section. As time went on, Juha went “deeper and deeper into the mire.” He perfected the biosphere project as his own scientific “playground” where he had an edge over Seppo, not vice versa.
Today, Posiva’s biosphere model is expansive, complex, time-dependent, and site-specific. This complexity had its origins in a passion project that Juha hatched, in part, as a personal defense against Seppo’s irascibility. When Seppo died, room opened up for Juha to further assert his expertise. Gustav, still haunted by Seppo, would sometimes send barbs his way. But the barbs only motivated Juha to go deeper into the mire. With Seppo’s past derision haunting Juha, he worked intensely to expand the biosphere project. Some grew concerned about occupational burnout. Juha’s great ambition began to irk Gustav: a man who had adopted many aspects of the mentality of the man it was originally intended to irk. Trapped in Seppo’s vision and oversight—as both the reason and remedy for his workplace discontents—Gustav had not escaped Seppo’s hold over him.
Seppo’s story, at first blush, may seem so unique to Finland’s nuclear waste expert worlds that its relevance is limited to that community. This is not the case. Nuclear waste, weapons, and energy experts across North America, Western Europe, East Asia, and beyond have grappled with the problem of expert mortality. During my fieldwork, they were all in the midst of mass baby boom generation retirements and intergenerational transitions. This sparked widespread concerns about how unplanned-for retirement, outsourcing, downsizing, job transfer, death, or quitting can increase project instability. This instability can be amplified when an expert with “valuable and unique knowledge”—a “go-to” person like Seppo who “peers and management recognize” as someone “we can least afford to lose”14—is lost.
As an example, after American nuclear weapons designer Seymour Sack’s 1990 retirement and 2011 death, colleagues worried his departure could pose serious knowledge loss problems at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.15 Working in a context of national security secrecy, Sack mentored primarily through personal relationships. He did not leave behind detailed reports on his work.16 Like Seppo, Sack was hardly known outside his small circles of experts, but was renowned within them for his great competence, bluntness, and gruffness. He was a mortal beacon of scarce, rarefied, coveted nuclear expertise. Precautions had to be taken to ensure his knowhow outlasted his body’s death. Sack built nuclear weapons that could cause mass species extinction and irreversibly change the Earth’s environmental and human futures. Yet his fragile knowledge remained vulnerable to the fleetingness of a single human life.
The challenges that mortality poses to knowledge are alive outside nuclear communities as well. Corporate “key person” or “key employee” insurance plans are testament to this.17 A Finnish physicist once told me about a VTT computer scientist who was the only one who knew how to use a certain computer code. Before dying suddenly, he had not documented his work so “an outsider could continue with it.” This left his surviving colleagues with no choice but to abandon it and start developing a new code. They accepted “at least twenty years of experience wasted.” Similarly, when trying to get financial systems running again after 9/11, traders from a Manhattan securities firm strained to recall the names of deceased colleagues’ family members and vacation destinations. Their goal was to guess computer passwords that went to the grave with them.18 A program manager from a large American conservation NGO once told me a similar story about a state-level director who died suddenly in an avalanche. After the tragedy, it was difficult to continue a key real estate project without his knowledge of the deal’s moving parts and many relationships in the region. Unanticipated deaths like these can destabilize any corporate, government, or academic organization reliant on small teams of narrowly specialized experts who harbor rare-but-coveted knowledge that takes years to acquire.
Fortunately, however, all aspects of an expert’s, scientist’s, or intellectual’s contributions do not vanish upon his or her biological death. Seppo’s story was evidence of this. This is a phenomenon that anthropologists have long appreciated. Gregory Bateson once noted how, while Socrates the “bioenergetic individual” is dead, much of him still lives on to shape a “contemporary ecology of ideas.”19 Bruno Latour once argued that he dwells in the “continued” history of Louis Pasteur’s “network” every time he eats pasteurized yogurt.20 More recently, Dominic Boyer has explored how, although German philosophers such as Hegel may be dead, aspects of their thought are still alive among Germany’s media intellectuals.21
Seppo, of course, was not a famous theorist from decades, centuries, or millennia past. Nor was he globally renowned for introducing any grand idea, theory, or invention. But for the small teams working with him, he was indispensable. This made his influence outlast his body’s death. Many told predecessor parables about him. Some felt haunted by him. Remnants of his thinking patterns, his emotional outbursts, his outsized personality, his prolific skill, his vast knowledge, and his defiance of expert norms of politeness had powerful afterlives. These afterlives, my fieldwork experiences taught me, can carry with them useful lessons. They can inform other places where highly specialized knowledge becomes so valuable that it warrants meticulous preservation. This brings us back to this book’s main goal: to learn how to better cultivate, conserve, and circulate long-termist thought in order to mitigate the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise.
Deep time knowledge is vulnerable to the cessation of human life. It is alive, fragile, and scarce; it often takes decades to acquire. Societies seeking to preserve their deep time reckoning human capital can read stories like Seppo’s as cautionary tales. These stories can teach us about the challenge of supporting rare but essential teams of long-sighted experts who can lengthen our thinking’s timescales during the Anthropocene.
This book’s introduction criticized today’s societies’ meager reserves of highly trained long-term thinkers. It warned of a growing crisis of deflated enthusiasm for and lapsed faith in expert knowledge. It argued that these tides must be reversed if we are to avert planetary destruction. This must be done in a careful, practical, self-critical way. Learning from Seppo’s story can inspire a path forward: a vision of a world in which just one talented, passionate, devoted expert becomes remarkably valuable to a community that makes deep time learning its priority. This inclination to value, rely on, and preserve long-termist knowledge need not be local to an elite few in Europe’s far north. Appreciating the indispensability of skilled deep time reckoners like Seppo must be our grandest societal aspiration during the deflation of expertise. It must become a collective sensibility that we, as denizens of the Anthropocene, strive to attain. At the same time, however, Seppo’s story can also inspire us to more strategically mitigate any unsavory personality tendencies at work. This is crucial when deep time reckoners find themselves dealing with exceptionally talented colleagues who happen to be as irascible and combative as Seppo was. This chapter has also shown how toxic workplace relationships can obstruct long-termism.
Communities reliant on slow-to-acquire, sophisticated, scarce expert knowledge can be sources of learning as we work toward building more long-sighted societies. Many lessons can be gleaned from Seppo’s death. Seppo’s context was, after all, one in which the multimillennial time spans of nuclear waste risk, the intergenerational time spans of expert succession planning, and the fleeting time spans of a single expert life shared entwined fates. This temporal mashup has great relevance to the Anthropocene’s tangles of human and geological timescales. So, let’s scour the promises and perils of Seppo’s story for reckonings that can help expert communities better hedge against the risks of knowledge loss that expert mortality can pose.
The reckonings that follow ask: How can we brainstorm new programs and norms of professional engagement among communities of deep time reckoners—be they climatologists, paleontologists, philosophers, nuclear waste experts, biodiversity specialists, evolutionary biologists, historians, archaeologists, astrophysicists, or others—plus those working closely with them? Can tomorrow’s institutions more effectively preserve mortal, fragile deep time knowledge? How can organizations learn to better identify prolific deep time reckoners in their midst? How can the public realize these skills’ importance to the future of humanity? Must deep time reckoners receive special treatment that both grants them extra privileges and requires of them extra responsibilities? How can societies provide more positive reinforcement to support long-sighted experts, given how alien this supportiveness would be to today’s deflation of expertise?
Seppo’s death has shown why a deep time reckoning project with unique, irreplaceable personnel should never put all its eggs in one basket of a single leader or hotshot specialist. A multiexpert team like the SafCa Group can, we have seen, offer a better hedge against death’s unpredictability. It can distribute irreplaceable long-termist knowledge more widely by not clustering it into a centralized “choke point” person who is susceptible to untimely death.22 Given how valuable today’s deep time reckoners’ knowledge is to society at large, we should press the organizations that employ them to implement protocols requiring more decentralized networks of leaders.
Key deep time reckoners like Seppo ought to be strategically split up—put to work in separate offices or laboratories. Doing so could prevent irreversible damage to societies’ long-term thinking capacities if a catastrophe were to strike a location that would otherwise result in simultaneous group death among key deep time reckoners. Such crucial long-sighted teams should also never all fly on the same plane or ride in the same van or bus together. If they do, a single transportation accident could erase their deep time knowhow all at once. If key academic, corporate, or bureaucratic organizations are not interested in implementing these policies specific to deep time reckoners on their own, then voters could push for laws requiring them. After all, many top corporations limit the number of executives they allow to be on any given flight. Are CEOs, COOs, and CFOs really more valuable to society than highly trained deep time reckoners? These are, after all, the intellects we need most to save us from Anthropocene collapse.
A key expert’s volatile, controlling, or autocratic personality may be efficient in the short term. But it can threaten the long-term preservability of his or her knowledge. When vital long-sighted knowledge is at stake, colleagues must openly discuss personality volatility risks. This can be done in meetings behind the expert’s back at first, but eventually it must be to his or her face. Institutions must also develop policies for ensuring this expert cannot imprison his or her most valuable deep time knowledge in the solitary confinement of a single mortal brain.
There are plenty of precedents for policies like these in nuclear industry “knowledge management” programs.23 Such programs can be mined for techniques that can be adopted by organizations that employ long-term thinkers. For example, any talented deep time reckoner should document his or her knowledge in reports. He or she should groom protégés as successors. He or she should communicate openly with deputy experts in line to take over as replacements if he or she unexpectedly dies, retires, or leaves work. On-the-job mentoring relationships and face-to-face apprenticeships are needed to transmit long-termist intuitions to new generations. All deep time wisdom ought to be stored in databases too, with backups secured in multiple locales across the globe. Perhaps these storage systems could be informed by Finland’s nuclear regulator STUK’s long-term archives.
Seppo had some personality flaws; but he also showed how a strong-willed, talented, hardworking expert can be so influential, productive, and innovative that he or she brings more to the table than a whole handful of less passionate, less meticulous, follow-the-leader experts can. These prolific experts must be identified and made aware of the responsibilities that their privileged status entails.
In Sweden’s nuclear waste program, key soon-to-retire experts have been interviewed extensively to record and archive testaments. These testaments have detailed their knowledge and careers for the future experts who will succeed them. This is a good start; but, with a matter as grave as today’s need to better preserve deep time wisdom for humanity, it falls short. For one, it focuses too narrowly on key individuals and not the wider network of colleagues, ideas, technologies, administrative supports, funding streams, and scientific trainings that helped create, cultivate, and contribute to the exceptional individual’s achievements. To even scratch the surface of archiving a prolific deep time reckoner’s lifetime impact, dozens and dozens of associated colleagues and coworkers must be interviewed about the expert’s thinking. This is something I learned gradually as I conducted interview after interview about Seppo. To this end, organizations employing deep time reckoners can take cues from nineteenth- and twentieth-century “salvage anthropology” projects. These were efforts to collect artifacts, archive knowledge, and interview insiders of cultural groups with dwindling numbers. The aspiration was to preserve some of their precious ways and ideas before their last surviving members died or assimilated into other societies.
A key deep time reckoner’s knowledge must not be hoarded by any individual or organization. It must be conserved for posterity and disseminated widely across populations. Perhaps, then, the findings, forecasts, scenarios, ideas, models, interview recordings, meetings transcripts, and notebooks from deep time reckoners from many different sectors and fields should be archived. Their long-termist knowledge could be databased and backed up in an international information repository.
This global database could be made fully transparent online, just like Posiva’s information Databank or NAWG’s natural analogues Library archive. It would help communities of long-termist experts who are not usually in contact with one another to cross-pollinate their farsighted ideas. Each entry would also include an educational, plain-language description to help concerned citizens use it as a resource for their own long-termist learning. This would enable deep time knowledge to serve all sorts of alternative purposes not specific to the organizations that produced it (similar to how I am, in this book, repurposing a nuclear waste organization’s knowledge for anthropological purposes). The database could perhaps be overseen by UNESCO or a trusted NGO. Inspiration for it could be drawn from the nuclear energy industry’s worldwide failure analysis databases: searchable systems that collect and catalog malfunctions, accidents, and other learning-experience insights. These databases compile reports from many nuclear facilities across the world to assist future generations if similar problems arise later on.
Alongside new programs and policies, subtle shifts in deep time reckoners’ workplace cultures are necessary. While a predecessor expert (like Seppo) may be dead, that does not mean he or she is no longer shaping the knowledge, relationships, and values of successor experts (like Gustav, Rasmus, or Juha). As Gustav’s reassertion of Seppo’s “No More Research Is Needed” slogan demonstrated, predecessor experts’ past visions of the future can be usefully summoned into the present. This can shake up colleagues’ preconceptions about how to proceed with their scientific efforts, and it can introduce alternative perspectives into workplace debates.
Long-sighted institutions need to appreciate, as anthropologists long have, that a person’s biological death is not the same as a person’s social death.24 In the wake of the abrupt loss of an expert, surviving colleagues should be encouraged to pause and reflect. They could ask themselves: what aspects of the deceased expert’s knowledge and personality still live on through me and my work? Alternatively, they could set up workplace meetings in which experts self-scrutinize the parts of themselves that might be reflections of, contributions from, defense mechanisms against, or inspired by those of a lost deep time reckoner. Doing this in a group may be too difficult given the emotionally taxing nature of the tragic situation. In that case, experts could be encouraged to meditate on how a predecessor’s wisdom or weaknesses may still linger on in them. Personal intellectual exercises like these can provide surviving experts with a richer sense of how traces of the late expert can be most usefully channeled, conjured, or summoned during future troubleshooting moments.
Efforts to preserve vital patterns of long-term thinking must be supplemented with something more robust than formal knowledge management programs or databases. After all, what Seppo’s surviving colleagues retained from their past mentor included much more than the mere storage of technical information or the backing up of scientific findings. It spanned Seppo’s whole gamut of emotions, passions, relationships, personality quirks, and flaws. Traces of Seppo’s total person lingered on to shape my informants’ everyday office lives. This included damages that his sharp tongue and volatile temperament did to working relationships. Gustav, for example, was both inspired and haunted by Seppo’s ambiguous character. This affected how he performed, interacted, and thought, for many years after Seppo’s death.
Keeping these possibilities in mind, successor experts should be encouraged to reflect on which aspects of a past deep time reckoner were ultimately helpful versus damaging to their organization’s long-termism. Then they could work to overcome the predecessor’s faults by making mature determinations about which aspects of the lost expert to inherit or not inherit. This means adopting an ethic of succession stewardship: of responsibly selecting which aspects of a predecessor should be mimicked and replicated versus which should be discouraged and discarded. Each member of each new generation must see him- or herself as both (a) a mouthpiece for transmitting predecessors’ long-term thinking patterns and (b) a reformer ending the transmission of impediments to this long-termism. Adopting this principled ethic or code of action is essential to ensuring that experts’ deep time reckoning skills are sustained and refined across the generations.
1. Vincent Ialenti, “Death and Succession among Finland’s Nuclear Waste Experts,” Physics Today 70, no. 10 (2017).
2. M. Lincoln and L. Bruce, “Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 1 (2015): 191–220.
3. Seneca, Dialogues and Letters, trans. R. Campbell (London: Penguin Press, 1997).
4. M. Toth, “Toward a Theory of the Routinization of Charisma,” Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal 9, no. 2 (1971).
5. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California, 1978 [1922]).
6. Lamont Lindstrom, “Doctor, Lawyer, Wise Man, Priest: Big-Men and Knowledge in Melanesia,” Man 19, no. 2 (1984): 291–309.
7. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1843]).
8. Joel Robbins, “Where in the World Are Values? Exemplarity and Moral Motivation,” in Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life, ed. C. Mattingly, R. Dyring, M. Louw, and T. Wentzer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017).
9. This is a reference to anthropologist Kilroy-Marac’s ethnographic description of how French military psychiatrist Henri Collomb haunted Dakar, Senegal’s Fann Clinic. For more, see K. Kilroy-Marac, “Speaking with Revenants: Haunting and the Ethnographic Enterprise,” Ethnography 15, no. 2 (2014): 256, 266, 269.
10. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1993), 7.
11. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi.
12. See Igor Kopytoff, “Ancestors As Elders in Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 41, no. 2 (1971): 138; David Graeber, “Dancing with Corpses Reconsidered: An Interpretation of Famadihana,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 258.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003 [1887]).
14. International Atomic Energy Agency, “Knowledge Management for Nuclear Industry Operating Organizations,” IAEA-TECDOC-1510 (2006): 56–57, http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/te_1510_web.pdf.
15. Hugh Gusterson, “Taking RRW Personally,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 63, no. 4 (2007).
16. Hugh Gusterson, “A Pedagogy of Diminishing Returns: Scientific Involution across Three Generations of Nuclear Weapons Science,” Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. David Kaiser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 87.
17. J. Nicholson and R. Corbett, “Key Man Insurance and Market Reaction: A Comment,” Journal of Insurance Issues and Practices 10, no. 1 (1987).
18. D. Beunza and D. Stark, “The Organization of Responsiveness: Innovation & Recovery in the Trading Rooms of Lower Manhattan,” Socio-Economic Review 1 (2003).
19. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1972]), 467.
20. Bruno Latour, “On the Partial Existence of Existing and Non-Existing Objects,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 263.
21. Dominic Boyer, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
22. Charles Perrow, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
23. Michael Madsen, “The Challenge of Managing Nuclear Knowledge,” International Atomic Energy Agency (2014), https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/challenge-managing-nuclear-knowledge.
24. Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960 [1907]).