Ei ole mitään niin paljon kuin aikaa.
Nothing is so plentiful as time.
—Finnish proverb
How far have you traveled in time today? Your focus has likely been on the demands of the day, perhaps a deadline looming next week, a trip planned for a few months from now. Maybe a conversation sent your thoughts back to events that happened some years ago, or a Proustian aroma returned you momentarily to childhood. But has your mind ventured forward to the next decade, century, or millennium? Thinking about times to come—in anything more than the most generalized way—is hard work, both intellectually and emotionally. The future is an elusive abstraction we almost don’t believe in; looking straight at it requires us to confront our fears and anxieties, the possibility of misfortune, and the fact of our mortality.
In Deep Time Reckoning, Vincent Ialenti presents an anthropological investigation of a contemporary subculture in which peering many millennia into the future is an everyday activity: the Finnish “Safety Case” project, charged with imagining how geological, hydrological, ecological, and social factors might interact over tens of thousands of years in the area around an underground nuclear waste repository on the island of Olkiluoto.
In the manner of other ethnographers, Ialenti spent almost three years doing fieldwork among those working on the Safety Case, observing and interviewing them, documenting their individual and collective habits, and abstracting from all of his data a set of practical strategies for envisioning possible futures not for the sake of the Safety Case workers or edification of other ethnographers but for the rest of us mired in the present. Ialenti calls these strategies “reckonings,” a creative appropriation of a rather old-fashioned word that bears multiple meanings—calculation, struggle, verdict. His hope is that the techniques the Safety Case workers use to reckon with time may serve as templates for all humankind at this moment in history when long-term thinking is urgently needed.
Some of the Safety Case’s ways of visualizing the future are temporal inversions of methods that geologists use to reconstruct the distant past. For example, to interpret an ancient volcanic rock with a particular crystal texture, a geologist looks for modern analogues produced by active volcanoes. Similarly, many of the Safety Case experts develop future scenarios by studying past and present analogues—a Mesozoic copper deposit in mudstone in Devon becomes a stand-in for copper canisters to be buried in clay at the repository site; the behavior of glaciers in modern Greenland provides insights into what Olkiluoto might experience in a future ice age. Like geologists, members of the Safety Case team habitually and casually zoom in and out of timescales.
Ialenti emphasizes that the Safety Case approach is methodologically omnivorous, combining analogue studies with a web of interconnected quantitative models to create a suite of scenarios for “far future Finlands.” The Safety Case embraces “strategic redundancy”—integrating the logic of different fields to ensure that any one potentially inaccurate assumption does not invalidate the entire range of projections. This rigorous, multiscale interdisciplinarity is a refreshing counterpoint to the myopic, reductionist thinking that has produced many of the intractable environmental problems of the Anthropocene.
There is some irony in studying Finns as exemplars of future thinkers: as Ialenti points out, the Finnish language has no future tense. Instead, either present tense or conditional mode verbs are used, which seems a rather oblique way of speaking of times to come. But this linguistic treatment of the future may reflect a deep wisdom in Finnish culture that informs the philosophy of the Safety Case. Making declarative pronouncements about the future is imprudent; the best that can be done is to envisage a spectrum of possible futures and develop a sense for how likely each is to unfold.
Ialenti notes that another peculiarity of Finnish culture is the remarkably widespread trust in technical experts to make judicious decisions for the public good. Elsewhere in the world, a combination of class-based resentment, anti-intellectual populist political rhetoric, and internet-related dilution of authority have led to what Ialenti calls the deflation of expertise. In a profoundly hypocritical contradiction, the public that eagerly consumes new technologies increasingly rejects the results of science. Taken to its extreme, the deflation of expertise is nihilistic, the end of two centuries of Enlightenment belief in the power of rational thought to elevate humanity. We can only hope that outside Finland, distrust of all claims to specialized knowledge will soon be reversed, before lasting damage is done to the architecture of civilization.
While most of the lessons from the Safety Case are positive, some are cautionary tales. Ialenti dedicates an entire chapter to how the project nearly collapsed in 2005 when a brilliant but abrasive key expert in the project died unexpectedly, leaving cryptic records and simmering resentments with long half-lives. This story is a reminder of the tension between individual careers and collective work, the challenge of creating intellectual infrastructures that outlast any particular life span.
Ialenti acknowledges that implementing the deep time reckoning practices of the Safety Case in other contexts and cultures will not be easy. He suggests imaginative exercises—“calisthenics for the mind”—that may help us build our capacity for long-term thinking. His self-described radical optimism and dedication to intellectual resistance are restorative antidotes to the paralyzing pessimism so many of us feel when we dare to think about the future.
But if we don’t learn soon to reckon with time—to see ourselves in proper temporal proportion, to prepare intelligently for our impending trip to the future—our time of reckoning will come. As the Finnish writer Henrik Tikkanen (1924–1984) wrote, “Because we don’t think about future generations, they will never forget us.”
Marcia Bjornerud
Lawrence University
October 2019