The word has been out for decades: we were born on a damaged planet careening toward environmental collapse. Yet our intellects are poorly equipped to grasp the scale of the Earth’s ecological death spiral. We strain to picture how, in just a few decades, climate change may displace entire populations. We struggle to envision the fate of plastic waste that will outlast us by centuries. We fail to imagine our descendants inhabiting an exhausted Earth worn out from resource extraction and devoid of biodiversity. We lack frames of reference in our everyday lives for thinking about nuclear waste’s multimillennial timescales of radioactive hazard. These environmentalist indictments are well rehearsed. Their truths have been spoken to power. Yet our societies, institutions, and intuitions still have not been refashioned to meaningfully think hundreds, dozens, or even a few generations ahead. We need escape routes for breaking out of our shortsighted mental strictures, yet here we are:
Timespans ranging from a few months to a few years determine most formal planning and decision-making—by corporations, governments, non-governmental organisations and international bodies. Quarterly reporting by companies; electoral cycles of 18 months to seven years; planning horizons of one to five years: these are the usual temporal boundaries of our hot, crowded, and flattened little world. In the 1980s, this myopic vision found a name: short-termism.1
Some say we have entered a new epoch called the Anthropocene: a new phase in the Earth’s history ushered in by our species’ own transformations of our planet’s climate, erosion patterns, extinctions, atmosphere, and rock record. If this is true, then humans are now a telluric force of nature—agents of not just ecological but also geological change.2 In this setting, the question is how to become more open to deeper timescales;3 the challenge is to learn to inhabit a longer now.4 But intellectually, we are stuck—gridlocked by failures of futurological imagination:
Today, we know our Sun is one of one hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is itself one of at least one hundred billion other galaxies. But despite these hugely stretched conceptual horizons—and despite our enhanced understanding of the natural world, and control over it—the timescale on which we can sensibly plan, or make confident forecasts, has become shorter. … There’s an institutional failure to plan for the long-term and to plan globally.5
This book, I hope, is one tiny step up the mountain before us. Its contention is simple. Gazing into deep time is no longer just for geologists, theologians, paleontologists, astrophysicists, archaeologists, climate scientists, or evolutionary biologists. It is our collective responsibility. Now more than ever, we need the courage to accept our responsibilities as our planet’s and descendants’ caretakers—millennium in and millennium out—without cowering before the magnitude of our challenge. We need new ways of living, thinking, and understanding our relationships with the Earth’s radical long-term. We cannot deny the gloomy reality that from “the perspective of millions of years, the duration of our lived experience, of ‘our time,’ appears utterly inconsequential.”6 We cannot feel paralyzed by the “seeming insignificance of human purposes within the immense time-span of the universe.”7 If humans are agents of geological change, then thinking in geological timescales is now a pressing ethical imperative. We must learn to learn more and more about the Earth’s distant futures and pasts.
Some have already embraced deep time learning. San Francisco’s Long Now Foundation is developing a mechanical clock to keep time for ten thousand years to help reframe the way people think and embody deep time. The Finnish Society of Bioart’s “Deep Time of Life and Art” project has organized public trips to ancient paintings found on 550-million-year-old rocks located atop Finnish Lapland’s two-billion-year-old bedrock. New Zealand’s “A Walk through Deep Time” project has led people along a 457-meter farm fence, meant to represent 4.57 billion years of the Earth’s history. They invited geologists, astronomers, biologists, physicists, Maori matauranga practitioners, philosophers, and artists to encourage reflection on the Earth’s deeper history. Academic institutes like Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and Cambridge’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk have grappled with human extinction scenarios. My former academic home base, Cornell University, has offered an archaeology course that challenged students to imagine the campus as it might look one thousand years from now. The US National Academy of Science has hosted an exhibit called “Imagining Deep Time.” Timely books on deep time have recently been published: physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford’s Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates across the Millennia, historian Martin Rudwick’s Scenes from Deep Time, historian Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, and nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey, to name a few.8
Deep Time Reckoning approaches these problems a bit differently. I am a cultural anthropologist. I believe the best way to study human relationships is to venture out into the field, meet and interact with people, and try to understand their worlds on their terms. This holds for intergenerational relationships between societies across the millennia, as well. Like many anthropologists before me, I am curious about how different communities grapple with different spans of time, and its past and future horizons. Back in the 1930s, anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard called this “time-reckoning.”9 Studying how people approach time’s intervals, scales, and durations can reveal how people understand themselves.10 That is why, from 2012 to 2014, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Finland’s nuclear waste disposal experts. This community grappled with deep time on a regular basis.
Nuclear experts routinely deal with long-lived radioactive isotopes. Uranium-235 has a half-life of over seven hundred million years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years. Doing fieldwork among Finland’s nuclear waste professionals, I discovered a world in which mind-bending visions of far future bodies, societies, and environments figure into everyday office routines, policymaking considerations, government and industry plans, and regulatory rules. Along the way, I struggled to come to terms with a seemingly absurd proposition: that these experts could—over the span of several decades—develop increasingly credible forecasts of far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, animal populations, floods, landscape shifts, and more.
When I arrived in Finland, the Finnish nuclear waste management company Posiva was developing what, in the 2020s, will likely become the world’s first operating underground disposal repository for high-level nuclear waste. This facility was being built deep in Western Finland’s granite bedrock, below the island of Olkiluoto in the Gulf of Bothnia. The Gulf of Bothnia is located in the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea. Posiva’s underground vault was slated to be the final resting place for burying Finland’s two commercial nuclear power plants’ used-up—or “spent,” to use the industry jargon—nuclear fuel. Posiva was also, at the time, in the process of submitting a repository safety assessment report, called a “Safety Case,” to the country’s nuclear regulatory authority Säteilyturvakeskus (STUK). STUK is the Finnish government’s nuclear energy sector overseer and technical rule maker.
The Safety Case’s purpose was to convince STUK that the Olkiluoto repository would not pose significant environmental or health risks to future populations. To demonstrate this, Posiva’s Safety Case experts worked to forecast the interacting geological, hydrological, and ecological conditions that might surround the repository over the coming tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. Intrigued by their Promethean task, I made it my mission to explore how Safety Case experts hashed out relationships between the living societies of the present and the unborn societies imagined to dwell in very distant futures.
For me, the Safety Case became more than just a portfolio of technical evidence supporting Posiva’s license application for government permission to construct a geologic repository. It became a window into far future Finlands. I began to realize that the unique tome was chock-full of ideas, strategies, and inspirations for refining how we can better relate to our planet’s yesterdays and tomorrows. As denizens of an Earth wracked by ecological crisis, this is our most crucial task. The Safety Case made me wonder: What sort of scientific ethos are Finland’s nuclear waste experts adopting in their daily reckonings with seemingly unimaginable spans of time? Have Safety Case experts’ efforts to simulate and model distant future ecosystems and geosystems affected how they understand the world and humanity’s place within it? What lessons can they offer us in a historic moment some call the Anthropocene? Can learning about their findings help us grow into more skilled deep time reckoners ourselves? If so, how? If not, why not?
To answer these questions, I did not have to take everything the Safety Case experts told me at face value. I did not have to agree with all their opinions, advocate for or against nuclear power, or even believe all their claims about far future Finlands. But I did have to take a small leap of faith. I had to extend some guarded trust that their years of work had left them with a more sophisticated understanding of possible future worlds than I could find in people who had not done the same. I had to listen to the experts carefully, giving them a little leeway and space for explaining themselves. I had to resist any urge to roll my eyes at their multimillennial plans, without first giving them the time of day. Undertaking this anthropological thought experiment was not always easy. I had to learn how to place a measured, self-reflective, cautious faith in the Safety Case experts’ deep time knowledge.
But it paid off. I returned from Finland confident that Safety Case expertise can provide guidance for those who seek to transcend rampant shortsightedness. Life today, for many of us, feels frenzied. Computers and tech gadgets require updates at least every few years, if not months. Smartphone fixation distracts minds from long-term contemplation. Throwaway consumerism favors the production of many cheap disposable goods over fewer moderately priced durable goods. Hedge fund managers use computer programs that make financial decisions in seconds or less. They work in digitized global marketplaces and stock exchanges that move even faster. Flexible employment structures, the “gig economy” of contract-based temporary labor, the rise of automation, and “sharing economy” platforms like Uber leave millions anxious about near-term job insecurity. They worry about uncertain future earnings, savings, and benefits. The boom-bust-or-buyout tempos of startup companies are increasingly rapid. Fashion, music, television, and movie trends remain notoriously fickle. And all of this applies only to those with relatively decent standards of living. Billions across the world are confined to even more precarious short-terms: living without ample paychecks or, in more dire conditions, fighting day-to-day to secure shelter, safety, and their next meals.11
The Safety Case experts’ long-termism runs counter to all of this. In this book, I argue that their techniques must be broadcast far beyond nuclear expert communities. I suggest that this can help us resist shallow time discipline: the powerful cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that interact to fix our attentions on the radical short-term. Today’s grandest challenges can be tackled only by taking a longer view. A 2017 United Nations report predicted that the Earth’s population will reach 8.5 billion people by 2030, 9.7 billion people by 2050, and 11.2 billion people by 2100.12 How can these future people be fed, clothed, and housed across decades, centuries, and millennia without vastly ramping up ecological destruction? Species now die out at rates many ecologists say constitute a sixth major planetary extinction event. How can we prevent this irreversible species loss and ensure sustainable life far into the future? A 2018 United Nations report forecasted that 68 percent of people will live in urban areas by 2050.13 Can architects, engineers, urban planners, computer scientists, and infrastructure builders design smarter cities to adapt to this influx? How might human-induced climate change throw a wrench in their plans? Will tomorrow’s supermassive cities become dusty archaeological sites for societies five thousand years from now? Or will our species go extinct long before then?
To begin answering these Anthropocene questions, we must first open our ears to the world’s most long-sighted experts. This includes rather obscure experts, like Finland’s Safety Case community. That may, at first blush, sound obvious. But such openness to expertise is at odds with another dire global crisis welling up alongside the Anthropocene. For the purposes of this book, I’ll call it the deflation of expertise. Today, we are witnessing a rising global skepticism of technocratic knowledge, liberal arts education, scientific research on the environment, and even the very possibility of there being verifiable facts, truth, or a single shared reality out there. In many countries, “experts are increasingly skeptical about publics” and vice versa, as the “bargain” long made between them is “rapidly unraveling.”14 New nationalist and populist movements, on both the political left and right, increasingly challenge the basic notion that “expertise confers legitimacy.”15
Scientific research may be more sophisticated than ever before. But too often it fails to capture hearts, minds, and imaginations. In this setting, I ask: how could Finland’s Safety Case experts dare to offer such ambitious visions of the Earth’s far future at a time when populists energize publics around the globe by flagrantly mocking the sober, restrained, often drab voice of the technocrat? How could their confidence in scientific inquiry remain insulated from today’s widespread rejections of the mild mannered, meticulous, sometimes pretentious voice of the researcher? How could they persist in their efforts to reckon deep time—unperturbed by the chirping Twitter pundits and lay bloggers who so often drown out the cautious voice of the expert? Is there something unique about the Safety Case experts or Finland’s approach to expertise more generally? How could the Safety Case experts plod forward so steadily—undeterred by this growing, worrying, global intellectual crisis?
During the Anthropocene, the silence of complacent experts can be as dangerous as the speeches of any political demagogue. During the deflation of expertise, experts cannot remain fearful of the world outside or cloistered in hidebound ivory towers. But today, many experts who do try to rock the boat—engaging publicly with issues of mass survival—simply fail to make waves. Long-sighted scientists need more platform, visibility, and influence. At the same time, our long-termist learning cannot only be about collecting and synthesizing data from the natural sciences. We need anthropology’s spirit of holistic thinking to help us break free from our narrow information silos and echo-chambers. Anthropology can expand our worldviews by helping us figure out where people with whom we disagree are coming from, why they believe what they believe, and how we can learn from their learning. It can remind us that “regardless of what and who we are, we, as individuals and as a society, can dwell in the world in a completely different way from the way we dwell in it at any given moment.”16
So, I write this book as an exposition of sorts. Chronicling ways that my fieldwork transformed my worldview, it demonstrates Safety Case expertise’s power to help us reckon deeper futures and pasts. Pushing back against the deflation of expertise, it advocates a spirit of adventurous learning: of actively seeking out scientifically informed knowledge while embracing an anthropologically informed openness to careful, skeptical, critical listening. This book, then, should not be read as an academic treatise for scholars. It is, rather, a practical toolkit for educated publics, expert and lay alike. I have named the tools in this kit “reckonings.” Five or six can be found at the ends of each chapter. They offer open-ended takeaway guidance that I leave behind each step of the way, as I follow Safety Case experts into far future Finlands. Feel free to pick them up and build on them yourself. They are not, after all, difficult instructions telling anyone how to think or act. They are suggested starting points for orienting others in embarking on learning-journeys of their own.
This book’s core goal is to encourage as many people as possible to do two things: (1) to pursue independent, expert-inspired, long-termist learning themselves, and (2) to support the highly trained, too-often-ignored, long-termist experts already in our midst. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the first mission. They walk through mental exercises, thought experiments, and intellectual workouts anyone can do to stretch one’s thinking more widely across time. I have derived these brainstorming pathways from my fieldwork among Finland’s Safety Case experts. The premise is that, as intellectual and ecological crises take hold, all long-termist knowledge is potentially valuable. We all have something to teach and something to learn. This does not mean that all arguments are equally valid. All information is, of course, not equally accurate. However, digesting many different perspectives—including seemingly irrational, repugnant, or misinformed perspectives—can help us attain more mature, textured, sophisticated worldviews. This spirit of curiosity can help experts and laypeople alike embrace long-termist learning and navigate today’s uncertain tomorrows.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on our second mission. They seek to bolster the special position that long-termist expertise deserves in society today. The question is how to better support long-sighted experts in cultivating, preserving, and disseminating their deep time knowledge. Inspired by the Safety Case community, the chapters’ reckonings ask: How can societies empower highly trained, long-sighted experts as their future-gazing guides? How can today’s shortsighted private companies, government agencies, NGOs, and universities more fully embrace long-termist learning? Can organizations that employ deep time reckoning experts adopt new policies, programs, and workplace norms to better put their talents into the service of preventing Anthropocene collapse? Can these initiatives help us work against the deflation of expertise by making long-termist expertise more salient among skeptical publics, media pundits, and politicians? Could this help bring deep time thinking closer to the center of societal decision making?
So, that is Deep Time Reckoning in a nutshell. But before we set out and start reckoning, it is important that we first take some time to dig deeper into the broader context behind the Safety Case experts’ efforts. We’ll spend the rest of this introductory chapter collecting background details about the Safety Case community’s lifeways, plus the far future Finlands they reckoned. Doing so will give us a clearer view of our case study’s bigger picture. Once that is all laid out, I will return to describing the dual crises of the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise in greater detail. This will help us take a step back and reflect on this book’s general approach to expertise, technology, and scientific knowledge. At that point, we will be properly outfitted to embark upon our trek into Finland’s tomorrows. But, first, some background to the future.
For thirty-two months from 2012 to 2014, I lived in Finland. A parliamentary republic of around 5.5 million people, Finland is the most sparsely populated country in the European Union. By area, it is slightly smaller than Germany, slightly larger than Poland. Sweden is to its west, Russia to its east, Estonia to its south, Norway to its north. Finland borders the Gulf of Bothnia, the Gulf of Finland, and the Baltic Sea. It is a highly industrialized, mostly free-market economy with a high per capita GDP and an extensive Nordic welfare state. About 90 percent of its population speak Finnish as their first language. Just over 5 percent are part of Finland’s Swedish-speaking linguistic minority. Finland is also home to Saami, Roma, Estonian, and Russian minorities, plus refugee populations from Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It is known for its telecommunications, electronics, metals, wood, engineering, electronics, clean tech, and information technology industries. About 30 percent of Finland’s energy production comes from its domestic nuclear power plants.
To conduct fieldwork, I took Finnish language courses, immersed myself in Northern European life, conversed with Safety Case experts in person, read their technical reports, and heard out their critics. I visited them at work and grabbed coffee, lunch, or drinks with them whenever possible. We discussed life in Finland, what captured their imaginations at work, how they organized their time, and how their time was organized for them.17 I picked their brains about how they grappled with futures near and deep. I chatted with physicists, engineers, geologists, mathematicians, hydrologists, artists, computer modelers, industry lobbyists, managers, chemists, finance professionals, activists, lawyers, politicians, academics, and others. I ended up recording 121 interviews with people who worked on or had something special to say about Finland’s nuclear energy and waste initiatives.
My fieldwork informants worked at Finland’s nuclear regulatory authority STUK, the nuclear waste company Posiva, the Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT), the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK), engineering consultancy Saanio & Riekkola Oy, lobbying association Confederation for Finnish Industries, clay technologies consulting firm B+Tech, Finland’s Parliament (Eduskunta), Aalto University, Greenpeace, lobbying association Finnish Energy Industries, Friends of the Earth, power companies Fennovoima, TVO, and Fortum, the general public, and elsewhere.18 Some worked on the Finnish Research Programme on Nuclear Waste Management, which oversaw the country’s nuclear waste knowledge base. In this book, I mask my informants’ identities with pseudonyms. Preserving research subjects’ anonymity is a common practice among anthropologists working with sensitive or personal situations.
When I moved to Finland, Posiva had already dug a four-kilometer access tunnel deep under Olkiluoto, which led down into a subsurface lab called Onkalo (Finnish for “cavity” or “hollow”). Onkalo researchers provided Safety Case experts with information about Olkiluoto’s underground conditions. Onkalo was to be renovated into a repository and expanded to a depth of about 400 to 450 meters. At the time, the plan was to make space for storing up to 9,000 tons of radioactive waste—though, more recently, the facility’s initial capacity was lowered to 6,500 tons. Posiva planned to bury Finland’s spent fuel “bundles” there. By late 2015, Finland’s nuclear reactors had left behind around 13,500 of them. The bundles contained over 2,000 tons of uranium, plus fission products like cesium, iodine, and technetium.19 Posiva’s plan was to slide the bundles into tube-shaped cast iron “insert” containers. They would then seal the inserts inside large copper canisters at a nearby encapsulation plant. Once placed in one of the repository’s underground holes, the canisters would be surrounded by an absorbent bentonite clay. The clay would serve as a “buffer” between the canisters and bedrock. This repository approach, known as KBS-3, was mostly derived from Swedish nuclear waste company SKB’s designs. Still, Posiva’s repository was expected to open for business first, sometime in the 2020s. After almost one hundred years of burial operations, the tunnel would be backfilled, sealed off, and decommissioned around 2120.
In the meantime, Finland stored its spent nuclear fuel bundles in temporary cooling pools near the two power plants that generated them. One of the plants is owned by the Finnish energy company Fortum, located in the Loviisa municipality on Finland’s southern coast. Loviisa’s two reactors were turned on in 1977 and 1980, respectively. Fortum owns 40 percent of Posiva. Another plant is owned by the Finnish nuclear power company Teollisuuden Voima Oyj (TVO), located next to Posiva’s repository site on the island of Olkiluoto in Western Finland’s Eurajoki municipality. TVO’s two reactors were turned on in 1979 and 1982, respectively. TVO owns 60 percent of Posiva. TVO’s and Fortum’s spent fuel needs to cool in the pools for about forty years for its radioactivity and heat to fall to levels suitable for encapsulation and burial. Since 1983, Finland’s national policies have required companies that generate spent nuclear fuel to take responsibility for managing and disposing it. When I left the country in late 2014, Finland’s State Nuclear Waste Management Fund had accumulated over 2.3 billion euros from the annual fees that TVO and Fortum had paid into it over the years. This fund, mandated by Finland’s 1987 Nuclear Energy Act and overseen by its Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, supports the work of Posiva.
Within Finland’s nuclear waste management community, the Safety Case experts’ mission was straightforward. They were to develop evidence-driven methods for convincing Finland’s famously strict nuclear regulator STUK that any exposures delivered to future populations would be safely below the country’s legal limits—including populations living tens and hundreds of thousands of years from now. Once STUK approved Posiva’s Safety Case, Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment would issue Posiva a construction license for the facility. The Safety Case experts worked to forecast whether and how radionuclides could someday escape from the repository, travel through underground rock fractures and groundwater channels, get released at various points on Western Finland’s surface, and then disperse in aboveground ecosystems—bioaccumulating, at times, in plants and animals along the way. Their big question was whether a release could expose human or nonhuman lifeforms in the Olkiluoto region to radiological risks, in unlikely far future scenarios.
To develop their portfolio, some Safety Case experts prepared reports with titles like Climate Scenarios for Olkiluoto on a Time-Scale of 120,000 Years. Others examined how the coming Ice Age’s potentially three-kilometer thick ice cover could affect the facility 50,000 or 60,000 years from now. They envisioned postglacial seismic events that could occur as the ice sheet melts and retreats. Some researched whether groundwaters of various chemical compositions could corrode the repository’s KBS-3 “engineered barrier system.” Others simulated Western Finland’s lakes, rivers, mires, and forests sprouting up, disappearing, and changing shape and size over the next 10,000 years. They considered future soil erosion, floods, and fires. Some experts made computer models of how the Olkiluoto island site will eventually become an inland site. They modeled how Finland’s shoreline will widen further into sea, continuing to rebound upward in elevation. It has been doing so since the retreat of the previous Ice Age’s glacial ice sheet. This process of land “uplift” will eventually engulf Olkiluoto into Finland’s mainland.
Other Safety Case experts investigated questions such as: What complications could the decaying radioactive waste’s heat pose to the repository’s long-term performance? At what rate will Posiva’s copper canisters and cast iron inserts corrode underground? What will the effects of far future permafrost be? How will the coming Ice Age’s glacial ice cover affect the repository? What about the potential seismic activity slated to occur once the ice sheet melts? What role will anthropogenic climate change play in all of this?
Appreciating the ordinary details of the Safety Case experts’ lives was key to establishing relationships of trust between anthropologist and informant. This meant considering how some were grandparents, others divorcees, others aloof loners, others rambunctious partygoers, while still others had recently become parents. One physicist in his fifties was training for an iron man endurance competition. Some spent summers crunching numbers in their office. Most enjoyed time in the Finnish countryside at their family’s kesämökki (“summer cottage”). One’s daughter had a pet hedgehog named Nipsu. Another decorated the wall near his desk with images of his Finnish Lapphund he printed off from his computer. One read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Another read works by Bruno Latour, Mary Douglas, Ulrich Beck, Alice Munro, and Marcel Proust. A security guard at a building housing a research nuclear reactor was a fan of the late-1980s early 1990s action-adventure television series MacGyver. In their childhoods, two experts, both geologists today, dreamed of someday becoming archaeologists. A high-status regulatory expert grew up fascinated by what she saw as the more ecologically attuned lifeways of Native Americans. A geologist went boxing with her daughter on Tuesdays to keep her arms, back, and shoulders moving after hunching over her computer all day. It took a village to make far future Finlands appear.
With our rapport established, Safety Case experts began showing me how they wove together powerful visions of far future Ice Ages, seismic events, erosion processes, human and animal populations, and climate changes. Our open-ended conversations were often speculative and philosophical in spirit. They taught me how to see deep time through their eyes, and drew me to reimagine how the Earth might look a decade from now, a century from now, millennia from now, and even millions of years from now. They taught me how to reckon deep time not as a matter of sci-fi futurism or navel-gazing rumination, but as a practical labor of regulatory science, government policy, and corporate planning.
Moving forward with my thought experiment, I began to ask: Could it be that nuclear waste disposal experts—long approached with skepticism by environmentalists and critical academics like me—are developing among the best resources for stretching our intellects into ever more distant futures? Could repository safety assessments inspire us to extend our intellectual horizons further forward and backward across time? What if their forecasts were translated from drab calculations and technocratic jargon into more lively and accessible prose? Could opening ourselves to deep time in ways inspired by Finland’s Safety Case experts motivate positive change in our ways of living on a damaged planet? Could societies opening themselves to expert-inspired, long-termist learning help us counteract the deflation of expertise?
To begin answering these questions, we must first think in terms of a bigger picture about Safety Case expertise’s broader implications. So, with Finland’s nuclear waste repository project in mind, let’s return to the Anthropocene. This is, after all, the key historical setting that makes embracing deep time learning all the more essential.
The Anthropocene is, as I write, not (yet) a formal interval of geological history. But the idea behind it is not new.20 The view that humanity has affected the Earth so profoundly that it has become a formidable geological force has gained considerable ground. The atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize–winner Paul Crutzen revived the Anthropocene concept in 2000, advocating for it at an International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme conference in Mexico.
In 2012, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) established an Anthropocene Working Group to vet the proposal, and in 2019, the taskforce voted to recognize it as a formal geological epoch that originated around 1950. However, it must surmount several more hurdles before the Anthropocene could ever be recognized as a formal epoch on the geological timescale: the official scientific chart for dividing our planet’s deep history into eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages. It first requires a supermajority of votes from both IUGS’ International Quaternary Subcommission and the International Commission on Stratigraphy. It also requires IUGS’ executive committee’s approval. It is often said that evidence must be found, in stone and sediment, indicating that far future stratigraphers will be able to look at the rock record below their feet and in the ocean beds to measure a clear break from the previous epoch. But paleontologist Jan Zalasiewicz, the chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, has said the question was less about detecting human influence in rock strata; for him, it was about revealing a fundamental, human-induced change in the Earth system.21
The Anthropocene idea, however unofficial, has already sparked lively scientific debates. Like Safety Case research, it can stretch our minds across time. One question is when it should be decided to have begun. Crutzen originally suggested the Anthropocene began in 1784 with the invention of the steam engine, which set into motion centuries of widespread fossil fuel addiction. In 2011, however, he and his colleagues proposed 1800 as a more logical start date. That is about when the Industrial Revolution became entrenched in Great Britain and elsewhere.22 Other start date proposals look to the Great Acceleration: the post–World War II explosion of automobiles, synthetic nitrate fertilizers, airplanes, population booms, international tourism, carbon emissions, nuclear arms race, leaded and concrete petroleum, plastics, global telecommunications, national GDPs, urbanization, energy use, water use, paper production, and so on. This data spike coincided neatly with another proposed start date: the 1945 advent of nuclear weapons testing, which dispersed new human-made radionuclides across the planet. The Anthropocene Working Group has seen the Atomic Age as offering far future stratigraphers a clear signature of materials that did not exist prior to humanity taking the helm as a geological force.23 Critics, however, worry that this nuclear origin story would let the Anthropocene’s primary driver, fossil fuels, off the hook too easily. Meanwhile, alternative start dates have been proposed: the mass extinctions of Pleistocene megafauna, the Neolithic Revolution’s advent of agriculture, and the European conquest of the Americas, to name a few.
The Anthropocene idea has sparked long-sighted debates among social scientists and humanities scholars. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the Anthropocene dissolves the long-standing divide between the “natural” history of our planet and the “human” history of peoples, merging them into a single “geo-history.”24 He has noted that scholarship on postcolonialism, theories of globalization, and Marxist critiques of capitalism scarcely prepared him to grasp this geo-history’s significance. Literature scholar Timothy Morton has cast the Anthropocene as emerging from the “logistics of agriculture” that arose in the Fertile Crescent ten millennia ago.25 Anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour has argued that the Anthropocene idea bypasses the modern divide between nature as a stable, slow, external setting in which culture—our human dramas and lifeways—is imagined to take place. As a result, in the Anthropocene, when one encounters a “natural” phenomenon like a waterfall or soil, one also encounters anthropos—the human—and vice versa. This postnature condition, Latour argues, makes politics and science “assume a totally different shape” that calls for them to no longer be seen as opposed to one another.26 This blurs boundaries between the social and natural sciences.27 Sociologist Nikolas Rose has called for a “critical friendship” between the social and life sciences.28 In the Anthropocene, collaborations between anthropologists and long-sighted hard scientists like Finland’s Safety Case experts are essential.
So, the Economist’s 2011 proclamation “Welcome to the Anthropocene” was certainly premature. But the idea has proven worthy of serious attention. In this book, I take it as an impetus for population-wide, expert-driven, long-termist learning. This is a crucial mission even if the Anthropocene is never inaugurated as an official epoch. The multiple, enormous, overlapping environmental crises that the idea has pulled together under a single umbrella are reason enough for embracing a sea change in how we reckon with futures and pasts. However, if humans are judged to be agents of geological change, then the value of better syncing our everyday thought patterns with deeper timescales may become clear to thousands, millions, or even billions more.
To achieve all this, though, we must face a sobering reality. Thinking about deep time is extraordinarily new for us; our task will not be easy. Even the most highly educated scientists are, historically speaking, rookies at it. For Europeans in the Middle Ages, the whole cosmos of human history covered only a few short millennia, from the Earth’s creation to its prophesied apocalyptic end.29 Until the nineteenth century, most Westerners assumed the world began only a few thousand years ago. The year 4004 BCE was widely seen as the biblical dawn of time, as defined by Irish Archbishop James Ussher.30
Since then, Sigmund Freud has described what he saw as modern science’s three most humbling revolutions for humanity. This first was Copernicus’s sixteenth-century revelation that our planet is not the center of the universe (which led scientists to realize that the Earth is a minuscule speck among countless other celestial bodies). The second was Darwin’s nineteenth-century theory of evolution (which placed the human species within, not above, the animal kingdom). The third was Freud’s own nineteenth-century discovery of unconscious psychological drives (which showed humans to be far less rational than previously assumed). In 1987, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould suggested we should add a fourth humbling revolution to the list: the rise of the geological sciences. The geologic timescale relegated the whole human story to a tiny moment in the deeper history of our planet. This revolution in time reckoning is often attributed to James Hutton’s 1780s book Theory of the Earth or Charles Lyell’s 1830s book Principles of Geology. The jury is still out on whether human societies have processed these profound insights—whether we have truly come to grips with our profound insignificance.
Yet, even as we take this hard look in the mirror, we must not approach the Anthropocene idea uncritically. Social scientists and humanities scholars have criticized Anthropocene advocates for implying that a single unified humanity is to blame for centuries of environmental devastation. After all, what does one really mean by saying that “humanity” is now a geological force, given that paleohistory, microbiology, biochemistry, and other fields define “human” so differently?31 Can Homo sapiens as a whole really be blamed when one US citizen emits more carbon into the atmosphere than five hundred citizens of Ethiopia or Burundi? If 19 million New York State residents consume more energy than 900 million from sub-Saharan Africa, why lump them all into the same basket?32 Why not call out capitalism as a culprit by renaming the Anthropocene the Capitalocene?33 Or call out the one-percenters by renaming it the Oliganthropocene?34 Given that mostly white, mostly male Western humans originally adopted the steam engine, why not call it the Chthulucene—referencing H. P. Lovecraft’s “misogynist racial-nightmare monster”?35 Finally, does presenting the Anthropocene as a new revelation let past polluters off the hook too easily? They have, after all, systematically ignored environmental warnings from the nineteenth century and before.36
These critiques are valid. However, my goal is not to hype up the world-historical significance of the Anthropocene. Nor is it to pull the rug out from under it by pointing out the very real baggage that comes with it—as important as tasks these are. My aim is simply to stress that, regardless of who got us into this ecological mess, the Anthropocene idea can inspire, agitate, or compel virtually anyone to cultivate their deep time thinking skills. This is a good thing. So, when I use the pronoun “we” in this book, I refer not to humanity’s undifferentiated everyone. My “we” refers, simply, to anyone who finds oneself seeking a longer-term perspective at a time when so many social scientists, journalists, natural scientists, humanities scholars, museum curators, and others find fascination in deep time. This “we” refers to anyone who wishes to better sync their thinking with deep, geological, Anthropocene timescales. It refers to anyone who wishes to resist the deflation of expertise by promoting greater societal openness to long-termist learning.
This book uses the word “reckoning” in a few different ways, too. It draws from its multiple dictionary definitions. The first refers to what the Safety Case experts did: how they reckoned deep time by calculating, estimating, and drawing conclusions about far future Finlands. The second refers to what I do: I reckon with the Anthropocene planetary crisis and the deflation of expertise intellectual crisis by concluding each chapter with reckonings: “opinions or judgments,” “ways of thinking,” and “considerations” about how we can better foster long-termism. The third definition refers to the general spirit of my anthropological thought experiment: a “settlement,” or even indictment, of “past mistakes or misdeeds” done to our planet by people that came before us. This book is, in this sense, a reckoning with legacies of the past.
With these reckonings in mind, let’s dig a little deeper into the Safety Case experts’ professional culture. We now have a richer sense of the Anthropocene as a backdrop to this case study. So, let’s meet a Finnish nuclear waste expert and learn more about how and why he grapples with deep timescales. This will help us better understand his expert community’s approach to creating futurological knowledge. It will also help us appreciate the nuances of Safety Case experts’ scientific sensibilities before we return to exploring the deflation of expertise in greater detail.
It was summertime in Helsinki in 2013. I was sipping coffee in an office with Risto, a computer modeling expert involved with Posiva’s Safety Case projects. When Risto spoke, he strung his sentences together carefully and methodically. His tone was calm, warm, and straightforward. He wore a simple, casual, dark-colored collared shirt to work. He recounted a childhood memory to me. Risto remembered sitting outside, decades ago. He was watching an ant repeatedly trying to climb up a ridge of mud formed by a human bootprint in the ground. The ant kept climbing up, falling down, trying to climb up again, falling down, ad nauseam. Risto was never sure whether the ant ultimately made it. Yet he was struck by two things. The first was the Sisyphean ant’s tenacity in ceaselessly trying to surmount what should have been, perhaps like the Safety Case’s efforts to augur far futures, dismissed outright as an insurmountable obstacle. The second was the steadfastness with which the ant repeatedly climbed up and fell down: deploying its best problem-solving strategies to tackle an inordinately difficult challenge without any certainty it could ever be accomplished.
Some of Risto’s colleagues identified with ants too. They expressed feeling like simple ants working in a larger Safety Case ant colony. They felt themselves inhabiting a collective intelligence that superseded any individual expert’s intelligence. Personal reflections like these helped me see what the Safety Case’s deep time reckoning was all about. It was about pressing onward toward impossible scientific horizons while working in complex collaborations that, as a whole, exceed any single person’s comprehension, yet still somehow work. We hope.
Risto, like many Safety Case experts, was a consultant with a PhD. He was employed by a state-owned nonprofit research institute called the Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT). He received his share of Finland’s State Nuclear Waste Management Fund money through his contracts with Posiva. Some of Risto’s colleagues worked directly for Posiva, which employed about ninety people. Posiva was headquartered in Eurajoki municipality near Olkiluoto, but also had an office in Helsinki. Posiva contracted with many experts based in Helsinki and nearby Espoo. Its consultants were employed by VTT, the Geological Survey of Finland, private consultancies such as Pöyry Oyj, Saanio & Riekkola Oy, clay technologies consultancy B+Tech, or companies abroad like Sweden’s risk assessment firm Facilia AB.
The Safety Case experts worked within a distinct project management hierarchy. When I began fieldwork in 2012, they were managed by a research director, who was a member of Posiva’s eight-person operations team. That team reported directly to Posiva’s president. Posiva’s management group was overseen by a board of directors, composed of higher-ups from power companies TVO and Fortum. The Safety Case experts were also overseen by the Finnish Research Programme on Nuclear Waste Management (KYT). KYT was an independent organization tasked with understanding Finland’s total nuclear waste knowledge base across several organizations.
Risto’s job was to make models of how and whether radionuclides would or would not move around in Western Finland’s underground, if a copper nuclear waste canister were to rupture someday. His models were part of Posiva’s Safety Case portfolio. The Safety Case consisted of thousands of pages of evidence detailing the repository’s design, reporting engineering principles, and presenting numerous quantitative models, computer simulations, and scenarios forecasting its fate over the coming millennia.
Risto spent most of his time developing geophysical and hydrological models in a Helsinki office. Other Safety Case experts worked outdoors—drilling boreholes and taking samples of water and minerals. Some studied the bedrock deep in Onkalo. Others mixed waters and clays together in surface-level laboratories in Helsinki. The Safety Case “biosphere assessors” made simulations of 6,000 future people living around the Olkiluoto area. All inhabitants were assumed to eat only local food. They determined that a certain amount (a “critical group”) may face a greater likelihood of radionuclide exposure as a result of future unlucky food selections. It was obvious to the biosphere assessors that the region could not support a population of that size without importing food from elsewhere. It is freezing and dark there for much of the year. However, Safety Case experts made “conservative” assumptions like these to emphasize how Olkiluoto’s hypothetical future people would be safe, even in worst-case or impossibly pessimistic scenarios. This was done with reference to STUK regulatory rules like this one:
The dose constraint for the most highly exposed individuals, 0.1 mSv per year, stands for the average individual dose in a self-sustaining family or small village community living in the environs of the disposal site, where the highest radiation exposure arises through different exposure pathways. In the living environment of this community, a small lake and a shallow water well, among other things, are assumed to exist. … The average annual doses to larger groups of people living in the environs of a large lake or sea coast shall also be addressed.37
When I chatted with Risto, he was just one man sitting in a chair. But the group collaborations, professional networks, and organizations in which he worked had long molded his thinking. Risto’s nuclear knowledge was always partially an “effect” of the “bureaucratic machinery” that helped forge it.38 The Safety Case had emerged from clusters of domestic laws like Finland’s 1957 Atomic Energy Act, 1987 Nuclear Energy Act, 1988 Nuclear Energy Decree, 1991 Radiation Act, and Government Decree 736/2008. It was designed to conform to regulatory requirements in STUK’s highly technical YVL (for Ydinvoimalaitos, or “nuclear power plant”) regulatory guides. It was influenced by Sweden’s SR-Site repository safety assessment. It was made with global standards defined by international bodies like the International Atomic Energy Agency and the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency in mind. It considered technical recommendations from the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation—plus the International Commission on Radiological Protection.
Risto’s scientific prowess was, in part, his own. At the same time, it was also the fruit of a vast landscape of international institutions, industry initiatives, government programs, university institutes, and legal entities spread across the globe. From this professional landscape sprouted visions of distant future worlds. Safety Case experts’ quantitative projections of far future radionuclide releases into Western Finland’s ecosystems focused on the 10,000 years following the repository’s scheduled closure in 2120. My informants explained how this was roughly the amount of time since human habitation began in Finland after the previous Ice Age. Other analyses looked hundreds of thousands of years into the future. The “reference period” for modeling how the Olkiluoto repository’s physical architecture would evolve was set at 250,000 years, to include at least one ice age cycle. Some Safety Case experts looked much further ahead. They worked on Posiva’s scenario, The Evolution of the Repository System beyond a Million Years in the Future. Doing so stretched their minds widely across time. Engaging with them anthropologically can help us stretch ours.
But, to get there, we must first learn more about how Risto’s deep time visions emerged from the humdrum here-and-now of office life, scientific projects, short-term schedules, and deadlines. We must learn to approach the Safety Case experts not just as specialists with technical knowledge. We must approach them as humans with dreams, hobbies, anxieties, hopes, frustrations, quirks, passions, gossip, regrets, kindnesses, and opinions. We must suspend any preconceptions we have about nuclear waste’s deep timescales. We must commit to approaching them, temporarily at least, on Safety Case experts’ terms. Only then can we understand just how starkly their ambitions diverged from the spirit of today’s deflation of expertise.
Before embarking for Finland in December 2011, I watched Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen’s 2010 documentary about the Olkiluoto repository, Into Eternity: A Film for the Future.39 The film painted Posiva’s efforts to reckon deep time with aesthetics of desolation and bleakness, of austere machinery and industrial processes. Madsen portrayed the project as a place where dark souls tended to the world’s most lethal waste in a lifeless cave beneath a frigid island at the edge of the habitable world. The project was depicted as a place of gloom and gravity, stillness and darkness. With this scene set, Madsen told a story of nuclear waste experts speaking straightforwardly of their plans to engineer an underground facility resilient to the contingencies to befall the Olkiluoto region over the coming millennia. The moods, ambiances, and cadence of the film were stirring. The story it told was engrossing. Deep time appeared mysterious, overwhelming, awe-inspiring, and otherworldly.
For Madsen, Finland’s nuclear waste invited philosophical speculation about the ethics of pollution, human extinction, communication between societies across millennia, and civilization’s grandest aspirations. This had precedents in academia. Ethicist Kristin Shrader-Frechette had already reflected on how nuclear waste’s multimillennial half-lives pose intergenerational ethical dilemmas.40 These half-lives have challenged scientists to model very complex, contingent, and interconnected ecosystems, engineered facilities, and geological systems. Social scientists had also already analyzed the US Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository project’s radically long-term engineering demands.41 Physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford had described the United States’ challenge of designing monuments to warn far future societies to stay away from the WIPP transuranic nuclear waste repository.42 WIPP is located deep in a New Mexico salt deposit. These societies, Benford explained, may have wildly different languages and signage systems than we do. In 2015, these questions resurfaced in Harvard professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss’s documentary about containing nuclear waste and “imagining society 10,000 years from now.”43 In 2018, historian Gabrielle Hecht summed up these challenges elegantly:
It is not just that ten thousand years (or longer—plutonium’s half-life is twenty-four thousand years) exceeds human design horizons. That sort of time scale exceeds human language horizons. How to make waste repositories legible to humans millennia in the future? How to persuade our descendants that the buried materials are permanent waste, too dangerous to ever be revalued? Such projection into the future does not just require reckoning with geology; it also requires reckoning with language and representation. Attempts to address such questions have involved anthropologists, archaeologists, philosophers, artists, and linguists. Interdisciplinary committees have imagined two- and three-dimensional signage to warn future generations. Inevitably in such discussions, someone invokes the Giza pyramids to demonstrate that taboos against plunder stop working after a while.44
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the US Department of Energy assembled interdisciplinary committees like these to brainstorm warning monument designs for the WIPP repository. Some experts proposed carving a foreboding note into a huge concrete slab in seven different languages, from Navajo to Chinese to English. The goal was to scare off future tomb-raiding treasure hunters, archaeologists, local communities, and miners. Part of the slab would read:
This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here … nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. … The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.45
The experts also proposed that “ominous and repulsive” non-language-based signs should mark the site, in case the tongues of today die out. One idea was to surround the landscape above WIPP with fields of enormous spikes and frightening thorns. Others suggested warning signs depicting the eerie, agonized face of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream. A decade before that, members of the US Department of Energy’s and Bechtel Corporation’s “Human Interference Task Force” proposed bioengineering living cats that change colors in response to radiation. After releasing the cats into the world, the goal would be to spread around folkloric fairy tales, poems, myths, and paintings. These modes of message transmission have endured through the ages. They would signal to future generations that seeing oddly colored cats means danger is near. Around the same time, semiotician Thomas Sebeok proposed a hypothetical council of experts called the “Atomic Priesthood.” The priesthood would preserve knowledge of nuclear waste sites and relay warnings about them through myths and rituals. This plan was inspired by the Catholic church’s success in conveying messages for over 2,000 years.
This is all pretty mindboggling. So, perhaps it is unsurprising that Madsen took a lengthy detour in his film about Finland’s Olkiluoto repository project to discuss the United States’ Yucca Mountain and WIPP repository projects’ warning monument ideas. Yet, as I got know Safety Case experts like Risto, I found their imaginations piqued by a rather different set of questions. My informants were caught up in the scientific, regulatory, and engineering details of their work. They focused on technicalities and scientific uncertainties more than any philosophical reverie on deep time’s forbidding expanses. Many abstained from speculating about future human signage systems. Their interests diverged from those of many social scientists, journalists, and humanities scholars. My informants never quoted philosophical works on the sublime or the uncanny. They never mentioned deep time’s ghostliness.46 Few cared to discuss how “the mind seem[s] to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”47 Nobody, to my knowledge, lost sleep over how viewing our lives from the “meta-level gaze from geological time” can leave us feeling like the “individual, the community, nation, history, creed, institution, and religion” are insignificant.48 Some explained that, given Posiva’s repository R&D work’s urgency, they simply could not afford to get lost in the existential dread of Madsen’s ruminations. Others critiqued how the sensationalism surrounding repository warning monument proposals had deflected public attentions away from their more substantive work on geoscience, engineering, regulation, financing, and systems modeling.
After months of fieldwork, I began to see how and why the flashy popularity of these issues had distracted cultural analysts like me. They had shifted attention away from the just-as-fascinating but less-well-known far future visions found in seemingly boring regulatory science documents like Finland’s Safety Case models. The same went for my home country’s equivalent: the US Department of Energy’s stagnated Yucca Mountain repository project’s License Application’s million-year Total System Performance Assessment models.49 Doing anthropological fieldwork altered how I saw, related to, and wrote about nuclear waste’s deep time. The assumptions I brought to Finland with me broke down.
Safety Case experts’ professional worlds turned out to be worlds apart from those in Madsen’s film. Most of my informants worked in modest-but-comfortable office buildings. Their offices were adorned with fluorescent lights, coffee machines, clean cafeterias, saunas, prints of artwork on the walls, and unostentatious brick exteriors. Many sat in chairs for much of their workdays. They ran models on computers, scrutinized regulatory requirements, and pored over datasets. Sometimes they stayed up late into the night to finish technical reports before a deadline. They spent most of their time working quietly. They chatted lightly and joked among themselves. They attended meetings, drank coffee, and looked over reports. This deromanticized what I had read in books and watched in films about nuclear waste’s deep time. As time passed, I found myself focusing more on how Safety Case visions of far future Finlands sprouted from rather short-term timespans: deadlines, schedules, funding disputes, project phases, career stages, daily plans, five-year plans, contingency plans, human life courses, and interpersonal dramas. Nuclear waste’s deep time’s aesthetics of gloom, awe, and profundity faded from view. They were displaced by the Safety Case project’s here and now. Deep time became shallow.
I was surprised to discover that, even as I engaged with very alien far future worlds, most of the “reckonings” I collected ended up pertaining to some of the most common features of human experience. These included the power of analogy (chapter 1), the power of pattern-making (chapter 2), the power of shifting and reshifting perspectives (chapter 3), and the problem of human mortality (chapter 4). But these familiarities, I realized, can be useful. Their sheer relatability can serve as a launching-off point for us to pursue long-termist learning ourselves.
As mundane as the Safety Case experts’ office lives were, their optimism about human ingenuity’s power to secure better ecological tomorrows never ceased to shine through. Theirs was a more cautious, measured, reserved techno-optimism than that of, say, proposals to fix Anthropocene problems using geoengineering. Geoengineering proposals have included plans to put fertilizers into oceans to raise their carbon dioxide uptake, or to pump reflective particles into the atmosphere to deflect sunlight.50 Most Safety Case informants were eager to protect the Earth from radiological hazards, but were more skeptical of humanity’s environmental impacts overall. They did not celebrate what some “ecomodernist” thinkers call a “great Anthropocene,” in which humans will learn to “use our extraordinary powers to shrink our negative impact on nature.”51 Instead, they placed their trust in something simpler. They trusted that a highly disciplined, tightly organized, well-trained, adequately funded group of experts can respond pragmatically to the nuclear waste problem. They trusted that this group could progressively improve the quality of their solutions as the months, years, and decades went on. Public appreciation of this softer, subtler form of techno-optimism can help us escape the worrying grasp of the deflation of expertise.
Yet I was not able to appreciate the Safety Case experts’ modest faith in scientific reasoning until my fieldwork ended. When I returned to Cornell University in the United States, I realized that their practical, unassuming, yet wildly ambitious endeavors to reckon far futures were out of step with the grave crises of expertise that had come to afflict so many other twenty-first-century societies. The relatively strong public trust that Finnish publics placed in Posiva’s work felt like it came from some strange other world. The mild reverse culture shock of returning home did not conclude my learning-journey. It merely opened up a new chapter. I grew concerned that a brewing global intellectual crisis would exacerbate the Anthropocene’s brewing ecological crisis. To give a richer sense of what I mean, let’s take a closer look at the deflation of expertise and its many implications.
In August 2014 I was back in upstate New York. I had just returned home from Finland. It was time to turn my fieldwork findings into a doctoral dissertation. I began to see the extent to which the authority, credibility, and confidence of many kinds of experts had been attacked while I was away. For many, faith in financial experts had been damaged by failures to predict the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. For many others, faith in experts who had been proclaiming a coming “nuclear renaissance” since the early 2000s—in which emissions-free nuclear energy was to become a twenty-first-century climate solution—had been sapped by failures to stop Japan’s 2011 Fukushima meltdown and by wariness of nuclear reactor technology’s high capital costs. For some, faith in national security experts had been shaken by failures to foresee the 9/11 terror attacks. For others, faith in military experts had flagged since the United States invaded Iraq based on false pretenses about weapons of mass destruction. For some, faith in intelligence experts had been stunted since Edward Snowden publicly leaked the US National Security Agency’s massive global surveillance operations. For others, faith in big data science was losing its luster, now associated with digital privacy losses and surveillance capitalism.
Skepticism was surely warranted in the wake of these grave failures of expertise and breaches of public trust. However, as the months and years went on, all sorts of claims to expert knowledge were increasingly written off as mere pompous elitism. Come the 2016 presidential election, nationalist-populist movements would clamor loudly against technocrats, bureaucrats, globalists, and the so-called deep state. Crime and jobs statistics, polling methods, vaccine science, government reports, university funding, pandemic disease alerts, and environmental research would be questioned. I found myself thinking that Finland’s Safety Case experts’ aspirations to reckon deep time would, in these contexts, likely be mocked as naïve or hubristic.
As I write in 2020, crises of expertise are ongoing. Stem cell research, economic models, climate experts, critical social theorists, cell phone radiation, and human evolution are targeted in frenzied social media free-for-alls. A 2012 Scientific American article described an “anti-intellectual conformity” gaining ground at both ends of the US political spectrum. This was “precisely the moment that most of the important opportunities for economic growth, and serious threats to the wellbeing of the nation, require a better grasp of scientific issues.”52 By 2017, it was no longer edgy or radical for a postmodern philosopher or critical sociologist to critique truth, reality, or scientific rationality. “Alternative fact” and “fake news” had become mainstream buzzwords. The Oxford English Dictionary named “post-truth” its 2016 Word of the Year. In April 2017, science became something to march on Washington for. I felt nostalgic for the Safety Case experts’ day-to-day faith in facts and reason. I worried the United States was too distracted by noisy clutter to prep for ecological destruction. Deluges of clickbait web content and twenty-four-hour news cycles left netizens lost in jungles of dubious information. Many were cloistered in naïve, self-reinforcing, insular echo-chambers. This had consequences for experts. US Naval War College Professor Tom Nichols had been warning of a “death of expertise” since 2014:
I wonder if we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between students and teachers, knowers and wonderers, or even between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all. … What I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live. A fair number of Americans now seem to reject the notion that one person is more likely to be right about something, due to education, experience, or other attributes of achievement, than any other. … We now live in a world where the perverse effect of the death of expertise is that, without real experts, everyone is an expert on everything. … There are no longer any gatekeepers: the journals and op-ed pages that were once strictly edited have been drowned under the weight of self-publishable blogs (like, say, this one).53
University experts faced their own crises across the West, too. Top scientists worried they “wouldn’t be productive enough for today’s academic system.” Physicist Peter Higgs wondered whether “work like Higgs boson identification” would even be “achievable now as academics are expected to keep churning out papers.”54 Computer scientist Cyril Labbé derided the accelerating publish-or-perish “spamming war” at the heart of science.55 Benjamin Ginsburg’s 2011 The Fall of the Faculty showed how non-academic administrators increasingly seized control from scholars with PhDs. Many colleagues were fed up with university research audits. They were tired of how scholarly assessment metrics valued the quantity of their publications over the quality of their findings. Journalist Richard Harris’s book Rigor Mortis showed how an overemphasis on productivity at the expense of “getting the right answers” not only encouraged shoddy biomedical research; it also discouraged scientists from investing time in replicating or verifying published studies’ results.56 Anthropologist David Graeber announced the “death of the university” as a “guild of self-organized scholars.” Graeber pointed to academia’s paperwork-riddled bureaucracy and the subordination of scholars to corporatized university “managerial feudalism.”57 Enrollments dropped and tuition costs rose. Some asked whether we are seeing “peak higher education.”58 Amid all of this, many PhDs in academia found themselves underemployed. They joined the armies of adjunct teaching staff upon which universities increasingly rely. These adjuncts often have small part-time salaries, little job security, and no employment benefits.
The 2016 US election’s protest politics channeled raw anger, disillusionments, and disenchantments of sorts that could never be domesticated by the scrupulousness of the Finnish engineer. Donald Trump’s charismatic authority contrasted sharply with the measured, calm, detached temperament of Finland’s trusted STUK nuclear regulatory experts. Rapid publish-or-perish academic research tempos blazed past the plodding pace of Posiva’s plans to deliver an updated version of the Safety Case every ten or fifteen years until the decommissioning of the repository around 2120. America’s deflated faith in experts’ capacities to anticipate even quite short-term futures contrasted with the Promethean ambitions of Safety Case experts’ multimillennial projections. It made them seem anachronistic or far too trusting. As Paypal founder Peter Thiel said in 2014, America was growing “very hostile to big ideas,” as projects like “the Apollo program are quite unthinkable today.” I began to appreciate how Safety Case deep time reckoning was about putting the fearful politics of denial aside and dreaming big. It was about imagining better tomorrows, embarking upon ambitious technological projects, and embracing open futures. This spirit of inquiry, I realized, can offer vital lessons as some asked, “Has America lost its ability to dream big?”59
So, ultimately, this book’s reckonings have the most to offer readers in places where the deflation of expertise has become the most engrained. In the United States, for example, the Trump administration recently advanced a proposal to reform its National Environmental Policy Act regulations to read: “Effects should not be considered significant if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain.”60 In contexts like these, Finland’s Safety Case experts’ efforts to discern deep time seem truly alien. To fully grasp these contrasts, though, we must first learn more about twenty-first-century Finnish society. We must explore which aspects of Finnish culture helped lay the groundwork for Safety Case experts to make bold journeys across time without collapsing into self-doubt or caving to onslaughts of public criticism. Posiva’s projects to reckon deep time were, after all, enabled by a Nordic country known for its trust in governance by networks of highly trained experts. Many (but certainly not all) Finns placed faith in the authority of expertise, education, and technology. As the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise simmer, this openness to expertise-driven progress can be held up as a counterpoint to today’s globalizing ecological and intellectual crises. It can help us imagine our worlds differently.
However, we should not idealize Finland. Not all Finns embraced expertise. Among those who did, the embrace had both promises and perils. Many of the Finns I met were delightfully well-read on matters ranging from urban planning to industrial design, aerospace technology to climate change. Many spoke three or more languages. Yet more than a few disproportionately admired engineers and natural scientists far more than, say, literature scholars or philosophy professors. Many Finns, perhaps rightly, felt that their respected domestic scientists, ministry technocrats, and regulatory experts had earned the citizens’ trust. Yet some tended toward blind deference to authorities and uncritical faith in scientific realism. Not all aspects of Finnish expertise culture can, or should, be adopted elsewhere. Trusting in technocrats can be very dangerous in places prone to corruption, dishonest officials, or incompetent scientists. In Finland’s finer moments, though, much of its population tended toward a grounded and pragmatic respect for rigorous expert inquiry. Studying this anthropologically can help us think beyond today’s intellectual and ecological crises. In this spirit, let’s explore how Finnish expertise culture often diverged from—but, unfortunately, sometimes succumbed to—the deflation of expertise.
Posiva’s long-sighted Safety Case projects did not happen in isolation. Many Finns from many walks of life told me of their country’s acceptance of big, centralized, hierarchical institutions. These included nuclear power plants, public transport systems, government ministries, and Finland’s welfare state. Some pointed to polls casting Finland as unique in its high levels of trust in its domestic civil servants, experts, police, educators, pilots, engineers, and welfare programs.61 Others explained how Finland’s lack of historical experience with technological disasters like Chernobyl, Bhopal, or the BP Oil Spill had garnered Finnish industry and regulatory institutions heightened public trust. Some pointed to Finland’s relatively few political corruption scandals. Still others told me about Erkki Laurila, who worked in Finland’s Linkomies Committee from 1958 to 1963. This committee foresaw the Finnish state supporting science and technology in service of the county’s national development. Laurila called this outlook “Ilmarinen’s Finland,” a reference to the smith in Finland’s national epic Kalevala. Ilmarinen made a magical artifact called Sampo. According to folklore tales, Sampo, a product of technological ingenuity, brought riches and good fortune to its holder. Adeptness in technology, as Laurila saw it, could deliver Finland the same.
Finnish social scientists have described how “Finns value things such as Enlightenment, state, bureaucracy and technology” and “in general count on expertise, technology and authorities.”62 They have explained how a “belief in enlightenment thinking” created conditions in which “science and education” become core values that “characterize and construct national identity.” These values have stoked “almost a mania for new technology.”63 They have noted Finland’s “trust in technology and its ability to produce welfare,” the “strong position of administrative bodies,” and the “involvement of academic intellectuals in the creation of the national ideology.”64 They have studied Finland’s icon of the “virtually infallible” engineer.65 International observers have noted Finland’s “high level of trust among citizens, a cooperative attitude in society and a sense of solidarity.”66 Oxford’s Reuters Institute’s 2016 Digital News Report showed that Finns’ overall trust in their media outlets was the highest out of twenty-six countries. Sixty-five percent reported trusting domestic news.67 Of European countries, Finns have been placed sixth for trusting in Parliament, fifth for trusting politicians, and fourth for trusting political parties.68 This trust has been cast as the key to Finland’s world renowned public education system69 and to how social clout is doled out in Finland.70 It has been cast as the key to Finns’ high levels of participation in voluntary organizations like sports, charity, and cultural associations.71
Many Finns I met, expert and lay alike, enjoyed self-characterizing Finnish culture in conversation with me, the anthropologist from afar. Some enjoyed self-stereotyping Finnish ways of life. Many reflected on Finns’ strong faith in fact-driven reason, state authorities, and one another. Some said they were more likely to trust career civil servants, researchers, and engineers than, say, certain sophists in Parliament or the attention-seeking “political broilers” heading Finland’s ministries. Others lauded the civility of Finnish debate culture’s asiat riitelevät, eivät ihmiset (“the issues fight, not the people”) ethic. Some associated Finnish trustworthiness with speaking in a direct, concise, neutral, no-nonsense way. Others associated it with being punctually on time for meetings and always keeping one’s word. Some linked Finns’ penchants for hiljaisuus (“quietude” or “silence”) or being omissa oloissaan (“to oneself”) to the high value they place on giving each other space for inward contemplation.72 Some noted Finns’ voracious reading habits and aversions to small talk or tyhjän puhuminen (“empty talk”). One Estonian told me how he saw Finns as always wanting to be the “perfect student” by doing everything properly, by the book, and with precision. As a Helsinki-based Russian expat recalled a drunk Finn once telling him: the “most important thing about living here is luottamusperiaate [the principle of trust]. … In Finland we trust each other. We trust officials, police, and people.”73
Finnish trust, cooperativeness, meticulousness, national solidarity, and orderliness have often received credit for Finland’s relative openness to nuclear initiatives. In 2011, the Finland Promotion Board website of Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs posted an article about a poll conducted shortly after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. It described how, even though public support had slipped, 85 percent of respondents still considered Finland’s nuclear power plants “absolutely safe.” After asking locals why, the author explained that “the word ‘trust’ is still heard loud and clear here: trust in the technological capabilities of the nuclear engineers, in the terrain, in the transparency, openness and honesty of the operators and construction companies, as well as of the regulators.”74 Finnish trust was a key image in Finland’s national brand. It also appeared in coverage of the Olkiluoto repository. As the BBC reported in 2010, “in Eurajoki in Finland, where the local council decided seven years ago that it would like to see the waste from the country’s nuclear reactors buried in its backyard, the T-word is everywhere, nestling alongside its spiritual siblings openness, honesty and transparency.”75 This recalled a 2006 BBC article written by the same journalist after he met with higher-ups from Posiva:
“It boils down basically to trust,” comments [Posiva manager] Timo Äikäs. “When you make a decision concerning this kind of thing, which takes us to 2100 when the final sealing takes place, there will always be uncertainty. So you have to have trust.” But Timo Äikäs believes his system and his team deserve the trust they have found in Eurajoki, and that Onkalo will prove as safe a resting place for highly active radionuclides as can be found, barring any surprises with the local geology.76
But not all were impressed. A frustrated Greek citizen living in Helsinki complained that Finns lack a “poetic predisposition.” He criticized their embrace of sober pragmatism and their trust in technical competence, bureaucrats, and rule-governed formality. For him, Finns were ordered, rational, disciplined Apollonians, not spirited, sensual, emotional Dionysians. An expat from Iran complained that Finns’ lack of passion left him “tranquilized into a Nordic slumber.” A Finnish colleague in the humanities lamented that Finland’s consensus-valorizing debate culture made for boring nonadversarial talk radio and failed to foster healthy criticism of society’s norms. One social critic derided Finland’s outdated “faith in the rational mind of an engineer.”77 Others rolled their eyes at how Finland’s high levels of public trust fostered public complacency and blind loyalty. A wisecracking Finnish academic once told me that “in Finland, you get to observe a near total societal embrace of Foucauldian discipline and governmentality.” A critically minded architect I met discussed 1980s sociological analyses of Finnish cultural codes, social class, and hierarchies that depicted Finland as the “anti-France.” Many Finns, he suggested, embrace naïve realist depictions of life, art, and media without acknowledging cultural subtexts or contexts.
Some Finns criticized their compatriots’ trust in nuclear technology. Critical scholars explained how, in the first decade of the 2000s, Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment worked in cahoots with powerful people in industry, the media, and Finland’s parliament. They built a “pro-nuclear network” and a “hegemonic political discourse” such that “opposition to nuclear power had become stigmatized.”78 Meanwhile, some participated in antinuclear demonstrations like the Olkiluoto Blockades, in which activists blocked roads surrounding the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant. Others developed activist projects like Case Pyhäjoki, a “transdisciplinary artistic expedition” to “explore artistic perspectives on the vast changes planned in Pyhäjoki, through the planning of a nuclear power plant at the site.”79 In 2010, Greenpeace placed a “monument of selfishness” in a Helsinki park memorializing names of Parliament members who recently voted for expanding the country’s nuclear capacity. Finnish rock band Eppu Normaali’s ironic 1980 song “Suomi-ilmiö” (“Finland Syndrome”) criticized Finns’ culture of nuclear trust. It was written soon after the United States’ 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania:
Although in Harrisburg one needs to lock one’s windows / Finland is always safe / Harrisburg is somewhere on another planet / it could never happen here / beneath the birch and the star / Can perfection exist in any form? / Yeah of course, among other things, at Olkiluoto / None are as smart as an engineer / its perfect / the button and pipe / Uranium splits / and produces the lamp’s light / but no other countries other than Finland are free from risk / We have quite a selection of infallibility / [Finland’s former President] Kekkonen, a Finnish-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, and [Finnish power company] Imatran Voima / no danger fits in our routines / unless in China the Finland syndrome would occur / Uranium splits / and produces the lamp’s light / but no other countries other than Finland are free from risk.
During my fieldwork, Finland’s advocates and critics of nuclear energy seemed to agree on something: the Olkiluoto repository’s national acceptance hinged on a widespread trust in expertise, technology, education, and state authorities. The divisive question was whether this trust was enlightened and deserved, or naïve and unwarranted. These conditions helped the Safety Case experts’ work remain largely nonpoliticized. They enabled Finland to hold closely to the repository construction schedule it set in the early 1980s. The Not-in-My-Backyard politicking that helped stop the US Yucca Mountain repository in its tracks in 2009 was not strongly present in Finland. Nor were the project stagnations seen over the years in France, the UK, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, or elsewhere.
Most Finns I met saw the Olkiluoto repository as a pragmatic solution to an unfortunate problem. Many saw it as an object of curiosity worth reading up on. A few saw it as a cause of outrage, grievance, or fear. Many had a noticeable aversion to speaking outside the realm of their own competence, declining to opine on nuclear waste. They instead referred me to technical specialists formally authorized to speak on the subject. This all helped clear out the political, intellectual, and logistical space necessary for Posiva’s work to persist without imploding amid dissent. It helped insulate Safety Case experts from a degree of self-doubt, agitation, and self-searching that may have been provoked elsewhere.
But much of this was changing. Many worried as Finland’s traditional forestry industries (e.g., lumber, paper manufacturing, pulp processing) restructured, as the global reach of its once-booming IT sector led by Nokia retracted, and as key mining and metallurgical companies saw financial turmoil. Finland’s Talvivaara mine’s wastewater leaks had spread nickel, cadmium, zinc, uranium, and aluminum into Eastern Finland’s ecosystems since 2012. This, and the high-profile criminal case which followed it, caused many to wonder whether Finland’s domestic extractive industry really worked in their interests. Finland’s far-right, nationalist-populist, Euroskeptical party Perussuomalaiset (“True Finns”) stoked anti-elite sentiments. Its leader Timo Soini entered the country’s coalition government as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister. Finns under the age of thirty-five became more skeptical than their elders were of the news media.80
Meanwhile, disconcerting elements of the deflation of expertise were on the rise. A scientist at VTT derided how Finland’s science today is often diluted by the politics of research funding allocation, the interests of commercial and investment capital, workplace audits of research “deliverables,” and pressures to engage more with the public. VTT is Finland’s traditionally state-funded, but increasingly privately funded, applied technological research organization. A scientist at Finland’s geological survey GTK lamented the decreased ratios of government funding at his institution, and worried the same was happening at VTT, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the Finnish Environment Institute, and elsewhere. He spoke somberly of how VTT recently had to lay off two hundred people. He complained about how much time Finland’s experts were wasting doing paperwork, not research. He felt for his growing number of colleagues who faced declining job security, working contract to contract and grant to grant. He was frustrated by how many companies relied on short-term subcontracted expert labor rather than signing on lifers for stable, secure, long-term careers. At the same time, humanities colleagues at Finland’s universities worried about downsizing and increasingly precarious hiring prospects. By February 2018, University of Helsinki professors demanded salary increases during their first walk-out strike.
Our planetary crisis could grow even more dire if the deflation of expertise continues to proceed alongside Anthropocene destruction. We need to overcome both if we are to survive. The rise of these troubling trends in Finland warrants new calls to action and fresh perspectives on expertise’s strengths and limitations. To this end, I will now clarify this book’s broader approach to science, technology, and expert knowledge. Doing so will help us sort through the positives and negatives of placing faith in various forms of evidence-based reasoning. This will be our final step in getting oriented before we embark upon the coming chapters’ experiments in deep time learning.
I emerged from fieldwork unapologetically optimistic that human hearts, minds, and technological ingenuities can adapt to more long-sighted ways of life. I remain optimistic that Safety Case experts’ spirit of modesty, hard work, pragmatism, and self-reflection can offer guidance. However, my optimism for technology remains more tempered than that of, say, futurists like Ray Kurzweil. Like nearly all of the Safety Case experts I met, I spend very little time heralding “the Singularity”—an overconfident vision of a future in which humans and machines converge. Kurzweil and his acolytes claim this convergence can help us achieve superhuman intelligence, transcend death by stopping aging processes, and upload our minds to computers.81 That sort of overzealous faith in progress is part of what got us into this Anthropocene mess in the first place.
Scientists can and do make mistakes. As any student of history will tell you, scientists can be wrong—both ethically and factually. Many technologies have had unfortunate, sometimes unforeseen, downsides: nuclear weapons, coal power plants, plastics, Twitter, pesticides, lead pipes, and asbestos insulations are just a few examples. Some of these downsides have been chilling. Industrial technologies aided the Nazis’ mass executions. In the 1940s, the US nuclear weapons complex injected unwitting citizens with radioactive elements—including plutonium, uranium, and polonium—to test their effects on the human body. Eugenics movements referenced shoddy science to justify racial hierarchies and forced sterilization programs.
Nevertheless, many still assume scientists have superpowers they simply do not have. Science and technology can never teach us what to value, how to pursue a good life, how to act morally, or how to navigate delicate situations. Logic and rationality alone can never teach us how to love, dream, aspire, care, or appreciate beauty. Scientific research can never provide us with full certainty, either. As physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn famously demonstrated, scientific paradigms change over time.82 Before Copernicus, for instance, the Earth was seen as the center of the universe; after Copernicus, it was the Sun. As another example, while Newton’s theory of gravity reigned before the twentieth century, it was later overtaken by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. We do not know what new scientific paradigms will take the helm in the future.
Still, to chart viable routes forward for healing our planet, science’s ethos of meticulousness must be given special platform. Analysis vetted by highly trained experts has a value that freewheeling podcast rants, talking head television pundits, and impulsive Twitter posts—vetted only by likes, reshares, retweets, and hit counts—do not. I am not advocating for anyone to blindly defer to scientists, technologists, or technocrats, and I am not suggesting that citizens in the United States, Russia, or China should start trusting their own technocrats the way many Finns do. But I am suggesting that, before we form judgments on matters of planetary survival, we first make a point to learn about what informed specialists have to say. After putting in the hard work of hearing them out, the ball is in everyone else’s court again to decide how and whether to respond. We can then begin debating whether they are on the right or wrong side of history, whether their innovations will bring human flourishing or collapse, or whether their narrow specializations have prevented them from seeing their actions’ wider implications.
So, I am a techno-optimist—but just barely. This may make for a boring social media tweet, but my techno-optimism is proudly measured and conditional. Some problems require scientific solutions, others do not. Tech fixes improve some situations, while making others worse. It is all a matter of context. It was, for example, reasonable when, throughout the Cold War, many social scientists wrote books and articles undercutting overconfident views of science’s universality. This scholarship questioned humanity’s capacity for total rationality and critiqued how a secretive military-industrial complex pointed to numerical calculations and technical models to justify its own authority. That was, and still is, a smart response to devastating nuclear weapons being controlled by a small but powerful elite who claim legitimacy by pointing to their own rationality. However, this does not mean we should abandon faith in science and rationality altogether. It would be equally naïve to reject all nuclear weapons, waste, and energy experts’ techniques, ideas, datasets, and methods as hopeless tools of soulless control. At least some of these tools can be repurposed as useful approaches that societies can adopt and then redeploy to serve more fulfilling ends.
The Safety Case experts’ Promethean long-termism can provide remedies for the ailments of the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise. It merits our attention, even when the experts behind it vehemently disagree with one another. Not long before I began fieldwork, researchers from Sweden’s Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology or “KTH”) published experimental findings suggesting that copper corrodes in oxygen-free, pure water. If this is true, SKB’s and Posiva’s spent copper fuel canisters would corrode at rates far faster than initially calculated. Many of my informants were confident that the experiment’s setup was flawed, and many scientists I met after leaving Finland concurred. Some, however, worried that, if the small group of scientists did turn out to be correct, then it could be a “show stopper” for Finland’s and Sweden’s nuclear waste programs. Both countries’ nuclear regulators instructed their respective repository programs to investigate the issue. Yet neither deemed the findings convincing enough to halt licensing procedures altogether. Many breathed a sigh of relief in November 2014, when SKB announced that two different research teams had conducted experiments that failed to corroborate the KTH researchers’ findings. However, the copper corrosion question reared its head again in January 2018, when Sweden’s Environmental Court ruled that further evidence of the KBS-3 canisters’ multimillennial corrosion resistance must be provided before it would approve SKB’s proposal.
Debates like these can, at times, be frustrating. Yet they are what make evidence-based inquiry great. Scientific debates grow more, not less, robust when educated publics, social scientists, humanities scholars, interest groups, environmental court judges, and other learned people openly participate in them. Disagreement generates new ideas; narrow-mindedly enclosing ourselves in intellectual echo-chambers does not. Nor does engaging solely with people with whom we agree. Closing our minds by assuming the world is just a postmodern abyss of meaninglessness, chaos, and power-politics can never liberate us from Anthropocene darkness. But adopting a spirit of adventurous learning can be enriching. Fieldwork showed me how a subtle, abiding, guarded optimism about technological advancement, intellectual discourse, and scientific scrutiny could—in one specific place, in one specific time—make deep time reckoning more achievable, or at least more accessible, for those who believed in it.
Stewart Brand once asked: “How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare?”83 My answer is that we can look to Finland’s Safety Case experts’ practical, pluralistic, grounded, “applied science” of deep time reckoning for some clues, but never all the answers. While this may interest futurologists in the interdisciplinary field of futures studies, my goal is different. I myself do not put forth utopian or dystopian scenarios of possible, probable, preferable, or unfavorable future worlds. Rather, I offer a repertoire of anthropological tools—“reckonings”—as a how-to guide for engaging with others’ future visions. My methods may contrast with those of, say, existential risk scholars who reckon future nuclear wars, asteroid impacts, super-volcanoes, pandemic diseases, climate change, robot uprisings, and other cataclysmic events in more arcane ways. Yet we all share a common question: how can we foster human and ecological flourishing across future millennia, despite the many powerful economic, political, cultural, and intellectual forces working against us?
Walking toward these distant horizons, let’s turn our backs to the Anthropocene and start thinking longer-term. Let’s resist the deflation of expertise by opening our ears to long-sighted experts. In this spirit of long-termist learning, let’s chart out our trek into far future Finlands.
Chapter 1 explores the Safety Case experts’ powerful use of analogy to reckon the Olkiluoto repository’s far future conditions. It shows, for example, how they studied a present-day glacial ice sheet in Greenland as an analogue: a stand-in feature used for the sake of comparison. This ice sheet helped them make extrapolations, inferences, and projections about the far future fate of a Finnish glacier during and after the next ice age. The chapter also tracks how Safety Case experts studied a crater lake that resulted from a meteor crashing into the Earth roughly 73 million years ago. The crater became, for them, an analogue for how Finland’s landscape might change over the next several ice ages.
Examining how multimillennial analogies are made by nuclear, climate, and space experts during the Anthropocene takes us on an expert-inspired learning-journey into futures and pasts. This journey brings us to far future Finlands, the Roman Empire, ancient China, a future Earth that looks like Mars, Africa during our planet’s earliest history, other planets, regions of South Africa in 2030, West Virginia during World War II, and elsewhere. It concludes with five reckonings, each one brainstorming how integrating farsighted flights of analogy into our day-to-day ponderings can sharpen our long-termist intuitions. This means routinely doing intellectual workouts that compare different objects across time and space. These mental exercises, inspired by the Safety Case analogue studies, challenge us to reflect imaginatively on possible similarities and differences between distant past, far future, and present-day worlds. They encourage us to resist the deflation of expertise by investing personal time in seeking out philosophical, scientific, and ecological knowledge and then, if possible, broadcasting it across society.
Chapter 2 is about learning to see future ecological and geological systems through the technical, disciplined, data-driven eyes of Safety Case computer modeling experts. These experts used the power of pattern to weave together quantitative models—highly technical computer simulations—of far future Finlands. Specifically, they used simple distinctions between input and output to establish a sense of consistency that helped organize their dense jungles of interconnected reports, models, datasets, and scenarios. Studying this anthropologically revealed how, say, a data output from one model could serve as a data input into another model, which could then produce data outputs that fed into, say, three other models as inputs, which then produced outputs of their own, which were each fed into two other models as inputs, and so on.
Embarking on a learning-journey of following these elaborate chains of input and outputs will help us see how radically complex patterns emerged from much simpler ones to make visions of far futures appear. It will also lead us to consider how Finland’s future climates may change, glaciers may form, shorelines many change position, landscapes may evolve, and more. The chapter closes with five reckonings, each exploring such questions as: How can we scour our daily routines and patterns for routes into better organizing our own deep time learning? How can basic patterns, found right in front of us, help us overcome the overwhelming feelings of meaningless, awe, mystery, terror, or anxiety that can well up as we learn how to gaze into the abyss of deep time? How can taking a close, anthropological look at experts’ work help us counter the deflation of expertise?
Chapter 3 explores Safety Case experts’ skills at toggling back and forth between visions of human, ecological, and geological histories (near and distant) and human, ecological, and geological futures (near and distant). Performing these intellectual journeys across time by zooming in and out across time spans is a crucial Anthropocene skill. Mimicking these experts’ intellectual adventurousness, the chapter begins by zooming out from the Safety Case: it approaches the entire project as only one momentary blip within the deeper human and geological history of Finland. Next, it zooms in on the collaborative forces that held Posiva’s elaborate Safety Case projects together across weeks, months, decades, and years. After that, it zooms in even further on how Safety Case experts maintained their motivations to endure their work’s intellectually taxing day-to-day demands.
From this emerges a sense of how the Safety Case portfolio became fully knowable only when many different kinds of experts were viewing it from many different timescales, angles, levels, and perspectives at once. The chapter closes with five more reckonings, each brainstorming different strategies for getting the shortsighted organizations of today to embrace more sophisticated multiscale, multiangle, or multiperspective sensibilities. These sensibilities must be widely cultivated if we are to survive the Anthropocene. The reckonings also ask how today’s communities of deep time reckoners can achieve greater solidarity—pursuing a shared mission to recalibrate experts’ and citizens’ relationships with one another and with the Earth’s future ecosystems. This will require a societal embrace of expert inquiry that is directly at odds with the deflation of expertise.
Chapter 4 examines the Safety Case experts’ cautionary tales about the consequences that can follow when a beacon of deep time learning dies. It tracks how experts summoned, conjured, or channeled memories of Seppo: a highly talented deceased colleague whose “specter” was said to still haunt their scientific community. For some, the “afterlives” of Seppo’s expertise manifested as gaps in knowledge left behind by an expert often reluctant to document how he made Safety Case models. For others, it manifested as anecdotes about Seppo’s stubbornness, irritability, and intellectual intensity, as well as his more jovial demeanor during sauna nights, workplace parties, or trips abroad. Still others caught themselves asking “What Would Seppo Do?” while troubleshooting at work.
This chapter argues that lessons gleaned from Seppo’s death can be sources of learning as we work toward building more long-sighted societies. Lessons of a similar kind can be gleaned from other expert communities reliant on slow-to-acquire, sophisticated, scarce expert knowledges. The chapter closes with five reckonings, each offering ideas for surmounting the expert replaceability problems that so often accompany rare but essential deep time reckoning specialists. Today’s societies, it concludes, must resist the deflation of expertise by embracing an ethic of predecessor preservation. This means carefully absorbing, tending to, and disseminating insights from prolific deep time reckoners so their contributions to long-termism do not die off upon their biological deaths. Key long-term thinkers like Seppo, therefore, need to be given both special treatment and additional responsibilities.
This book’s accumulation of reckonings reaches its peak in the conclusion, where I pull many of them together and set them into motion. The question is how we, as denizens of the Anthropocene constrained by the deflation of expertise, can learn to escape the forces of shallow time discipline I laid out earlier on in this chapter. To envisage a society that takes this seriously, I draw on several of chapters 1 through 4’s reckonings to undertake two final, speculative thought experiments. The first asks if what we need is a radically new education program that introduces entire populations, from an early age, to humanity’s inventory of long-term thinking tools. The second asks how a hypothetical society, educated into greater time-literacy, could be reorganized to more holistically embrace futures-thinking. By taking these alternative worlds as inspirations, the chapter argues, we can better reflect on how to rescue hopes for human flourishing from the Earth’s ecological death spiral.
1. David Armitage and Jo Guldi, “Bonfire of the Humanities,” Aeon, October 2, 2014, http://aeon.co/magazine/society/how-history-forgot-its-role-in-public-debate/.
2. See R. Monastersky, “Anthropocene: The Human Age,” Nature 519, no. 7542 (2015): 144; see also W. Steffen, J. Grinevald, P. Crutzen, and J. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1938 (2011): 842–867.
3. Richard Irvine, “Deep Time: An Anthropological Problem,” Social Anthropology 22, no. 2 (2014).
4. Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
5. Martin Rees, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 3, 217.
6. Tim Ingold, Evolution and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 129.
7. Michael Welker and John Polkinghorne, The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology (Trinity: Harrisburg, 2000), 8.
8. Gregory Benford, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates across Millennia (New York: Avon, 2000); Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Martin Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
9. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Nuer Time-Reckoning,” Africa 12 (1939).
10. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 1.
11. If their livelihoods were improved, would billions of new long-term thinkers come to the fore? Or would their attentions merely refixate on another set of short-terms—those that distract the currently better-off from long-sightedness?
12. United Nations, “World Population Projected to Reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 Billion in 2100,” Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2017), https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world-population-prospects-2017.html.
13. United Nations, “68% of the World Population Projected to Live in Urban areas by 2050,” Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2018), https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html.
14. Annelise Riles, “The Politics of Expertise in Transnational Economic Governance: Breaking the Cycle,” Social Sciences of Crisis Thinking 10, no. 3 (2017).
15. Annelise Riles, Financial Citizenship: Experts, Publics and the Politics of Central Banking (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2018), 2.
16. Meridian 180, “Forum Summary—What Role for Global Intellectuals?” (2011), https://meridian-180.org/en/forums/forum-summary-what-role-global-intellectuals.
17. Sometimes I engaged with Nordic nuclear experts in a more participatory spirit, too. In February 2012, for example, I gave a presentation for Posiva’s management group. In summer 2013, I spent two days at a Safety Case expert’s family’s kesämökki (“summer cottage”) and then we visited Finland’s Tytyri limestone mine. We visited a uranium and copper deposit geological research site together. Another informant brought me to a laboratory working on the welding and nondestructive testing of the repository’s copper nuclear waste canisters. In June 2013, I attended the European Nuclear Society’s Young Generation Forum event in Stockholm. While in Sweden, I visited Swedish nuclear waste disposal company SKB’s underground Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory—a facility similar to Posiva’s Onkalo underground laboratory—and its CLAB interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel. In September 2013, I attended the World Nuclear Association’s annual symposium in London.
18. To break my field materials down further: I recorded (a) fifty conversations with engineers, modelers, geologists, and other experts who could be considered insiders to Posiva’s repository project; (b) ten conversations with experts who could be considered insiders to STUK’s regulatory oversight of Posiva’s repository project; (c) thirteen conversations with artists, NGO workers, environmentalists, and activists who were skeptical of Posiva’s work; (d) eleven conversations with nuclear sector insiders who worked on nuclear energy production (as opposed to nuclear waste disposal); (e) eleven conversations with critical experts (in, e.g., geology, engineering, social sciences, and architecture) skeptical of Posiva’s work; (f) ten conversations with experts in academia and/or the private sector who specialized in the financial-legal aspects of nuclear energy in Finland; (g) six conversations with political actors who had views on Finland’s nuclear energy/waste projects; (h) six conversations with bloggers, industry lobbyists, and environmental activists who held broadly pro-nuclear and/or “ecomodernist” views; and (i) four conversations with miscellaneous experts, artists, and/or members of the public who had noteworthy perspectives on nuclear energy/waste or culture in Finland.
19. Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, “Spent Fuel Disposed of in Finland,” https://tem.fi/en/spent-nuclear-fuel (accessed February 24, 2019).
20. The Anthropocene concept has many precedents. In the late eighteenth century, France’s Comte de Buffon explained how the “entire face of the Earth today bears the imprint of human power” (C. Bonneuil and J.-B. Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us [London: Verso, 2016], 4). Around 1873, Italian priest and geologist Antonio Stoppani proposed the “Anthropozoic Era,” an idea taken up in American diplomat and philologist George Marsh’s 1874 The Earth as Modified by Human Action. In 1922, British geologist Robert Sherlock published Man as a Geological Agent: An Account of His Actions on Inanimate Nature. Soviet earth scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, a father of the concept of the Earth’s biosphere, wrote of a “psychozoic era” marked by the “influence of consciousness and collective human reason upon geochemical processes” in his 1927 essay collection on geochemistry. Fairfield Osborn’s 1948 Our Plundered Planet introduced the idea of “Man: A New Geological Force.” A 1955 Princeton event titled “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” revived these themes. In the decades to follow, ideas of humanity as a geological force interspersed the development of what would become Earth systems science, but the topic remained something of a sideline item (Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene,” 843–844). Biologist Eugene Stoermer, however, has used the term Anthropocene informally since at least the 1980s. Andrew Revkin, in a 1992 book on global warming, speculated that future earth scientists would give the name Anthrocene to a post-Holocene “geological age of our own making” (Revkin, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast [New York: Abbeville Press, 1992], 55).
21. Jan Zalasiewicz, “Response to Adrian J. Ivakhiv’s ‘Against the Anthropocene’ Blog Post,” Immanence 7 (July 2014).
22. Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene.”
23. J. Zalasiewicz, C.N. Waters, M. Williams, A.D. Barnosky, A. Cearreta, P. Crutzen, E. Ellis, M.A. Ellis, I. J. Fairchild, J. Grinevald, R. Leinfelder, J. McNeill, C. Poirier, D. Richter, W. Steffen, D. Vidas, M. Wagreich, A. P. Wolfe, and A. Zhisheng, “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth-Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal,” Quaternary International 383 (2015): 204–207.
24. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.
25. Morton’s “agrilogistics” include simple algorithms that today’s societies still perpetuate, like “eliminate contradiction and anomaly” and “establish boundaries between the human and the nonhuman.” His argument is that they have, since the dawn of agriculture, gone “viral” across the globe—later requiring industrialization to persist. See Timothy Morton, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Term Anthropocene,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1, no. 2 (2014): 259.
26. Bruno Latour, “Telling Friends from Foes in the Time of the Anthropocene,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. C. Hamilton, F. Gemenne, C. Bonneuil (London: Routledge, 2015), 146.
27. Bruno Latour, “Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene: A Personal View of What Is to Be Studied,” 113th AAA Meeting Distinguished Lecture (Washington, DC, November 5, 2014), http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/607.
28. Nikolas Rose, “The Human Sciences in a Biological Age,” Theory, Culture, & Society 30, no. 1 (2013).
29. Rees, On the Future, 3.
30. Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time, 2.
31. Julia Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,” American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014).
32. Andreas Malm, “The Anthropocene Myth,” Jacobin, March 30, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/.
33. Jason Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I,” Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 (2017).
34. Erik Swyngedouw, “Anthropocenic Promises,” lecture at the CERI, Sciences Po Paris, France, June 2, 2014.
35. Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–165.
36. Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene.
37. STUK, Disposal of Nuclear Waste Guide YVL D.5/15 (2014).
38. Anna Weichselbraun, “Not Talking about Disarmament at the IAEA,” Anthropology News, July 19, 2018.
39. Michael Madsen, Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (Films Transit International, 2010).
40. Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Burying Uncertainty: Risk and the Case against Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Kristin Shrader-Frechette, “Mortgaging the Future: Dumping Ethics with Nuclear Waste,” Science & Engineering Ethics 11 (2005): 518–520.
41. Brian Bloomfield and Theo Vurdubakis, “The Secret of Yucca Mountain: Reflections on an Object in Extremis,” Society & Space 23, no. 5 (2005).
42. Benford, Deep Time. For an anthropological perspective on WIPP, see Vincent Ialenti, “Waste Makes Haste: How a Campaign to Speed up Nuclear Waste Shipments Shut Down the WIPP Long-term Repository,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 74, no. 4 (2018).
43. Peter Galison and Robb Moss, directors, Containment (film, 2015).
44. Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018).
45. K. M. Trauth, S. C. Hora, and R. V. Guzowski, Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Sandia National Laboratories (SAND-92-1382, 1993).
46. David Farrier, “Deep Time’s Uncanny Future Is Full of Ghostly Human Traces,” Aeon, October 31, 2016, https://aeon.co/ideas/deep-time-s-uncanny-future-is-full-of-ghostly-human-traces.
47. John Playfair, “Of Dr. James Hutton,” in The Works of John Playfair (London: George Ramsay, 1822 [1805]).
48. Michael Tomko, “Varieties of Geological Experience: Religion, Body, and Spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology,” Victorian Poetry 42, no. 2 (2004): 113–133.
49. Vincent Ialenti, “Adjudicating Deep Time: Revisiting the United States’ High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository Project at Yucca Mountain,” Science & Technology Studies 27, no. 2 (2014).
50. Isabelle Stengers, “Accepting the Reality of Gaia,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. C. Hamilton, F. Gemenne, C. Bonneuil (London: Routledge, 2015).
51. Breakthrough Institute, “Breakthrough Dialogue 2015: The Good Anthropocene” (2015), https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/breakthrough-dialogue-2015.
52. Shawn Lawrence Otto, “Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy,” Scientific American, November 1, 2012, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antiscience-beliefs-jeopardize-us-democracy/.
53. Tom Nichols, “The Death of Expertise,” Tomnichols.net (blog), December 11, 2013, https://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/.
54. Decca Aitkenhead, “Peter Higgs: I Wouldn’t Be Productive enough for Today’s Academic System,” Guardian, June 12, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system.
55. Richard van Noorden, “Publishers Withdraw More than 120 Gibberish Papers,” Nature, February 24, 2014, http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763.
56. R. F. Harris, Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
57. David Graeber, “Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 6, 2018.
58. “Peak higher ed means we’ve reached the maximum size that colleges and universities can support. … There’s a qualitative aspect to all of this, namely that a lot of Americans think higher ed is in crisis. Increasing numbers of us are skeptical of its value, terrified of student loan debt, don’t think college is needed for many jobs, etc. While anti-higher education feelings used to be a specialty of the political right, they’ve now crossed over into Democratic territory (cf. Paul Krugman’s recent complaint, among many other examples). This is not an atmosphere likely to send rising numbers of people to campus.” Bryan Alexander, “Peak Education 2013,” BryanAlexander.org (blog), September 18, 2013, https://bryanalexander.org/uncategorized/peak-education-2013/.
59. Mick Krever, “Has America Lost Its Ability to Dream Big?” CNN.com, February 11, 2014.
60. Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, “Trump Proposes Change to Environmental Rules to Speed up Highway Projects, Pipelines and More,” Washington Post, January 9, 2020.
61. Eurobarometer 62, Public Opinion in the European Union: National Report Finland (2004), http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb82/eb82_first_en.pdf.
62. Annukka Berg, “The Discursive Dimensions of a Decent Deal: How Nuclear Energy Evolved from Environmental Enemy to Climate Remedy in the Parliament of Finland,” in The Renewal of Nuclear Power in Finland, ed. Matti Kojo and Tapio Litmanen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 97, 114.
63. Tapio Litmanen, “The Temporary Nature of Societal Risk Evaluation: Understanding the Finnish Nuclear Decisions,” in The Renewal of Nuclear Power in Finland, 192, 198.
64. Matti Kojo, “The Revival of Nuclear Power in a Strong Administrative State,” in The Renewal of Nuclear Power in Finland, 235.
65. Markku Lehtonen, “Reactions to Fukushima in Finland, France and the UK: Rupture or Continuity in the Nuclear Techno-Politics?” An STS Forum on the East Japan Disaster (2013), https://fukushimaforum.wordpress.com/.
66. Biljana Markova, “Finland Welcomes Disaster Risk Review,” United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, July 14, 2014, http://www.unisdr.org/archive/38562.
67. Nic Newman, “Overview and Key Findings of the 2016 Report,” Oxford’s Reuters Institute (2016), http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2016/overview-key-findings-2016/.
68. Elina Kestilä-Kekkonen and Peter Söderlund, “Political Trust and Institutional Performance: Evidence from Finland 2004–2013,” Scandinavian Political Studies 39, no. 2 (2016): 138–160.
69. Erik Kain, “The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System,” Forbes, May 2, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/05/02/the-finland-phenomenon-inside-the-worlds-most-surprising-school-system/.
70. Laura Iisakka, ed., Social Capital in Finland: Statistical Review (Statistics Finland, 2006), https://www.stat.fi/tup/julkaisut/tiedostot/isbn_950-467-602-2_en.pdf.
71. Tomi Kankainen, “Voluntary Associations and Trust in Finland,” Research on Finnish Society 2 (2009): 5–7.
72. Donal Carbaugh, Michael Berry, and Marjatta Nurmikari-Berry, “Coding Personhood Through Cultural Terms and Practices: Silence and Quietude as a Finnish ‘Natural Way of Being,’” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 25, no. 3 (2006).
73. Evgenie Bogdanov, “The Principle of Trust,” Helsinki Times, December 20, 2012, http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/columns/columns/expat-view/4825-the-principle-of-trust.html.
74. Rebecca Libermann, “Few Fukushima Fears for the Finns,” This Is Finland, May 23, 2011.
75. Richard Black, “Nuclear Waste Plan Hangs on Trust,” BBC News, September 21, 2010, http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11378889.
76. Richard Black, “Finland Buries Its Nuclear Past,” BBC News, April 27, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4948378.stm.
77. Martti Kalliala, Jenna Sutela and Tuomas Toivonen, Solution 239–246 Finland: The Welfare Game (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011).
78. Litmanen, “Temporary Nature of Societal Risk Evaluation”; Ari Lampinen, “An Analysis of the Justification Arguments in the Application for the New Nuclear Reactor in Finland,” in The Renewal of Nuclear Power in Finland.
79. Case Pyhäjoki, “Artistic Reflections on Nuclear Influence,” Call for Participants, Bioart Society, May 31, 2013, https://
80. Newman, Digital News Report.
81. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Press, 2005).
82. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
83. Brand, Clock of the Long Now.