This book is a response to two overlapping crises—one ecological, the other intellectual. The first is the Anthropocene: a name proposed for a troubled time in Earth’s history ushered in by human transformations of our planet’s climate, erosion patterns, extinctions, atmosphere, rock record, and more. The second is the deflation of expertise: what happens when political power is commonly gained through populist mockery of expert authority, experts’ voices are too often drowned out by the noisy clamors of knee-jerk tweets and self-published blogs, and adepts’ inquisitive spirits are frequently dulled by new corporate-managerial reforms and constrained by bureaucratic protocols.
The first crisis, I will argue, challenges entire populations to reimagine their ways of thinking, acting, and relating to better sync with the Earth’s environment’s radical long term. It calls us to become more skilled deep time reckoners. This means repositioning our lives, ideas, and societies within wider time spans—better squaring our drives for short-term gains with the long-term well-being of our species. Yet the second crisis creates new obstacles to this. Today, it is increasingly difficult to put forth bold, evidence-driven, intellectually ambitious visions of the Earth’s future, given widespread skepticism toward 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.
With these hurdles in view, this book argues that hearing out the world’s most long-sighted experts should be step one in a fascinating, yet gravely important, trek toward widening our intellects’ timescales in times of ecological downturn. This means opening our ears to astrophysicists, geologists, historians, cosmologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, archivists, theologians, paleontologists, nuclear waste scientists, climatologists, philosophers, archaeologists, and other long-term thinkers. A bit like Sun Tzu’s fifth-century BCE treatise The Art of War—a practical guide for cultivating a military general’s mentality—Deep Time Reckoning is a practical guide in the art of long-termism.
I write this guide as a cultural anthropologist. From 2012 to 2014, I spent thirty-two months living and conducting fieldwork in Finland. I was doing research abroad for a PhD program at Cornell University. Over these months, I recorded many interviews among experts who used the toolkits of laboratory science, government regulation, computer modeling, geotechnical engineering, corporate planning, and office life to make ambitious forecasts of far-future worlds. Most of my informants were involved with or had something to say about Finland’s nuclear waste repository project at Olkiluoto. Their goal was to permanently bury radioactive waste from the country’s nuclear power plants. Striving to contain multimillennial half-lives, these experts reckoned with deep time. They forecasted geological, hydrological, and ecological events that could occur over the coming tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. Like other anthropologists doing years of fieldwork in cultures unlike their own, my mission was to uncover kernels of wisdom that could, hopefully, widen people’s worldviews in my own or other societies. This book is the outcome of my journey. Its aim is simple: to glean, from Finland’s nuclear waste experts, long-termist sensibilities that any of us can adopt to help resist today’s dual crises of ecology and expertise.
Deep Time Reckoning is what anthropologists call an ethnography. It is a description and analysis of my fieldwork findings and interpretations. As an ethnography, though, it is unusual. I have not written it mainly for fellow social scientists, humanities scholars, or nuclear researchers. This book is for the educated public, expert and lay alike. It requires no prior knowledge of anthropology or nuclear issues—just a little patience in following me and my informants into far-future Finlands. We all live in times shaken by populist unrest, fractious social division, out-of-touch elites, and unraveling trust between experts and laypeople. As I see it, the last thing these unsettled times need is yet another alienating academic tome, hiding its best ideas behind impenetrable jargon. What’s needed, rather, are more stable bridges between the social and natural sciences, experts and nonexperts, and diverse cultures inhabiting a damaged planet that, for many, feels less and less like a friendly global village each day.
So, Deep Time Reckoning is about more than just Finland’s nuclear waste program. It aims to provide food for thought anywhere that taking a long view becomes useful. This could include projects of biodiversity conservation, information archiving, climate change mitigation, city planning, natural resource extraction, infrastructure security, digital technology obsolescence, landscape architecture, human mobility planning, land management, and beyond. After all, as the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise take hold, we all have something to teach and something to learn. We all must embark, each in our own ways, on personal journeys of long-termist learning. Along the way, we must never fool ourselves into thinking our intellectual growth is complete.
Fortunately, my anthropological fieldwork has left me optimistic that human hearts, minds, and technologies can grow to secure better ecological tomorrows. My optimism, however, remains guarded. Placing an abiding-but-measured faith in science, technology, and intellectual inquiry is vital, but this faith must always be reinforced with humility, hard work, strong oversight, ethical self-examination, restraint, and self-critique. The same goes for our abilities to reckon with deep geological timescales. It would be more than naïve to assume that Finland’s nuclear waste experts painted perfect portraits of worlds for millennia to come. They did not. In fact, many of them emphasized that their own computer models of the future, however sophisticated, were but highly educated guesses. They saw them as merely the most credible future-gazing strategies they could concoct using the best science and technology available to them at the time.
Yet it would also be naïve to deny that these experts have made, or can make, real progress in refining their long-termist techniques. Undeterred by the deflation of expertise, this book is an exercise in adopting my informants’ faith that a highly disciplined, tightly organized, well-trained, adequately funded group of experts can, in fact, inch us closer to understanding futures near and deep: our most crucial Anthropocene task. It is, in other words, an anthropological thought experiment in mimicking their worldviews, and then expressing them in print. This book’s contention is that embarking on imperfect projects to envisage far futures is, ultimately, far more enlightening than giving up or never embarking in the first place. In this spirit of adventurous learning, we can practice stretching our minds across time.
Deep Time Reckoning is a passion project that has consumed me for over twelve years. I began framing it as an undergraduate major in philosophy, politics, and law, taking a graduate-level anthropology course in ethnographic analysis at the State University of New York at Binghamton. I continued developing it in a master’s program in law, anthropology, and society at the London School of Economics, a PhD program in sociocultural anthropology at Cornell University, then as a postdoctoral fellow and now assistant research professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. I am grateful that, along the way, my research has been supported by a US National Science Foundation fellowship (GRFP 2011129751), a Mellon Fellowship from Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, a Nuclear Waste Solutions grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, plus a generous package of teaching assistantship, research assistantship, and fellowship support from Cornell’s Anthropology Department.
I thank the MIT Press’s anonymous reviewers for their wise comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, plus Beth Clevenger, Judy Feldmann, Sikina Jinnah, and Simon Nicholson for their excellent editorial work. I thank my doctoral committee—Annelise Riles, Hiro Miyazaki, and Mike Lynch—for their tremendous patience and invaluable advice. I thank Allison Macfarlane and George Washington University’s Institute for International Science & Technology Policy for providing me with an enriching academic home base for over three years. I thank the students who took my fall 2016 seminar, Nuclear Imagination: Technologies & Worlds, for their stimulating questions. I thank the Meridian 180 think tank community for the vibrant conversations we have had together since 2011. I thank Cornell’s Society for the Humanities’ 2015–2016 fellows for introducing me to so many thought-provoking ways of thinking about time. Chapter 4 of this book is an extended version of an article I wrote titled “Death & Succession among Finland’s Nuclear Waste Experts” (Physics Today 70, no. 10 [2017]: 48), adapted with permission from the American Institute of Physics. I thank Physics Today’s editors and reviewers for their helpful feedback.
Over the years, many colleagues, friends, mentors, and acquaintances have shaped my thinking through fascinating conversations, intense debates, and constructive comments on past drafts. To name a few: Joe Abdallah, Chloe Ahmann, Lindsay Bell, Eeva Berglund, Eric Budde, Craig Campbell, Adrian Currie, Britt Dahlberg, Bahram Dastmalchi, Brian Escobar, Alexander Gordon, Kelly Grotke, Karin Gustafsson, Hugh Gusterson, Doug Holmes, Lara Houston, Zach Howlett, Lei Huang, Janne Hukkinen, Nina Janasik, Timo Kaartinen, Timo Kallinen, Marianna Keisalo, Matti Kojo, Lindsay Krall, Amy Levine, Elina Lehtonen, Markku Lehtonen, Brad Lipitz, Tapio Litmanen, Yash Lodha, Austin Lord, Tim McLellan, Mary Mitchell, Martha Mundy, Brian Pekkerman, Karen Pinkus, Alain Pottage, Beth Reddy, Johan Munck af Rosenschöld, Josh Reno, Minna Ruckenstein, Antti Silvast, Alana Staiti, Magda Stawkowski, Steph Steinhardt, Jake Sullivan, Pedro de la Torre, Juha Tuunainen, John Wagner, Jeff Wall, Anna Weichselbraun, Erick White, Jake Wojtowicz, Rich Zamore, and Malte Ziewitz. Whether they realize it or not, they have each influenced this book in their own unique ways. Any errors are my own.
This book would not have been possible without the sixty-nine fieldwork informants who kindly offered me their perspectives and time. When recruiting interviewees for my study, I suggested they indicate their preference for anonymity on Cornell’s “Institutional Review Board for Research on Human Participants” consent form. The idea was that confidentiality would encourage frank and personal dialogue while also protecting their identities. I extend my deepest thanks to all the informants I cannot mention by name. The same goes for the few I can: Timo Äikäs, Mick Apted, Hannu Hänninen, Jehki Härkönen, Satu Hassi, Ari Ikonen, Tiina Jalonen, Denis Janin, Juha Kaija, Martti Kalliala, Anna Kontula, Kaisa-Leena Hutri, Michael Madsen, Lauri Muranen, Markus Olin, Barbara Pastina, Heikki Raiko, Matti Saarnisto, Timothy Schatz, Johan Swahn, and Juhani Vira. I thank Finnish nuclear waste management company Posiva Oy for giving me formal permission to conduct this research in dialogue with their experts. I thank University of Helsinki’s Finnish for Foreigners program for the language training. Special thanks are due to Christa Örn for her Finnish translation assistance.
Finally, over the past few months, Allegra Wrocklage has gone above and beyond: reading over chapter drafts, coming up with clever suggestions for revision, putting up with my daily absorption in writing, and overall being a uniquely smart, fun, and loving partner. I also thank my parents, Vin and Sharon Ialenti, for their love and support, even and especially when my decisions have led me down atypical paths. I dedicate this book to them.