One of the things I love about canyon country is the ability to see geologic time at play. Millions of years of rock formation are visible at a glance. Sand accretes and erodes and accretes once again. I like this new author at 13.7 and agree that deep time thinking must become our collective task. QUOTE: At my own academic home base, Cornell University, an archaeology course has challenged students to imagine the Cornell campus as it would look 1,000 years from now. A course named Global Weirding: Climate Change & Culture has challenged freshmen to explore how philosophers musings on awe and the sublime could alter how we view climate change, the Anthropocene and deep time. And Cornell Cinema has shown Michael Madsens 2010 Into Eternity, a documentary film about Finlands nuclear wastes multi-millennial futures. Climate change and sustainability debates have meanwhile nudged entire populations toward thinking inter-generationally across centuries and, sometimes, even across millennia. Debates about biodiversity and (human) extinction have laid bare the potential irreversibility of todays environmental problems. And high-level nuclear wastes remarkably long-term risks have led to the establishment of regulations — as in the United States now-inactive Yucca Mountain repository project — that have drawn legal rules one million years into the future. In short, engaging with such radically long-term timespans is no longer just for the astrophysicists, theologians, paleontologists, geologists, evolutionary biologists, or archaeologists among us. It has become our collective task.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 15:24:03 +0000
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