[EcoDharma] ACTIVE HOPE Chapter Eight

[Naiko]

We conclude Part Two with Chapter Eight, A Larger View of Time.

This chapter describes our culture’s and industrialized economy’s myopic focus on maximizing short term gains (and underpricing risk), likening this to a Ponzi scheme, and explores how we might reexpand our concept of time. For example, the authors highlight how industrialized overfishing led to the collapse of Northwestern Atlantic cod in the span of a few decades. In contrast, when Oxford University’s New College dining hall was built in 1379 foresters planted a grove of oaks on college land, knowing it would take several hundred years for them to grow to the size needed to replace the roof.

Time is speeding up, the authors contend, as a result of economic success measured as speed of growth and computer technology providing the instantaneous data that drives it.

The Cost of Speed (a sprint can’t be sustained):
* Short term benefits outweigh long-term costs.
* We don’t see disasters coming our way.
* Short term timescapes are self-reinforcing.
* We export problems to the future.
* Short-term timescapes diminish the meaning and purpose of our lives.

The second half of the chapter encourages us to contemplate the full span of time on earth and our species’ time on earth, backwards and forwards, from multiple viewpoints. Do you think of yourself as one point family line? Can you see your as an ancestor looking out for those who will come after you?

The authors write, “ Ecological intelligence involves thinking in terms of deep time—a temporal context that includes our whole story…given our technologies, our actions have consequences, extending millions, even billions of years. Take the thousand tons of depleted uranium weaponry used in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cancer causing aerosol it leaves behind has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. That is as long as the age of the Earth.”

If you wish, try the following exercises:
Letter from the Seventh Generation
Letter to the Future


Here are a couple of interesting links. The first is a short video of the history of the earth conceived as 24 hours (I couldn’t find one that represented human history as 24 hours). The second is about the scientific evidence for damage we’re causing future generations.

4.5 Billion Years in 24 Hours


https://www.nrdc.org/bio/jennifer-sa...%20generations.

How do you imagine we might plan with future generations in mind? I feel quite cynical that caution will ever outweigh the allure of a quick profit and our inability to comprehend to effects of actions we can’t see.

Gassho,
Naiko
st

[Doshin]

Naiko you provided a very good summary and the video you shared is a good representation of “deep time.” When we are so occupied by our own short history on this planet it is difficult to fathom how long the earth has been here and all the life that came before and most now gone.

The Seventh Generation is a good analogy to discuss the future and our responsibility for those to come. There are good efforts among some to provide for the future. Examples are the advocates for sustainable agriculture and climate change, and even setting aside lands to maintain ecosystems for future generation. However many are focused on the now and how it will benefit them. You see the attitude around us and. I wonder how many truly understand the consequences for their grandchildren? Is that even a concern to them?

From the perspective of one who worked on wildlife conservation, it is very apparent that many in the past in North America were most interested in the short term gains from Bison hides for the market, eliminating wolves and other predators that preyed on livestock, and the commercial hunting of other species for fashion and food. Tools available to them helped to all but eliminate many species and the past hundred years or so have been spent restoring their numbers. However some species went extinct and could not be brought back.

My question for this Chapter is the same as the previous one, how do we get the majority to care and plan for the Seventh Generation and beyond?

Doshin
St

[paulashby]

In our capitalist Wall Street system today's gain often = tomorrow's pain.
This chapter is a powerful sermon on the direct result from greed, power and willful
ignorance about the future. The karma bills are coming due with species extinction,
desperation caused immigration, climate change, the dying ocean and 3 billion people
who lack the food they need for this day.
My hope is that I notice younger generations do care and are willing to make sacrifices
that have not happened among other generations in power.
I am also part of the problem because I want to install solar power at home but I need to
wait 10 years until the mortgage is paid off. The world is not going to wait for humans
to get their act together...maybe we only get 7 or 8 seconds in global history.

Gassho, Paul Ashby sat lah

[Kokuu]

Thank you, Naiko! This was a really interesting chapter. I have been hearing/reading about the earth and human existence as a 24 hour period since the 80s when I started being interested in environmental issues, but it still shocks me every time that the period of human existence is so vastly short compared to the lifespan of the planet, and even within the length of time that humans have walked the earth, that it is in the last tiny part of that when the vast majority of the damage has been done.

The timescale of nuclear waste is absolutely shocking and I remember reading that there is real concern about this as how do you even begin to set appropriate warning signals for a few thousand years in the future, let alone a few million? Language clearly evolves too fast, so the thinking is to use symbols, but will images warning of radiation still be understood?

In his books on trasitioning from a carbon-based economy, the activist and writer Rob Hopkins talks about how it has taken millions of years to build up the carbon reserves of oil and gas that we are now burning through, and likens it to if we worked our whole lifetime to build up our savings, and then spent it all in one day. Not only that, but that we expected to still be able to keep spending at that rate. We have used huge amounts of energetic resources over the course of one or two centuries, with little thought to either the sustainability or damage of that.

The seventh ancestor idea is a very good one, although at present it doesn't even seem that we need to look that far ahead with the younger generation often stating very forcefully that they feel they are being left to pick up the mess of those who have come before and burned through resources. And I sadly have to admit that I am one of those who has done that.

You would hope that people would care about the next generation, and the one beyond that (their grandchildren) that they will probably live to see but even that often doesn't happen and the reason for that is that Business as Usual has a very good get out clause - future technology will save us. This future technology, such as carbon capture and storage, is factored into the equation before it even exists. It is like counting on winning the lottery when you make your annual budget. Profits are in the now, cleaning up the mess is left to the future. And, to be honest, most people are happy with that so they don't question it.

Doshin's question of how we get people to care and plan for the seventh generation is an aposite one in a world where it seems that everything is incredibly short-term and more and more is increasingly demanded in the now. Talking about the vertical span of history and asking ourselves to think generations ahead seems like a crucial part of that. But it is not a message that Business as Usual, either in its corporate or political form, wishes to promote.

I really really wish I had an answer. But, at present, I really don't. Reading this book is, however, making me think about what a solution might look like, and that is at least moving in the right direction.

Thank you all for your friendship and practice.

[Tairin]

Thank you Naiko

I like this chapter a lot. I love the wisdom of considering our actions on the seventh generation. Too much of our thinking is very short term. Most people are maybe considering a few years into the future. Shockingly I find that even some of my peers haven’t considered even far enough into their future to consider retirement. They continually trade their own future for the present. Both my set of grandparents lived and struggled through the Great Depression. You could see and hear in their lives they need to consider the future.

One thing I find truly frustrating about Canadian politics (and I suspect this is true of other democracies) is the short term thinking. How many times have we elected leaders who implement a policy only to have the next party come in and undo it all? Look to the seventh generation? We can’t even look out a few years? Sometimes I admire countries like China who can at least enact 25 year plans and stick to them.

The thing about the seventh generation concept is that it is built into those indigenous cultures. How do we get our culture to be forward thinking like that? How many people will sacrifice for the next couple of generations? I certainly consider my son and his generation in my thinking. I might think about my potential grandchildren. It starts getting pretty abstract after that.

The video of Earth’s history in 24 hours is humbling. We humans tend to think of ourselves as a big furry deal but the reality is that Earth did very well without us for the vast majority of its existence and I suspect will do very well without us once we are gone.

Thank you for the article on the toxic chemicals exposure. That was sobering.

Ultimately I think Kokuu is right. Even as the evidence mounts people are holding out hope that technology will save us. It might save some of us but I think the real antidote is for us to evolve as a species and a society beyond our current BAU approach to life.


Tairin
Sat today and lah

[aprapti]

thank you all for your thoughts. Mine are quite the same as Kokuu and Tairin..
Someone said once: we have to be optimistic, because it is too late to be pessimistic..
but its a tough job

aprapti


sat

[Kokuu]

One thing I find truly frustrating about Canadian politics (and I suspect this is true of other democracies) is the short term thinking. How many times have we elected leaders who implement a policy only to have the next party come in and undo it all? Look to the seventh generation? We can’t even look out a few years? Sometimes I admire countries like China who can at least enact 25 year plans and stick to them.

That is an interesting point, Tairin. When I was a biologist, I had colleagues in the Czech Republic and they said that in many ways things were much more stable during the years of communist government as long-term planning was so much easier to put in place. For them, that applied to scientific research as well as everything else. Democracy clearly has many advantages in giving people a say in the governance of their country but it can definitely be seen to lead to short-termism in which politicians rarely look beyond the next election cycle. Why bother to look to environmental issues that are decades away in that scenario?

Someone said once: we have to be optimistic, because it is too late to be pessimistic..
but its a tough job

You are right there!


Gassho
Kokuu
-sattoday-