The Daily Planet #123: Deep Time Impermanence

From Frederic Hanusch's "The Politics of Deep Time":

The Politics of Deep Time

Cambridge Core - Environmental Policy, Economics and Law - The Politics of Deep Time

How societies know about and perceive time on the one side, and how they are organized and govern themselves on the other side thus depend on each other. Societal relations regarding knowledge of the timeframes of the Earth’s and the Universe’s existence changed during the course of history and will likely be subject to change in the future. How societies perceive their relationship to these large timeframes fundamentally changes worldviews. Depending on societies’ perception of the Earth’s age, whether it is some thousand or some billion years old, their self-conception and politics differ. When it comes to such vast amounts of time, which may be measurable but are yet so unfamiliar that they can barely be comprehended, the way in which relationships with these are shaped become particularly important. This characterizes deep time.

Deep time is a political and civilizational event. A society’s sense of time is inseparable from its sense of order, because the horizons within which it places itself help determine what it values, what it fears, and what it believes it owes to the future. A world organized around a few thousand years will imagine itself very differently from one that understands Earth as four and a half billion years old and the universe as older still.

Our sense of self will be different if we imagine ourselves against the backdrop of deep time.

Further, that temporal imagination is part of the metabolic infrastructure of a civilization. How we know time shapes how we organize extraction, reproduction, memory, responsibility, and governance. The Holocene permitted a human politics largely forgetful of planetary time because the stability of the climate could be mistaken for permanent shelter. But the Anthropocene has shattered that illusion.

Suddenly, deep time is no longer an abstract geological backdrop!