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    Deep Time Reckoning

    How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now

    Part of One Planet

    Author Vincent Ialenti
    Foreword by Marcia Bjornerud
    Ebook
    The MIT Press
    On sale Sep 22, 2020 | 200 Pages | 9780262359351
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    A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth.

    We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future--to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now.
    SERIES FOREWORD vii
    FOREWORD BY MARCIA BJORNERUD ix
    PREFACE xiii
    INTRODUCTION: EMBRACING DEEP TIME LEARNING 1
    1 HOW TO RIDE ANALOGIES ACROSS DEEP TIME 45
    2 HOW FAR FUTURE WORLDS SPROUT FROM SIMPLE
    REPEATING PATTERNS 69
    3 HOW TO ZOOM IN AND OUT ON DEEP TIME FROM
    DIFFERENT ANGLES 93
    4 HOW TO FACE DEEP TIME EXPERTISE'S MORTALITY 119
    CONCLUSION: ESCAPING SHALLOW TIME DISCIPLINE 143
    A DEEP TIME RECKONING LEXICON 157
    NOTES 165
    INDEX
    Vincent Ialenti is MacArthur Assistant Research Professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.
    Vincent Ialenti View titles by Vincent Ialenti
    "Imagine yourself as an ancestor of people living ten thousand or a hundred thousand years in the future. Ialenti focuses on these unfathomable timescales through the lens of radioactive waste and illuminates how readjusting our time horizon underlies our survival." – Ruth DeFries, Denning Family University Professor of Sustainable Development, Columbia University; author of What Would Nature Do?

    "Finland’s nuclear waste safety case project is one of the most extraordinarily large-minded human endeavors. Reading Deep Time Reckoning is, likewise, a mind-expanding experience. Both sober and open to wonder, Vincent Ialenti makes deep time tangible." – David Farrier, author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

    "Ialenti captures a world of possibilities, a future that is not as gloomy as it looks to many. In a secularized world of short-term profit-making, Ialenti points to deep time, inviting the reader to explore alternative futures and timescales in order to plot a way out of our current ecological predicaments." – Kate Brown, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, MIT; author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

    About

    A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth.

    We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future--to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now.

    Table of Contents

    SERIES FOREWORD vii
    FOREWORD BY MARCIA BJORNERUD ix
    PREFACE xiii
    INTRODUCTION: EMBRACING DEEP TIME LEARNING 1
    1 HOW TO RIDE ANALOGIES ACROSS DEEP TIME 45
    2 HOW FAR FUTURE WORLDS SPROUT FROM SIMPLE
    REPEATING PATTERNS 69
    3 HOW TO ZOOM IN AND OUT ON DEEP TIME FROM
    DIFFERENT ANGLES 93
    4 HOW TO FACE DEEP TIME EXPERTISE'S MORTALITY 119
    CONCLUSION: ESCAPING SHALLOW TIME DISCIPLINE 143
    A DEEP TIME RECKONING LEXICON 157
    NOTES 165
    INDEX

    Author

    Vincent Ialenti is MacArthur Assistant Research Professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.
    Vincent Ialenti View titles by Vincent Ialenti

    Praise

    "Imagine yourself as an ancestor of people living ten thousand or a hundred thousand years in the future. Ialenti focuses on these unfathomable timescales through the lens of radioactive waste and illuminates how readjusting our time horizon underlies our survival." – Ruth DeFries, Denning Family University Professor of Sustainable Development, Columbia University; author of What Would Nature Do?

    "Finland’s nuclear waste safety case project is one of the most extraordinarily large-minded human endeavors. Reading Deep Time Reckoning is, likewise, a mind-expanding experience. Both sober and open to wonder, Vincent Ialenti makes deep time tangible." – David Farrier, author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

    "Ialenti captures a world of possibilities, a future that is not as gloomy as it looks to many. In a secularized world of short-term profit-making, Ialenti points to deep time, inviting the reader to explore alternative futures and timescales in order to plot a way out of our current ecological predicaments." – Kate Brown, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, MIT; author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

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