The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World

A growing number of business leaders are not only experts at ‘greenwashing’ (making unsubstantiated environmental claims for their companies) but also in what I think of as ‘longwashing’ (forging a long-term strategy primarily for the benefit of the firm’s financial performance rather than for the welfare of tomorrow’s world).

We must accept the reality that our personal stories from birth to death, and all the achievements and tragedies of human civilisation, will barely register in the annals of cosmological time.

Cathy Haynes has created Stereochron Island, a campaign to found a new state without clocks in a London park, which endeavours to return its citizens to a cyclical relationship with solar time.

Nation states are a recent historical invention and have only been the dominant form of political organisation for the past two centuries. Cities, in contrast, are the greatest and most enduring social technology ever invented by humankind.

The war for time has also severed our links with the ecological choreography of the planet, formed by natural cycles of eternal return. We have broken the circle and put a line in its place: the forward thrust of the arrow of time. Its direction of travel has been propelled by artificial cycles of our own making.

But then, thanks to reading Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken, I came to realise that the hundreds of thousands of environmental organisations around the world effectively operate as a massive decentralised religion, each worshipping the same deity that has been venerated by indigenous peoples for so long: Mother Earth.

History tells us that collective action works. Yet drawing a strict line between individual and communal endeavours is a false dichotomy. Our personal actions are not a pointless drop in the ocean, for the simple reason that their ripple effects can turn into waves.

Moreover, the studies show that thinking about death and how we want to be remembered when we are gone can have enormous social benefits by helping to forge a sense of intergenerational care and responsibility. This is very much counter to the culture of death denial that pervades Western society. We expend enormous energy shielding ourselves from

Having a picture of the potential long-range pathways in our minds is essential mental scaffolding for negotiating our collective and personal journeys into the future.

This may be the ultimate historical lesson of the Great Stink: that radical long-term planning can be kickstarted by a crisis. It is the essence not of cathedral thinking but what I think of as ‘sewer thinking’. Sometimes nothing but a crisis can shake dominant actors and institutions out of their slumber. It’s a lesson absolutely understood by act