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

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.

In the words of novelist Richard Powers, trees teach us about ‘life at the speed of wood’.21 The art of long-term thinking may lie in the capacity to think in ‘tree time’, a scale of hundreds and thousands of years that can open our minds to the depths of time.

They are a majority condemned to suffer in silence.

For Wells, the perspective of geological time called for ‘the discovery of the future’. This would require a new science, a kind of temporal mirror image of geology ‘to throw a searchlight of inference forward instead of backward’, which would help predict the future by ‘seeking for operating causes instead of for fossils’.

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 greed for speed embodied in the factory clock signalled the triumph of linear time. Now it was the artificial construct of minutes and seconds that mattered rather than the natural cycles of the moon or seasons. The long-term future began to fade away as the present loomed ever larger.

S-curves can be found throughout the living world, from the growth of an ant colony and the spread of cancer cells to the growth of a forest or your children’s feet. Such patterns are equally prevalent in human systems. Empires and economies, dictatorships and democracies, social movements and fashion fads – all of them in the end succumb to the lo

The goal of one-planet thriving has been reinforced by a growing recognition that human beings are not separate from nature but an interdependent part of the living planetary whole.

There may no other moment in history when the actions of the present have had such monumental consequences for the future. We are now faced with one of the most urgent social questions of the twenty-first century: what obligations and responsibilities do we have to the generations who will succeed us?