The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
If only we could all breathe the air that our children and grandchildren will be struggling to breathe in the future. If only we could feel the heat, feel the hunger, feel the insecurity they might face.
Roman Krznaric • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
They are a majority condemned to suffer in silence.
Roman Krznaric • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
With this ambition in mind, my partner and I now give our electoral votes to our 11-year-old twins: we scrutinise the party manifestos, watch political debates and discuss the issues together, and then they instruct us how to vote. Will the intergenerational
Roman Krznaric • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
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.
Roman Krznaric • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
Just as a person appears smaller and smaller the further from us they stand, discounting gives smaller and smaller weight to their interests the further in the future they stand.
Roman Krznaric • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
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’.
Roman Krznaric • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
according to anthropologist Wade Davis, we are also surrounded by an ‘ethnosphere’ that provides the cultural air in which we breathe. It contains the swirl of ideas, beliefs, myths and attitudes that are prevalent in society, and that constitute the worldviews shaping how we think and act.
Roman Krznaric • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
Our phones were turned off and our only timekeepers were the rhythmic beat of our hammers and the sun moving slowly across the sky.
Roman Krznaric • The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World
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.