Our phones were turned off and our only timekeepers were the rhythmic beat of our hammers and the sun moving slowly across the sky.

‘We are the first generation to know that we face unprecedented global environmental risks, but at the same time we are the last generation with a significant chance to do something about it,’ warns the earth system scientist Johan Rockström.

There is an Apache saying, ‘We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.’

The problem is just that we don’t do it all that well. Unsurprisingly, some people have already learned to do it well, from indigenous communities who use seventh-generation decision-making to engineers who design bridges that last a century and cosmologists steeped in the mysteries of deep time. Most of us, however, are like old dogs struggling to

We might begin our journeys towards deep time with a practice inspired by the Long Now Foundation that is powerful in its simplicity: placing a zero in front of the year every time we write the date. I am writing these words in 02019. With just a single extra digit – echoing one of Black Elk’s whirling circles – we can start to imagine tens of thou

Temporal vision seldom extends further than a decade, although there are exceptions, such as NASA’s 30-year space exploration programme, the Chinese government’s 35-year National Plans and long-term seed banks. In general, the public future goes dark after around three decades. In 2020, it is difficult to find any governments, corporations or inter

As the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano remarked, ‘Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.’

The most likely trajectory is Reform, where we respond to global crises but in an inadequate and piecemeal way that merely extends the curve outwards, to a greater or lesser extent. We manage to maintain our current civilisational pathway, with all its existing problems and inequalities, for some decades or possibly longer, but eventually hit an in

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