Multiple Time Views

Personal View: ~100 years

Family View: ~a span of about 250 years
”When is someone you will love still going to be alive? “
Looking backward and forward, this time view includes the people you will touch within your own lifetime, from the ancestors that you have known to the descendants that you will meet. This is what Andri Snær Magnason calls the “pancake sci-fi” kitchen exercise or the “handshake of generations” in two chapters, both titled A Future Conversation, of his book On Time and Water.

Multi-generational View: ~140 to 200 years out in the future
Indigenous seven generations principle
“The entire span of human life exists within each one of us, going all the way back to the hands of the creator. In our bodies, we carry the blood of our ancestors and the seeds of the future generations. We are the living conduit of life.” ~Sherri Mitchell (Sacred Instructions)

Cathedral Thinking: ~multiple centuries timeframe
Engaging in projects that will not complete until centuries for now: examples cathedrals, Angkor Wat, Stonehenge, planting trees or the Future Library project of Katie Paterson for example.
Magnason defines “Cathedral Thinking” as the “ability to plan thirty, forty, fifty, one hundred years in the future: when one generation starts half of a cathedral, expecting the next generations to finish it in the next 300 years”

Deep Time and Geological Thinking: ~4.5 billions years time horizon
To think geologically is to hold in the mind’s eye not only what is visible at the surface but also present in the subsurface, what has been and what will be. ~Marcia Bjornerud, geologist and author of Timefulness- How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Save the World
- an appreciation of the history of the Earth and the place of humanity in it,
- having a poly-temporal view, a temporal concept that includes our whole story, our past and future, specifically understanding that our lifestyle already has an impact into the future: plastic bottles taking 450 years to decompose, CO2 staying from 300 to 1,000 years in atmosphere for example

Timefulness: also from Marcia Bjornerud
’”Timefulness’ is a clear-eyed view of our place in Time, both the past that came long before us and the future that will elapse without us”

Other Terms (from the Long Time Project):
- long-termism: the ability to predict, forecast and plan for the future, and
- long-timism: the cultivation of an attitude of care for the world beyond our lifetimes

sources and RESOURCES

Books:
- Active Hope- How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone
- On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason
- Timefulness- How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud
- All We Can Save- Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
- Sacred Instructions- Indigenous Wisdom for Living a Spirit-Based Change by Sherri Mitchell- Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset
- The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking by Roman Krznaric

Podcast: 
Interview of Andri Magnason On Time and Water on Emergence Magazine
Interview of Brian Greene This Tiny Slice of Eternity OnBeing with Krista Tippett

Videos: 
BBC video Do we need to re-think our ideas of time?
The Long Time Sessions: Timefulness: Deep Time & Geological Thinking- Interview of Marcia Bjornerud by Ella Saltmarshe from The Long Time Project
The Gifts of Uncertainty- Joanna Macy at Bioneers 2009
Roman Krznaric | The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking | Talks at Google

Articles:
- The UnderStory- Issue 25- Contours of Time - Adam Lerner
”In its essence, climate change is a story about and of time. As we touch the periphery of Deep Time we contextualize our own being and actions into something far larger and more important than what happens to direct our present gaze. Here we find the continuum rather than the edges that connect us to the whole.”
- BBC- How Art and Culture Can Help Us Rethink Time
- BBC- The Perils of Short-termism: Civilisation’s Greatest Threat
- The Guardian- Anthropocene Epoch: Have We Entered a New Phase of Planetary History?

App:  Deep Time Walk

Tools:
The Long Time Tools (from the Long Time Project)

Timefulness Practices