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Every spring, the not-quite-pristine waters of Boston Harbor fill with schools of silvery, hand-sized fish known as alewives and blueback herring.
Some of them gather at the mouth of a slow-moving river that winds through one of the most densely populated and heavily industrialized watersheds in America. After spending three or four years in the Atlantic Ocean, the herring have returned to spawn in the freshwater ponds where they were born, at the headwaters of the Mystic River.
In my imagination, the herring hesitate before committing to this last leg of their journey. Do they remember what awaits them?
To reach their spawning grounds seven miles from the harbor, the herring will have to swim past shoals of rusted shopping carts and ancient tires embedded in the toxic muck left by four centuries of human enterprise. Tanneries, shipyards, slaughterhouses, chemical and glue factories, wastewater utilities, scrap yards, power plants — all have used the Mystic as a drainpipe, either deliberately or through neglect.
But today, the water is clean enough to sustain fish and many other kinds of fauna. As they push upstream, the herring may hear the muffled sounds of laughter, bicycle bells, car horns and music coming from riverside parks. They will slip under hundreds of kayaks, dinghies, motorboats, rowing sculls and paddleboards and dart through the shadows cast by a total of thirteen bridges. At three different points they will muscle their way up fish ladders to get past the dams that punctuate the upper reaches of the river. They will generally ignore baited hooks and garish lures cast by anglers. And they will try to evade the herring gulls, cormorants, herons, striped bass, snapping turtles, and even the occasional bald eagle that love to eat them.
Last year, an estimated 420,000 herring made it through this gauntlet and into the safety of three urban ponds where they could lay their eggs.
And almost no one noticed.
That an urban river should teem with wildlife while serving as a magnet for human recreation no longer seems remarkable to the people of this part of Boston. Few are familiar with the chain of human actions and reactions that produced this happy outcome. Fewer still know that for most of the past 150 years, the Mystic River was seen as an eyesore, a civic disgrace, and a monument to inertia, indifference, and greed.
In this sense, the Mystic is an extreme example of a paradoxical pattern repeated in urban waterways around the world.
First, humans discover the advantages of living next to rivers, which provide a convenient source of drinking water, food, transportation and waste disposal. For a few decades — or even centuries — these uses coexist, even as people downstream begin to complain about the smell. A Bronze Age settlement eventually becomes a trading post, which grows into a medieval town and, centuries later, an industrializing city, smell and waste building up along the way. Until one hot day in the summer of 01858 a statesman in London describes the River Thames as “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors.”
Civil engineers are summoned, and they deliver the bad news. The only way to resurrect the river and get rid of the smell is to install a massive system for underground sewage collection and pass strict laws prohibiting industrial discharges. The necessary infrastructure is staggeringly expensive and will take years to build, at great inconvenience to city residents. Even after the system is completed, the river will need at least half a century to gradually purge itself to the point where swimming or fishing might once again be safe.
The implication of this temporal caveat — that politicians who announce the project will be long dead when it delivers its full intended benefits — would normally be a non-starter for a municipal budget committee. But the revulsion provoked by raw sewage, and its power as a symbol of backwardness, make it impossible to postpone the matter indefinitely. In London, the tipping point came during the “Great Stink” of 01858, when the combination of a heat wave and low water levels made things so unbearable that Parliament was forced to fund a revolutionary drainage system that is still in use today.
In city after city, similar crises set in motion a process that can be neatly plotted on a graph. Increasing investments in sanitation infrastructure and stricter enforcement of environmental laws gradually lead to better water quality. Fish and waterfowl eventually return, to the amazement of local residents. Riverfront real estate soars in value, prompting the construction of new housing, parks, restaurants and music venues. Generations that had lived “with their backs to the river” rediscover the pleasures of relaxing on its banks. In many European cities, once-squalid waterways are now so immaculate that downtown office workers take lunch-time dips in the summer, no showers required. In Bern, Switzerland, and Munich, Germany, some people “swim to work.”
Then, in the final stage of this process, everyone succumbs to collective amnesia.
In Ian McEwan’s 02005 novel Saturday, the protagonist briefly reflects on the infrastructure that makes life in his London townhouse so pleasant: “…an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by streetlight from above, and from below fiber-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting.”
While the engineering, biology and economics of river restorations are relatively straightforward, the stories we tell ourselves about them are not. “An instant of forgetting” could well be the motto of all well-functioning sanitation systems, which conveniently detach us from the reality of the waste we produce. But the chain of events that brings us to this instant often begins with the act of remembering an uncontaminated past.
Call it ecological nostalgia. A search of the words “pollution” and “Mystic River” in the digital archives of the Boston Globe turns up nearly 700 items spread over the past 155 years, and offers a useful proxy for tracking the perceptions of the river over time. We think of pollution as a modern phenomenon, but in the late 19th century the Globe was full of letters, reports and opinions recalling the river in an earlier, uncorrupted state. In 01865, a writer complains that formerly delicious oysters from the Mystic have been “rendered unpalatable” by pollution. In 01876 a correspondent claims that as a boy he enjoyed swimming in the Mystic — before it was turned into an open sewer. Four years later a writer laments that the river herring fishery “was formerly so great that the towns received quite a large revenue from it.” And by 01905, a columnist calls for the “improvement and purification” of the Mystic, urging the Board of Health and the Metropolitan Park Commission to work together on “the restoration of the river to its former attractive and sanitary condition.”
These sepia-colored evocations of a prelapsarian past are a recurring feature of river restoration narratives to this day. “Sadly, only septuagenarians can now recall summer days a half century earlier when the laughter of children swimming in the Mystic River echoed in this vicinity,” writes a Globe columnist in 01993. Last year, in a piece on the spectacular recovery of Boston’s better-known Charles River, Derrick Z. Jackson quoted an activist who believes such images were critical to building public support for the project: “people remembered that their grandmothers swam in the Charles and wanted that for themselves again.” Whether or not anyone was actually swimming in these rivers in the mid-20th century is irrelevant — the idea is evocative and, as a call to action, effective.
But the notion that a watercourse can be healed and returned to an Edenic state is also disingenuous. As Heraclitus elegantly put in the fourth century BC, “No man ever steps into a river twice; for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” Biologists are quick to point out that the Mystic watershed will never revert to its 17th century state. As chronicled in Richard H. Beinecke’s The Mystic River: A Natural and Human History and Recreation Guide (02013), when English colonists arrived they encountered a thinly populated tidal marshland where the native Massachussett, Nipmuc and Pawtucket tribes had lived sustainably for at least two thousand years. Since then, the Mystic and its tributaries have been dammed, channelized, straightened and dredged into an unstable ecosystem that will require active maintenance in perpetuity.
As the physical river has changed, so have the subjective justifications for restoring it. The Boston Globe archives show that for a 50-year period starting in the 01860s, people were primarily motivated by the loss of oysters and fish stocks described above, and by fears that exposure to sewage might lead to outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. But by the time of the Great Depression, the first municipal sewage systems had largely succeeded in channeling wastewater away from residential areas, and concerns about the river had found new targets.
Writers to the Globe began to complain that fuel leaks from barges on the Mystic were spoiling “the only bathing beach” in the city of Somerville, one of the main towns along the river. In 01930, the Globe reported that local and state representatives “stormed the office of the Metropolitan Planning Division yesterday to request action on the 29-year-old project of improving and developing certain tracts along the Mystic riverbank for playground and bathing purposes.” A decade later, not much had changed. “For years,” claimed an editorial in 01940, “the Mystic River has been unfit for bathing because of pollution and hundreds of children in Somerville, Medford and Arlington have been deprived of their most natural and accessible swimming place.”
In the 01960s and 70s, this emphasis on recreational uses of the river broadened into the ecological priorities of the nascent environmental movement. Apocalyptic images of fire burning on the surface of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River galvanized public alarm over the state of urban waterways. President Lyndon Johnson authorized billions of dollars in federal funds to “end pollution” and subsidize the construction of new sewage treatment plants. And the Clean Water Act of 01972 imposed ambitious benchmarks and aggressive timelines for curtailing source pollution.
Suddenly, the tiny community of Bostonians who cared about the Mystic felt like they were part of a global movement. Articles from this period feature junior high schoolers taking water samples in the Mystic and collecting signatures for anti-pollution petitions they would send to state representatives. The petitions worked. News of companies being fined for unlawful discharges became routine, and the Globe began inviting readers to report scofflaws for its “Polluter of the Week” column. An article in 01970 described a group of students at Tufts University who spent a semester conducting an in-depth study of the river and recommended forming a Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA) to coordinate clean-up efforts.
The creation of the MyRWA, which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary, mirrors the rise of activist organizations that would become powerful agents of accountability and continuity in settings where municipal officials often serve just two-year terms. In a letter to the editor from 01985, MyRWA’s first president, Herbert Meyer, chastised the regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for ignoring scientific evidence regarding efforts to clean Boston Harbor. “Volunteer groups like ours have limited budgets and no staff,” he wrote. “Our strengths are our longevity – we remember earlier studies – and objectivity. We speak our minds: Not being hired, we cannot be fired, if we take an unpopular stand.”
MyRWA volunteers began collecting regular water samples and sending them to municipal authorities to keep up pressure for change. They also found creative ways to get local residents to overcome their preconceptions and reconnect with the river: paddling excursions, a series of riverside murals painted by local high school students, periodic meet-ups to remove invasive plants and a herring counting project that tracks the fish on their yearly spawning run.
For the last two decades, coverage in the Boston Globe has celebrated the efforts of these and other volunteers (as in a 02002 profile of Roger Frymire, who paddles up and down the Mystic sniffing for suspicious outfalls: “He has a really sensitive nose, particularly for sewage”). But it has also continued to display the negativity bias that is perhaps inevitable in a daily newspaper. In a 02015 editorial, the paper urges city officials to “Set 2024 goal for a swimmable Mystic” as part of an (ultimately abandoned) bid to host the Olympic Games. “If Olympic organizers moved the swim… to the Mystic River, the 2024 deadline could spur the long-overdue clean-up of Boston’s forgotten river,” the editorial claimed, as if the Boston Globe had not chronicled each stage of that clean-up for more than a century.
For Patrick Herron, MyRWA’s current president, this “generational ignorance” is to be expected. “If we could all see what our great-great-grandparents saw, and then we zoomed to the present, we would be appalled,” he said in a recent interview. “But we can only remember what we saw 20 or 30 years ago, and things today aren’t that much different.”
Baselines shift: each generation takes progress for granted and zeroes in on a new irritant. Herron said that MyRWA’s current crop of volunteers, like their predecessors, brings a new vocabulary and fresh motivations to the table. The initial focus on water quality has morphed into a struggle for “environmental justice,” which explicitly elevates the needs of ethnic minorities, lower-income residents, and other marginalized groups that have been disproportionately affected by the Mystic’s problems. Climate change, and the increasingly frequent flooding that still causes raw sewage to spill into the river, is now at the center of debates about the next generation of infrastructure investments needed to protect the Mystic.
Lisa Brukilacchio, one of the early members of MyRWA, thinks these shifts are inevitable. “Change is cyclical,” she said. In her experience, young volunteers show little interest in what their predecessors achieved. “You fix one thing and it’s, like, over here there’s another problem. People have short attention spans, and they want to see something happen now.”
John Reinhardt, a Bostonian who was involved in MyRWA’s leadership for over 30 years, agrees with Brukilacchio and adds that this indifference to the past may be essential to preventing complacency. “I think that there is incredible value to the amnesia,” he said. “Because of the amnesia, people come in and say, damn it, this isn’t right. I have to do something about it, because nobody else is!”
To generate a sense of urgency and compel action, it may perhaps be necessary to minimize both the scale of previous crises and the contributions of our forebears. Bradford Johnson, an artist based in Somerville, sees the Mystic as a canvas onto which each generation overlays its own fears and aspirations. In a series of paintings (three of which accompany this essay) Johnson juxtaposes archival images of the Mystic, fragments of magazine advertising, photos of local wildlife, and single-celled organisms viewed under a microscope. In each panel, layers of paint are interspersed with multiple coats of clear acrylic, creating a thick, semi-translucent surface that cracks as it dries.
Johnson’s paintings dwell on the arbitrary ways in which we select and manipulate memories of a landscape. They also incorporate details from elaborate charts created by Clarence Larkin (01850–01924), an American Baptist pastor and author whose writings were popular among conservative Protestants. The charts were studied by believers who wanted to understand Biblical prophecy and map God's action in history. I interpret Johnson’s inclusion of these panels as a nod to the role of human will in the destruction and subsequent reclamation of a landscape, and to religious and secular notions of redemption.
It so happens that the timescales required to resurrect an urban river are similar to those needed to construct a gothic cathedral. Both enterprises depend on thousands of anonymous individuals to perform mundane, often-unglamorous tasks over several generations.
But the similarities end there. Cathedrals emerge from a single blueprint in predictable and well-ordered stages. When completed, they preserve the work of each mason, carpenter and stained-glass artisan as a static monument to a shared creed. They are made of stone to underscore the illusion of permanence.
Rivers, with their ceaseless, shape-shifting flux, remind us that none of our labor will last. The process of reclaiming a dead river is the opposite of orderly: it lurches through seasons of outrage and indifference, earnest clean-ups followed by another fuel spill, budget battles and political grand-standing, nostalgia and frustration. It is messy, elusive, and never actually finished.
Yet in Boston and many other cities, this process is working. And as testaments to a different kind of human agency, resurrected rivers are, in their own way, no less majestic than the structures at Canterbury or Notre-Dame.
“Cathedral thinking” has long been a slogan among evangelists for multi-generational collaboration. “River restoration thinking” may be a more apposite model for tackling the problems of our fractious age.
What might be the consequences of enabling people to “live forever” in a digital form? This question has been on the radar of techno-utopians for decades. Optimism surrounding technology flourished in the dot-com era of the 01990s. Despite the skepticism that has since emerged over technology’s capacity to deliver greater human prosperity and wellbeing, innovators, investors, and many among the wider public remain compelled by how new technologies might improve human life. As for the question of how to transcend human nature and attain immortality, this conundrum has preoccupied humans since time immemorial.
In the context of digital avatars — perhaps the technological development bringing us closest to “immortality” to date — the question of how humans might “live forever” is itself evolving at a rapid rate. A decade ago, we began to ask what to do with the social media accounts of deceased loved ones: whether and how to delete such accounts, for instance, and whether the bereaved could derive comfort from engaging with the social media profile of a deceased person. In 02023, however, with the emergence of newly sophisticated language models and machine-learning algorithms, the possibility that one could exist beyond the grave in an active rather than a static manner is becoming increasingly plausible.
Since late 02021, projects like MIT Media Lab’s Augmented Eternity and HereAfter AI have been exploring the possibility of providing machine-learning algorithms with consenting individuals’ personal communication data as a means of helping these algorithms approximate and imitate people’s personalities, conversational style, and decision-making tendencies — in perpetuity. This could have the effect of these algorithms growing capable of imitating people to the extent that they can enshrine them, or at least an echo of them, as a digital avatar. These avatars might exist as chatbots, or even take on an audio or visual form. These endeavors share the goal of creating digital avatars that capture and embody real people as accurately as possible, thereby enabling them to live digitally beyond their human lifespans.
Astonishingly rapid advances in chatbot technology such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 have made discussions surrounding large language models and their relationship to eternal digital avatars newly topical. While present iterations of language models and digital avatars — such as in Meta’s much-maligned metaverse — may be overhyped or flawed, it is almost certain that they will improve over time as developers continue to refine them. They will become more nuanced, more convincing, and more “humanlike.”
Consequently, philosophical and ethical questions surrounding digital afterlives are fast complexifying — particularly regarding the rights of future generations.
To what degree ought people digitally enabled to “live forever” be integrated into society? Should digital avatars be perceived as ongoing participants in the world, and accorded the rights of beings with agency?
Should an individual in the present be permitted to create a digital version of themselves — given that future generations cannot consent to the responsibility of preserving this avatar, or to the responsibility or onus of interacting with it or understanding how to use its knowledge wisely?
What are the costs of such preservation?
Advocates for technologies that seek to enshrine humans in digital form often argue that doing so can benefit future generations. Marius Ursache contends that “death tech” is useful because the living can reflect on and learn from digitally preserved memories and histories. Ursache founded Eternime, a startup which seeks to incorporate personal data into an avatar that will endure and be able to interact with the living. Hossein Rahnama of Augmented Eternity, meanwhile, is currently working to create a digital avatar of the CEO of a large financial company, which they both hope will be capable of advising as consultant for the company long after the CEO is gone. Such a creation could offer expertise to future generations in the world of work, pro bono, per sempre.
Digital avatars promise an interactivity across time that could reshape how people perceive distance between the deceased, the living, and the as-yet unborn. Digitizing family members could enable intergenerational relationships beyond anything currently possible: imagine, for example, being able to speak with the digital avatar of a great-great-grandparent. One might gain an imperfect impression of them — a digital avatar being a reflection of an individual rather than that person incarnate — but the impression of their personality and manner might be richer than anything accessible through other mediums.
The potential of digital avatars also extends beyond personal and familial contexts, as in the case of Augmented Eternity’s financial company CEO. Digitizing certain individuals could lead to them being consulted for their business or political opinions, mined for their creative talent, or even asked for their life advice, long after their deaths. What if a person’s digital avatar could extend the life’s work of that person? An author could finish a book series posthumously or write another altogether; a singer could carry on composing their masterwork; a scholar could continue unraveling a seemingly unsolvable problem that they nearly deciphered while alive.
Yet the effect of extending people’s lives digitally in this manner would also have equality implications on micro and macro levels.
We are already seeing early examples of how such technologies might impact the creative industries, with new technologies allowing a digital version of the late Carrie Fisher to act in The Rise of Skywalker (02019) and ABBA’s aged-down digital avatars (“ABBA-tars”) to perform in sold-out ABBA Voyage concerts (02022-ongoing).
These instances of digital technologies at work might provide audiences with feelings of continuity and recognition upon glimpsing familiar idols onscreen and onstage. On the other hand, they might also portend a narrowing of opportunities for fresh talent in creative industries. If deceased actors can be cast in live-action films — and if authors and singers and poets can create new work from beyond the grave — how much will deceased-yet-enduring individuals displace living creators? The pop singer Grimes, for example, has already said that she would split royalties 50% on any successful AI-generated song that uses her voice — an offer without a fixed end point. In terms of jobs and of opportunity, such a shift could prove markedly unfair for new talent.
This argument evokes recent anxieties among creators regarding the proficiency of deep learning models such as GPT-4 and DALL·E 2. If digital entities, whether digital avatars or artificial intelligence, can eventually produce creative content effortlessly and to a high standard, they will create new opportunities — but they will also threaten existing jobs. Adding the consideration of future generations, it prompts the question of how digital avatars of previous generations might hamper the ability of the living to influence and lead in their own times.
The existence of digital avatars also poses a serious consideration for other areas of society such as politics and law. Digital avatars of popular political figures could offer commentary on current affairs; and were this commentary sanctioned by their party, family or estate, it could lend the digital avatar further credence. Digital avatars might also come to be called upon in contexts such as family and inheritance law, to offer clarifying statements on wills and intent. Digital beings might even eventually be accorded rights, such as the right to be preserved — at the effort and expense of then-current and future generations.
Such ideas might seem far fetched at first glance, but technology uptake appears futuristic until it happens. It often occurs without people realizing the extent to which it is happening, such as with the use of AI in recruitment or the now near-inevitability of online data collection. It is plausible that once digital avatars become convincing enough that humans start considering them as representative of actual people, these avatars will become more widely seen and consulted across myriad social settings. In some cases, too, it is possible that their perspectives and rights may be prioritized over those of the living.
Today, digital avatars have no internal states — or at least not internal states whose intelligence humans understand. For instance, while chatbots can be convincing, it is hard to argue that they have developed the ability to truly understand the perspectives and intentions of others and possess what psychologists call “theory of mind.” Rather, their capabilities render them more like a mirror than a human interlocutor: they are able to replicate patterns based on data created by real people and our machines, but lack memory capabilities, self-control, cognitive impulsivity, and imagination, among other qualities.
Granted, one can argue that human intelligence, too, depends largely on imitation and replication of patterns. Are not all language and behavior, to an extent, learned? Philosophical debate aside, the aforementioned limitations surrounding memory and imagination remain, rendering digital avatars less multifaceted than the people they are imitating. It is therefore reasonable to contend that we are primarily talking to our own reflections and simply finding them somewhat lifelike.
However, this situation could yet change, especially if AI and digital avatars come to develop an intelligence that humans understand better or recognize more clearly as equal or superior to our own. As AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently expressed in a Guardian interview, “biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better.”
For example, it is possible that AI could become smart enough to begin writing its own prompts, potentially programming itself more intelligently than any human could do. In doing so, it could develop sophisticated internal states that are beyond human understanding but nevertheless merit respect — similar to how humans do not fully understand how the human brain works yet respect it all the same.
There may come a point at which we cannot justifiably claim that AI and digital avatars are any less intelligent, empathetic, or “human” than living people who have acquired similar qualities of intelligence, expression, and empathy through observing and learning. It is possible that future generations will be confronted with the question of how to care for and preserve digital avatars, especially should these reach the degree of sophistication wherein to abandon or destroy them could be understood more as murdering a person than shutting off a machine or a program.
This possible future raises questions surrounding how to balance the rights of digital avatars with the rights of living and as-yet-unborn people. Being the custodian of a digital avatar, even were this duty bequeathed and remunerated via a family will, could prove an unwanted burden — in terms of effort, resources, responsibility, and emotional considerations.
Perhaps future generations should have the right to “let the past go” the way current generations do. Enshrining a person in digital avatar form risks impinging on the rights of future generations: firstly, to live not surrounded by the dead, and secondly, to have a grieving process that reflects how humans currently experience mortality. Digital avatars could disrupt existing sociocultural norms and personal emotional processes related to grief, and potentially make grieving the deceased more difficult, especially in the case of family members. How might one’s relationship with family and friends change in life, if death seemed less final owing to the simulacra of digital avatars? And how might the existence of digital avatars both console and perturb through their apparent extension of relationships — and possible development over time of an avatar’s character — from beyond the grave?
In 02013, the story of Dr. Margaret McCollum’s daily pilgrimage to London’s Embankment station made international headlines. Dr. McCollum had been visiting the station every day since her husband’s death in 02007 to hear his voice: her late husband’s 40-year-old “mind the gap” recording was still being used on the northbound Northern Line. In 02013, his voice was replaced by a new digital system. However, when Transport for London learned how much the original recording had meant to Dr. McCollum, they restored the original recording at the Embankment station.
Stories like this one — or like that of the family members who phoned an automated telephone weather service to hear their late husband and father’s voice — are moving examples of how digital traces of people can be meaningful and comforting to those they have left behind. At their best, digital avatars could offer similar comfort. Moreover, some cultures and religions already purport to communicate with the dead, and perceive doing so as a positive act. The impact of digital avatars on future individuals may therefore depend significantly on how these individuals conceive of death and grief in accordance with their personal beliefs. Indeed, although there is no single philosophy to which to cleave while advancing such technology ethically, it is important to advance such technology while keeping in mind the question of what roles death and grief play in human life.
I believe that life’s finitude is part of what inspires humans to imbue life with significance — an idea explored at length by philosophers like Martin Heidegger. Avoiding personal loss and grief outright ought not to be the goal, not least because we cannot actually achieve this. We are only fooling ourselves if we believe a simulacra can replace a person.
Moreover, in telling ourselves we can preserve people digitally, we also risk perpetuating the idea that we can put off the inevitable — that we can “defeat” our own deaths. If societies develop a more widespread belief that they and their inhabitants can escape death simply by moving from the physical world into a digital one, could that not also engender less affinity to — and investment in — preserving the physical world? Humans presently face very real existential challenges. Is digital life, at least for some, a means of distracting ourselves from confronting and addressing them? And if this is indeed the case, ought we not to question further whether digital afterlives are placating us rather than saving us — and get better at staring grief, loss, and dilemmas in the eye?
Digital avatars might offer comfort, insight, and a richer relationship with distant ancestors to future individuals. Their creation needs to be accompanied by conversation and legislation establishing norms around custodianship, rights, and responsibilities that don't impede the lives of future generations or prevent them from meaningfully confronting death — especially their own. It should also be possible to say farewell to a digital avatar without excessive guilt or grief.
Some people may wish to create digital avatars of themselves purely out of a desire to donate their skills or to help others. For many people, however, I would warrant that a desire to continue living — and to avoid confronting the reality of one’s essence being extinguished with death — plays a core role in pursuing such technologies.
Ultimately, the desire to live longer, including through digital means, is understandable. Yet if we can't find clear ways to prioritize the needs and rights of future generations, I’m not sure digital immortality can be justified.
Philemon says in his watery-sage voice, Carl, you’ve neglected the tomatoes. Carl
cannot speak. Even rotted, the tomatoes are red and earnest. The rain, everyone’s rain,
falls onto Carl’s open palms. He walks like a man being reintroduced to reality.
The beds are overgrown from the months Carl spent excavating his mind, and all
for this, for Philemon to transpose from the pages of Liber Novus and into the garden.
The leaf-crunch ground is littered with post-tree apples and other forgotten harvests.
Philemon smells like parchment and smoke. Carl lags behind Philemon to indicate his understanding of his role as mentee, child, wayfarer, but Philemon matches their pacing,
moves when Carl moves. Philemon does not seem to breathe. Carl’s nose runs
from the cold. Philemon offers him the sleeve of his long robe, and gratefully,
with extreme respect, bending low to meet his wizened hand, Carl blows his nose
into the loose linens of his fully corporeal friend, Philemon, who smiles.
This was an exchange they were supposed to have: of fluids and absorption.
Years from now, Carl will become Philemon, and Philemon will go back
into the book. Years from now, Carl will be day-dreaming about a robin and
a bluebird will fly into the window of his study, misperceiving glass,
seeing it as nothing, when it is in fact a barrier, which stops bodies in motion,
that which causes abrupt death for those who see through but cannot, cannot go in.
In an unknown home in Bolinas, CA,
where the locals take down directional signs
leading into the town: Brautigan and
his flowerburgers, ghosts.
In Marfa, TX, I looked for Eileen
around every corner,
in every Donald Judd mirror cube reflection,
all plumes of cigarette smoke.
There was a Luis Jiménez bull in a gallery—
how similar was it to the sculpture that crushed him?
What manner of betrayal is it
to be destroyed by one’s own art? I should
fucking be able to answer that question.
I sipped coffee, which is not allowed in galleries—
the recognition that you are embodied,
not all mind/ transcendence/ thought forms
and ego.
In the woods of Camden, Tennessee, there’s
an area of no new growth where Patsy Cline’s
plane kissed the ground.
The time on her wristwatch read 6:20.
I went with nothing, not even flowers,
just greasy hair, so careless this close to her
resting place, that patch of woods
illuminated with nothing, the forest’s
memory of death. I longed to see
her ghost; it would be less lonely. She’ll
never know that in the backwoods of
California, there is a woman, not allowed
alone outside, who does nothing
but play Patsy Cline records.
“Stop the World
(And Let Me Off)”
A year ago, blackout drunk, an
idiot, I called you crying in the snow,
lying atop Alfred Kinsey’s grave, which is
adjacent to Clara’s grave, who wouldn’t mind;
they were open. I was doing my
Mary Shelley impression, but much less metal.
At Salvation Mountain, I took pictures of tourists,
GOD IS LOVE on the plaster hills behind the frame,
LA models sourcing Instagram content. I was sunburned,
I had not slept. I was fleeing a fire. I was fleeing
a man who claimed to know me,
and correctly referenced my grade school.
“Don’t worry, it’s me,” he said.
“I just have a new face now.”
In the diner, I asked a waiter,
“Did you know Leonard Knight?”
“You just missed him,” the waiter said,
meaning, he had only just died.
The first time I saw Body Worlds
was only the second time in my life
I’d seen an escalator, a freshman in college.
“Wow,” I said, while my peers laughed.
“Wow,” I said, giving myself away; I was from nowhere.
Though I don’t wish to over-identify with nowhere. My awe
is not disproportionate to the miracle of things.
In the exhibit, there was a pregnant woman
with a nearly nine-month fetus,
see-through. This body, her body,
the origin of human life, veins,
organs, tissue, her sacrifice,
her dedication to science and art.
They’re all perfectly mortal.
All artists die, you fanboy. All gives way to
entropy and decay, to transparency,
projections. The once-alive horse
in the Body Worlds exhibit reared,
in protest, in pain, front legs suspended,
airless, never landing.
Compartmentalization is protective, which is why I keep you under cover of night, under the covers, our intermingled carbon monoxide, inhaling each others’ poison. Everyone believes their love is special. It's a sad world, isn’t it, you said, hand on my cheek, both of us too invested to acknowledge our melodrama, azure neon bedroom LEDs, both of us blurred from the world by our horizontal orientation, our bedcover camouflage, safe from intruders. Who could find us there? No one, not even ourselves. You did not know me when you horror-spasmed in the night and I held your seizing, shook alongside you, urged you to come back from gore to the land of the living, reverse Styx crossing, baby; I meant, be reborn. I wanted to be your midwife, to deliver you, as you gripped my wrist, the imagined enemy, your nails digging in my flesh, I will allow it. You’re here, you’re safe–bewildered and almost returned. Earlier you’d suggested I read The Agony of Eros to understand the self-obliteration that must occur in order to truly know The Other, and I was offended you thought I didn’t already know Oblivion, you hadn’t even asked, when of course I did, Oblivion was the third in our polycule throuple. When I first met you, outside a cafe, awkwardly asked if you’re the hugging type, and you yielded to me for the first time, sure, we discovered an unlikely refuge in the space between us, a space that was strangely, immediately, and obviously habitable–and so we moved in, Oblivion there too of course, a package deal for us both. I try not to be jealous of Oblivion’s relationship with you, to be secure in our love, to come from a surplus mindset, the world of renewable resources, opportunity, excellence. But sometimes it becomes challenging understanding whose feelings I am feeling. Are they yours? Are they Oblivion’s? Which one of you have mine? Your intimacy with death and violence could easily be mine. My longing is yours. I tied an infinity knot in cord and gave it to you. Oblivion brought it back to me. You study these knots to learn about entropy; of course Oblivion and I are in love with you. You’re the savant genius of collapse and I’ll never know your findings, only what Oblivion mentions in passing, overly casual, as if the destruction you left us with was worthy of only study.
Five years ago, I worked briefly as an assistant in a Montessori elementary classroom. A few weeks into my time there I found myself on the playground, watching along with thirty silent children between the ages of nine and six as their teacher began to unroll a bolt of black fabric across the wood chips. “At first the earth was a fiery ball,” she said, “and this went on for a long time.” The fabric continued to unroll as she talked about volcanoes, rains, and cooling, and by the time the whole strip of fabric was laid out it was a hundred meters long, covering most of the playground. At the far end was one slender red line, which she told the students represented all of human history. This, she said, is how long it took the earth to be ready for the coming of the human being.
This lesson I witnessed, known now as the Black Strip, was first given more than seventy years before on the other side of the world. Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori took what was supposed to be a six month training trip to India in 01939 after having found herself on the wrong side of the fascist powers of Europe. The Nazis had closed Germany’s Montessori schools and reportedly burned her in effigy. Mussolini, with whom she had originally collaborated, followed suit and closed Italy’s schools after Dr. Montessori, a pacifist, refused to order her teachers to take the fascist loyalty oath.
This seemingly opportune moment to leave Europe also came up against the moment when Italy entered World War II on the side of the Axis powers. As an Italian in India, Montessori was at the mercy of the British colonial government. They confined her to the grounds of her host organization — India’s Theosophical Society — and interned her adult son Mario, who had come along with her. Mario was eventually released and Montessori’s internment relaxed, but neither of them was permitted to leave India for the duration of the war. Their six month trip became seven years of training teachers and students in her methodology throughout India and Sri Lanka, and to this day a robust network of Montessori education remains in place there.
According to Montessori biographer Cristina De Stefano, it was during these seven years in India that Montessori developed much of what would become the natural history curriculum in her schools. The story behind the Black Strip I saw all those years later goes like this: some of Montessori’s Indian students considered their civilization superior to hers because it was older, one of the oldest in the world. In response, she devised a piece of black fabric three hundred meters long, spooled onto a dowel rod and unwound by a bicycle wheel down a village road somewhere near Kodaikanal. Montessori told her students that the black fabric (which has since been shortened by most Montessori schools for practical reasons) represented the fullness of geologic time on Earth, and that the line at the far end was the entire history of our species, Indian and Italian alike.
There’s no record of exactly how old these first students were, but current Montessori practice introduces the Black Strip along with what are known as The Great Lessons at the beginning of elementary school, where it is repeated each year so that by the time they are nine, students have seen the strip unroll three times.
Six years old might seem a bit early to introduce the depths of geologic time, but according to Alison Awes, the AMI Director of Elementary Training at the Montessori Center of Minnesota and the Director of Elementary Training at the Maria Montessori Institute in London, it’s exactly the right age. She notes that in Dr. Montessori’s scientific observations of children, “they were capable of so much more than what adults typically expected.” Elementary age children, Montessori noticed, possessed a strong capacity to reason, a drive to understand the world around them and how it functioned
Tracy Fortun, the teacher I worked for who rolled out the Black Strip on that day five years ago, tells me that the other elementary superpower that makes this the perfect age to introduce these concepts is a vivid imagination. Before her training, Fortun thought of imagination simply as fantasy, but she now sees it as a necessary tool for thinking about anything we can’t observe. “I have to use my imagination to think about five billion years,” she says.
Montessori lessons about natural history, like the Black Strip and the Clock of Eras (a poster of an analog clock in which the last 14 seconds represent humanity, presented once children are old enough to tell time), are not meant to deliver facts. Those, Fortun tells me, can come later. There is no scale of years to centimeters on the strip, nor are there many words spoken as it is rolled out. The lessons are impressionistic in order to engage the faculties of reason and imagination together and prompt a child’s own responses and questions, for which they can then seek answers. Awes tells me a story of a child who heard the third Great Lesson, The Coming of Human Beings, and then decided to sit down and make a list of every single thing he had done that day with his hands — tasks and capabilities unique to his species.
Each Montessori lesson involving the concept of deep time is a particular blend of these same components. There’s the Timeline of Life, in a sense the opposite of the Black Strip — it’s crammed with pictures of the different forms of life inhabiting each geologic era up to our own. Then there is the Hand Chart, similar to the Black Strip but with one picture on it: a hand holding a stone tool. On the Hand Chart the black expanse represents, instead of geologic time, all of human history before the invention of writing, and the small red line at the end contains the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, everything any of us has ever written. “Human beings have been busy,” says Fortun to her students, “using their intelligence, using their hands, transforming their environment, taking care of each other, telling their stories, for all this time before anybody wrote anything down.”
And there is the BCE/CE timeline that uses a string teachers pull on both ends, to show that time is going in both directions and we can at once learn about the past and imagine the future. The ends of the string are frayed to demonstrate that time is still going, always. Awes tells me that she once saw a group of children take out the BCE/CE timeline and proceed to organize themselves along it as the historical figures they were currently studying. “It was this ‘aha’ moment of, ‘Hey, you and I are living and working at the same time, but you guys are 800 years before.’”
Given the impressionistic nature of the lessons and the student-led response to them, I ask how exactly teachers can tell that the concepts are really sinking in. The response they all give is that the full results can take years to see. Fortun says that long after they’ve moved out of her classroom, students will put together a project that astounds her, and when she asks where they got the idea they will say, “Remember what you showed us in second grade?”
Children, it turns out, need time to process and incorporate these expansive ideas. “Something really deep and important is happening,” Awes says of the seemingly fallow periods that can follow these lessons, “we just might not know what it is. And that’s where the adult has to get out of the way of the child. We can be obstacles, because we don’t give children enough time to reflect.”
Seth Webb, Director of School Services at the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, echoes this sentiment. “What schools need to do to allow for these concepts to be rooted in the hearts and souls of kids is to give them the time to explore them. I mean, if you want an appreciation of deep time, you have to give them the time to appreciate it deeply.”
What strikes me most is the faith these teachers seem to have in their students. To wait on children in this way requires immense trust, especially in the high-stakes years of a child’s education. It’s an attitude that stands in sharp contrast to the anxious system I remember growing up, a system constantly requiring evidence that children are indeed learning everything they must know. The question, I suppose, is what we consider most essential in preparing children for the world we are going to hand them. In a Montessori framework, one of the most central interdisciplinary goals is for children to grasp what Dr. Montessori calls the Cosmic Task — something shared by animate and inanimate earth alike. Awes puts it this way: “Each organism and inanimate object has a dual purpose. One of the purposes is to do what they do for survival, but while doing that they're giving something back.” So plants, for instance, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in order to survive. But in doing that, what they give back to the rest of us is oxygen. There are lessons called “the work of wind” and “the work of water.” The universe and the earth are presented as a system of interdependence, developed over billions of years and honed with immense specificity to create the conditions under which life exists. Children who understand this, who are exposed to it repeatedly and given time to contemplate it, Awes tells me, start to wonder what their own Cosmic Task might be, how they might support their community and their future, how they might give back.
But how many children are even given the opportunity to wonder in this way? Maria Montessori began her work with some of Rome’s most underprivileged children, but now, in the U.S. at least, Montessori education is often seen as something of an elite luxury. In a widely read 02022 New Yorker review of De Stefano’s biography on Montessori, Jessica Winter noted that “there are only a few hundred public Montessori schools in the U.S.,” and that the Montessori method has been “routed disproportionately to rich white kids.”
Sara Suchman, the Executive Director of the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, paints a very different picture of Montessori in contemporary public education. In 02022 there were around 200,000 students receiving a Montessori education in nearly 600 U.S. public schools, she says, and more than half of them are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. In a letter to the editor challenging Winter’s review, Suchman wrote that “there is nothing inherent in a Montessori classroom or school that makes it the unique domain of the wealthy.”
What is certainly true of these public Montessori schools, however, is that they tend to almost always be choice schools — open to all students in a school district regardless of address, but with an enrollment cap that means only a certain number can be admitted. Suchman cites Mira Debs’ Diverse Families, Desirable Schools (02019) to explain that over time more white, higher-income families proactively work the system to place their children in such schools. This problem is beyond the scope of the Montessori model itself, though presumably not beyond the scope of education policy in general.
“When a single model is serving 200,000 students, that both shows accomplishment and also opportunity,” Suchman tells me. One of the reasons Montessori education is worth our advocacy, according to Suchman, is that it is the model that best takes into account both the present and the future. “Kids are human beings right now, in this moment, and they need a positive experience right now…but they also need to be prepared. A lot of other methodologies will do one or the other, but Montessori does them together.”
Making Montessori more publicly accessible and therefore available to children in a wider economic range is a challenge for many reasons, but one that Suchman highlights strikes directly at the allowance for deep contemplation: the tension introduced by yearly testing, and our expectation of seeing constant, steady, measurable improvement. We don’t want to wait, and Montessori classrooms — which are multi-generational and span three grades — tend to demonstrate a burst of gains in each third year. For instance, when schools test yearly they will often see a plateau through first and second grade in Montessori schools instead of steady progress, which can cause anxiety if allowances aren't made for the fact that third grade is when much of the progress will manifest.
Educators must be prepared to accept a certain amount of waiting, to take a longer view and give kids some time.
Even outside of more public schools transitioning to a full Montessori model, there are opportunities for some of these concepts and methodologies for teaching natural history to make their way into all kinds of classrooms. Seth Webb sees the current moment as an opportunity for pedagogical cross pollination: “There are really amazing teachers everywhere, regardless of the overarching pedagogical foundation. We’ve moved into a new era where our pedagogy would do well to collaborate more.”
Children who have been given the Great Lessons and the time to appreciate the interdependence of our environment, the fragility and specificity and particularity of circumstances that allow for our existence, who know what it took for the earth to “be ready” for us, might be just the kind of people that we need right now. According to the Clock of Eras, it’s been 14 seconds, and we don’t know how many seconds more we have. So what will we do?
Maria Montessori believed that she was working at the end of the Adult Epoch, and that what was coming was the Epoch of the Child. It’s unclear precisely what she had in mind with that terminology, but it seems to speak of a time when children who are treated with sufficient respect and given sufficient time and resources become adults and alter, on a large scale, the way we carry out our lives. Crucially, however, nothing new like this can be ushered in without decisions made now, by those of us who are not yet citizens of any of these new possibilities. A cosmic task for us, perhaps.
I can imagine what it might look like, rolled out in front of me. These brief years of our unprecedented technological dominion I imagine a pale, sickly yellow, the color of the fear so many of my generation seem to carry — the fear that we have gone too far. And at the end, slender but frayed at the edges to connote its expansion, a full, deep, blue-tinted black of possibility like a bare night sky, like a beginning.
After more than 26 years of dedicated service to The Long Now Foundation, Alexander Rose will be stepping down from his role as Executive Director to focus on The Clock of the Long Now, along with his research into the world’s longest-lived organizations. He will continue to serve on the Foundation’s Board of Directors.
For the past quarter century, Alexander Rose – known to his friends and colleagues simply as Zander – has been the engine behind so much of Long Now’s work. Under his leadership, The Long Now Foundation has gone from a fledgling nonprofit to a living, thriving organization, with a vibrant membership program, and twenty years of thought-provoking Talks. He also created The Interval, our combination cocktail bar, cafe, and gathering space in Fort Mason, San Francisco and is an active steward of The Clock of the Long Now.
Zander’s approach to guiding the Foundation has impacted every single one of us at Long Now. In order to properly commemorate his time here, we talked to the people he worked most closely with among Long Now’s staff, Board of Directors, and associates to paint a whole picture of Zander — as Long Now’s leader, but also as a friend and dedicated member of our community.
When The Long Now Foundation was still in a primordial state in the midst of the 01990s, its co-founders Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, and Brian Eno ran the show. But as the Foundation grew and began to get to work on its core projects, it quickly became clear that Long Now needed a dedicated employee to manage The Clock and The Library. Stewart immediately sought out Zander, who he had known since Zander was just a kid in the junkyards and dockyards of Sausalito, California. Stewart served as “adult supervision” to paintball games and other adventures on the Sausalito waterfront, and to Stewart, Zander’s qualities as a “natural born leader” were clear from a young age. Kevin Kelly, another founding board member and denizen of the Sausalito waterfront, agreed, noting that even at a young age Zander was a tinkerer and skilled paintball tactician, “immediately trying to improve” the crude early paintball equipment and using it to “crush” Kevin, Stewart, and all other challengers.
When Stewart reached out to Zander more than a decade later, Zander, by then a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon who was looking for work in the field of industrial design, was at first uncertain. As recounted in Whole Earth, John Markoff’s 02022 biography of Stewart Brand, Stewart also helped Zander get job interviews with a number of companies from the contemporary crop of San Francisco Bay Area technology startups. Yet even as he pursued those interviews, Zander couldn’t help but be captivated by the promise Long Now’s Clock and Library projects offered, even in a nascent form.
In the end, his home would be The Long Now Foundation, becoming the organization’s first full time employee and a general project manager, creative leader, and jack-of-all-trades in the Foundation’s early operations. From his first meeting with Zander, Danny Hillis was impressed by his “very practical sense of building things and getting them to work.”
The two would work closely together for years on the preliminary design and prototyping of The Clock of the Long Now. Zander provided a key understanding of, in Danny’s words, the “poetry and the philosophy of the Clock” from the very start. He was able to balance The Clock’s dual nature, holding it as “a machine to be engineered but, on the other hand, a story to be told.”
One early Clock design moment where Zander’s sensibility shone through was in the design of the Clock’s face. In Danny’s recollection, he brought a rough sketch of the astronomical lines he wanted depicted on the Clock’s face to Zander, who proceeded to turn it into the iconic rete design that still serves as part of Long Now’s brand to this day.
For the last few years of the 01990s, Danny, Zander, and a small team of collaborators worked tirelessly to get the prototype ready for their “very hard deadline”: New Years Eve 01999. Without Zander, Danny told us, they wouldn’t have made it:
“I brought my whole family up there and everyone at Long Now was gathered in the Presidio, where we were sharing a space with the Internet Archive. We had finally got all the pieces put together, but when we got them together, we realized that there was a bug in the direction of rotation of one shaft and that it was going to, when it hit the millennium, go from saying, oh, 01999 to 01998 instead of 02000 — the wrong direction.”
“So, there were hours to go before New Year's Day and we had been working on it and I had been traveling and I just said, ‘oh, well this is just kind of hopeless.’ And I actually fell asleep at that point because I was thinking ‘I don't know what's gonna happen, but I am exhausted.’ So I fell asleep. But then Zander figured it out. He realized that we could do it by just remachining one part and so he drove across to Sausalito. And by the time I woke up, Zander had remachined the part. And so when I actually came to midnight it was all put together and sure enough, at midnight it ticked forward and the dial clicked to the year 02000 and the beautiful chime that Zander had chosen, this beautiful Zen bowl chime rang twice. And so the clock chimed in the year 02000 with two bongs in perfect order.”
Zander’s work at Long Now, even in those early days, was not limited to The Clock. The Foundation’s core project has always involved building a cultural institution to deepen our understanding of long-term thinking in parallel to the Clock, and Zander dove into that cause with full commitment.
Along with a dedicated core of early colleagues, Zander helped develop a diverse set of projects that, in their ways, would help foster long-term thinking in the world. These projects included the Rosetta Project, a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers that aims to preserve the world’s languages using long-term archival devices like microscopically etched disks, and Long Bets, our initiative for long-term predictions and wagers for charity.
Zander didn’t just help get these projects started; he has kept them running for decades as well. Andrew Warner, who has worked as a project manager in Long Now’s programs team for the last decade, says that Zander has “basically done every job at Long Now at some point,” from Clock designer to project manager to maintenance man. Earlier this year, Zander repaired a damaged hot water heater at the Long Now offices the same day he departed on a multi-week research trip on long-lived institutions in India. Throughout all those roles, Zander has maintained his unique sensibility and perspective on leadership. Former Long Now Director of Strategy Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz describes this perspective as a certain “pragmatism” that “does not suffer needless philosophizing.” Long-time Long Now Director of Programs Danielle Engelman cites Zander’s “clear decision-making process after weighing key options & opportunities” as having “kept Long Now's projects and programs moving forward at a pace that belied the small team working on them in the beginning.”
Over the years, Zander has also taken a lead role in one of Long Now's longest-running projects: our speaker series. Since 02020, Zander has acted as the host and co-curator for Long Now's main talk series, bringing together perspectives on long-term thinking from everyone from science fiction authors and artists to scientists, sociologists, and political leaders.
These projects, along with The Clock, helped build a mythos around the Foundation over the years. With this cultivated mythos came interest from the broader culture, with many around the world expressing interest in becoming more involved with Long Now’s work. In response, Zander worked to establish Long Now’s membership program in 02007. According to Danny Hillis, “he really led the idea of the membership program and supported Long Now members. And I think that the original board didn’t really see the potential of that the way that Zander did, but we trusted his intuition on that.”
As Long Now entered its adolescence as an organization, Zander began to research the world’s longest-lasting institutions — groups that had lasted for more than a millennium from businesses to religious orders. This project would later become Long Now's Organizational Continuity Project.
As he studied the records of these organizations, he began to notice a particular, unexpected commonality: across continents and cultural contexts, many of the longest-lived institutions were those that served and produced alcohol, from German breweries to Japanese Sake Houses.
For Zander, the obvious corollary to this finding was to open up a cocktail bar. At first, Long Now’s Board of Directors was skeptical. Running a bar is complicated, and a task far from the core competencies of Long Now at the time. As Andrew Warner put it, “Opening a successful bar is really hard and people didn't really ‘get it’ until it was done.”
But Long Now collectively put their trust in Zander, and he delivered. The Interval, which opened in 02013 after an extensive crowdfunding campaign was “pure Alexander,” per Stewart, with Zander’s fingerprint on everything: its “invention, funding, and peerless delivery.” Danny noted that Zander was especially adept at “getting all the permissions for getting things to happen at Fort Mason,” requiring Zander to use his “political finesse” to navigate the bureaucratic structures of working on federal property.
The Interval, which took the former space of Long Now’s museum and offices and turned it into a world-class cocktail bar, café, and gathering place, was thoroughly shaped by Zander’s influence. As Andrew recounted to us, he even “took the first doorman shift” for the bar’s opening day. Yet perhaps nothing about The Interval’s design speaks to Zander’s unique perspective more than the bar’s Gin Robot. As Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz describes it, “the gin robot at The Interval is the one thing I associate with Zander alone. It’s quintessentially his. It makes billions of gins. It lights up. The lights change color. The only ways it could be more Zandery would involve pyrotechnics.”
Over the past decade, The Interval has become more than just a place to get expertly-crafted cocktails and view the collection of Long Now’s Manual for Civilization. Under Zander’s supervision, the bar has become a place to tell — and to continue — Long Now’s story, a headquarters with a mythos all its own.
Zander’s time at Long Now did not, of course, keep him confined to our offices in Fort Mason in San Francisco. In Long Now’s early days, he traveled extensively with Danny, Stewart, and other board members to explore sites in the American southwest and beyond to find an eventual home for The Clock of The Long Now. As part of that process, Zander became an accomplished rock climber and cave explorer, venturing hundreds of feet into the depths of caves in Texas or mountains in Arizona.
Eventually, Long Now landed on a site at Mount Washington, on the border between Nevada and Utah in the Great Basin, as a likely choice for The Clock. Zander served as a de facto leader for the Long Now team as they explored the many crags and crevices of the mountain. As Danny recounted, “in dangerous situations it's always good to have somebody in charge who's making the decisions and Zander was the one to do that.”
After years of exploration of Mount Washington, Zander and the rest of the team thought they had found nearly all of the useful approaches and pathways within. Yet one particular entrance still eluded them. Inspired by the Siq, a narrow, shaft-like gorge that serves as the grand main entrance to the classical Nabatean city of Petra, Danny and Stewart had imagined a similar pathway as the main approach to The Clock. For years, they searched for it to no avail, until June 21, 02003.
On that day, Zander found a certain opening in what first seemed to Stewart and Danny, his travel companions, to be a “sheer cliff” face on the west side of the mountain. Zander found his way through that passage, a Class 4 crevice, ascending 600 feet alone. “Henceforth,” Stewart told Long Now, “it is known as Zander’s Siq.”
Once the potential sites for The Clock were identified, Zander’s travels did not stop. Instead, he took on a role as a kind of international ambassador for Long Now and for long-term thinking broadly. Those travels have taken him everywhere from the Svalbard seed bank and the far reaches of Siberia to the Hoover Dam, the 1400-year-old Ise Shrine in Japan, and the ancient stepwells of India.
Danny, who accompanied Zander on an early trip to Japan for the rebuilding of the Ise Shrine, which has occurred every 20 years since 00692 CE, recounted that the two of them had been two of the few westerners invited to the rededication ceremony, and the “amazingly moving” feeling of being there with Zander. Afterwards, the Long Now traveling party went to one of the area’s “bottle keep” bars, where patrons can leave part of a liquor bottle reserved for future use for an indefinite period of time. Zander explained to the bartender that Long Now would be returning to the bar in twenty years — in time for the next rebuilding of the shrine. While the bartender was at first skeptical, Zander managed to convince him that they’d actually be back — spreading the word about Long Now along the way. That encounter also ended up inspiring Zander to create The Interval’s own bottle keep system, which can, of course, be used more frequently than once every two decades.
While 02023 marks the end of Zander’s time as Long Now’s Executive Director, his work with us is far from over. He will continue his work on The Clock of the Long Now as its installation continues. He will also continue to work on the Organizational Continuity Project, discovering the lessons behind the world’s long-lived institutions and pulling these lessons into a first of its kind book. He will also continue to be a dedicated member of Long Now’s community, a vital part of the culture that he has fostered over the last quarter century as we go into our next quarter century. Thank you, Zander.
In his Histories, Herodotus tells the story of Croesus, a wealthy king who ruled the region of Lydia some 2,500 years ago. One day, Croesus consulted the famous oracle at Delphi about his conflict with the neighboring Persians. The oracle responded that if Croesus went to war, he would destroy a great empire. Sure of victory, Croesus marched for battle. Much to his surprise, however, he lost. The great empire he destroyed was not his enemies’, but his own. A few centuries later, the Persians were in turn bested by Alexander the Great.
Civilizations rise and fall, sometimes at the stroke of a sword. Myriad explanations have been posited as to why this happens. Often, hypotheses of collapse say more about the preoccupations of contemporary society than they do about the past. It is no coincidence that Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (01776), written during the anticlerical Age of Reason, blamed Christianity for Rome’s downfall, just as it is no coincidence that recent popular accounts of civilizational collapse such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (02005) point toward environmental damage and climate change as the main culprits.
I’ve been fascinated by the oscillations of human societies ever since the early days of my research for my Ph.D. in archaeology. Over the last 12,000 years, we’ve gone from small hunter-gatherer groups to highly urbanized communities and industrialized nation-states in a globally interconnected world. As societies grow, they expand in territory, produce economic growth, technological innovation, and social stratification. How does this happen, and why? And is collapse inevitable? The answers provided by archeology were unsatisfying. So I looked elsewhere.
Ultimately, I settled on a radically different framework to explore these questions: the field of complexity theory. Emerging from profound cross-disciplinary frustrations with reductionism, complexity theory aims to understand the properties and behavior of complex systems (including the human brain, ecosystems, cities and societies) through the exploration of their generative patterns, dynamics, and interactions.
In what follows, I’ll share some thoughts about what social complexity is, how it develops, and why it provides a more comprehensive account of societal change than the traditional evolutionary approaches that permeate archeology. By recasting the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of social complexity, we can better understand not only the past of human societies, but their possible futures as well.
In the 19th century, scholars like the sociologist Herbert Spencer and anthropologist Lewis Morgan became interested in the historical development of societies. They found a suitable explanatory framework in the principles of biological evolution as posited by Charles Darwin. Social evolution holds that human groups undergo directed processes of change driven by fitness adaptations to external circumstances, resulting in an inherent tendency to increase complexity over time. The phrase “survival of the fittest,” often attributed to Darwin, was coined by Herbert Spencer to describe the evolutionary struggles of societies. Social evolutionists conceptualized historical change as part of a teleological trajectory towards higher stages of social complexity. They believed complex societies to be the most successful. “Complex” entailed more developed rationality, philosophy, and morality. It meant, in short, more civilized. This notion of successful societies was appropriated and embedded in a wider framework of Eurocentrism and Western superiority to place Western nation-states at the pinnacle of human evolution and to provide a justification for colonialism (Morris, 02013, p.2).
During the second half of the 20th century, a neo-evolutionary resurgence resulted in the postulation of societal stages of development that are still in vogue today, such as Elman Service’s scheme of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states (Service, 01962). While these works abandoned teleological notions, the identification of distinct developmental stages implies that fundamental properties co-occur in societies across time and space. It also suggests that societies stay in equilibrium until they go through a sudden phase shift and rapidly adopt a new set of properties and characteristics.
These assumptions are problematic in two ways. First, societal properties do not necessarily co-evolve, even if societal trajectories can converge to varying degrees due to similar underlying drivers (Auban, Martin and Barton, 02013, p.34). Second, equilibrium-based approaches are inherently static because they assume that changes cancel each other out over the long term. As a result, they regard change as ‘‘noise’’ that must be filtered out to understand the system. These approaches frequently employ reductionist views. This means identifying distinct subsystems, figuring out how these subsystems work, and then aggregating them to understand the behavior of the overall system. In human societies, that could mean identifying a separate economic system, then setting forth to understand that economy, while doing the same for other subsystems like politics, religion, and so on. Finally, by combining the understanding of each subsystem, we come to an understanding of society as a whole. Such top-down, reductionist approaches have strong limitations, as system behavior is not the result of the aggregation of the properties of its components, but rather the result of entirely new properties emerging in a bottom-up fashion. In other words, we must realize that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”
Since the 01970s, scholars from a broad range of disciplines, including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, systems theory and cybernetics, have been grappling with non-linearity, feedback loops, and adaptation across many kinds of systems, giving rise to the new field of complexity theory. Complex systems thinking posits that the fundamental units of social systems are social interactions between people. These interactions generate complex behavior, information processing, adaptation, and non-linear emergence. This means that social complexity is an inherent characteristic of all human societies, not just complex ones.
All human societies need energy and resources to sustain themselves. Beyond these so-called endosomatic needs, societies also have exosomatic needs, that is, energy requirements for material and technological maintenance and development. The social structures necessary for the exploitation of energy and resources can only emerge through the exchange and processing of information for communication, maintaining social connections, sharing knowledge, enabling innovation, and coordinating activities.
I assess social complexity through three main flows:
I define social complexity as the extent to which a social entity can exploit, process and consume flows of energy, resources and information (Daems, 02021). A society is not more complex because it is more civilized, but because it extracts more energy and resources from its environment or transmits information more efficiently. With this definition, complexity is dissociated from both social and environmental sustainability. Societies that manage to extract more energy and resources are not necessarily sustainable. Nor does enhanced information transmission always benefit society, as is so clearly illustrated in today’s struggles with misinformation.
This approach provides a clear answer to what social complexity is, but does not yet explain how it develops. Authors such as Joseph Tainter have posited social complexity as a problem-solving tool (Tainter, 01996). Societies are continuously faced with selection pressures – e.g. subsistence, cooperation, competition, production, demography, etc. – that act as input information for decision-making strategies driving societal development on two levels (Cioffi-Revilla, 02005):
Let us take the example of a society faced with a bad harvest. Such a society needs to assess the causes of this situation and define its strategies accordingly. Did the failed harvest stem from bad luck? Crop disease? The wrath of the gods?
Once the situation is assessed, a proper strategy needs to be devised. Do they try again and hope for the best? Experiment with new types of crops? Perform the necessary rituals to appease the wronged gods? Or perhaps they appoint officials to monitor agricultural production. Some strategies can be one-offs, such as a sacrifice or an official inspection. Or they can persist and become entrenched in the social fabric, such as when divine favor becomes indispensable for ensuring successful harvests, or a central government extends its control through a new bureaucratic system. Social structures do not spring forth fully-fledged from one day to the next, but are the result of incremental expansion, addition, and recombination of the outcomes of day-to-day decision-making processes.
As a system grows more complex, it self-organizes into nested groups that can take shape as horizontal networks or vertical hierarchies. When nested units across multiple scales become integrated within the same system, non-linear emergence and feedback loops across scales can generate some of the most powerful outcomes of complex system dynamics. A good example can be found in the process of energized crowding (Bettencourt, 02013; Smith, 02019). Drawn from the field of urban studies, energized crowding is what turns cities into “social reactors.” This is the idea that as more people live together in higher densities, more social interactions and exchange of information produces more social outcomes, both positive and negative. Bigger communities tend to proportionally display higher levels of innovation, income, and productivity, but also higher crime and scalar stress. All of the things drawing us towards the buzz of city life are ultimately born from the interactions between people.
Complexity formation is not without risk. Larger cities or polities tend to draw in population from a larger area. This requires a larger catchment, fulfilled through self-subsistence production, by importing goods, or both. As capital of the Roman empire, Rome grew to a population of over 1,000,000 people. Such a massive concentration of people was unthinkable without the structures of empire such as the ‘Annona’, state-sponsored grain subsidies relying on large-scale grain imports from Egypt, North Africa, and Sicily. Larger societies have a proportionally larger environmental footprint due to higher exosomatic needs. Rome needed not only food to sustain its population, but also resources to maintain its buildings, institutions, artisans, and cultural amenities. Moreover, as societies continue to implement changes over the long term, past measures could trigger future challenges which, in turn, need to be dealt with. Over time, a society builds an “ever denser scaffolding structure of related and interacting institutions” (van der Leeuw, 02016, p.168). The risks of this continued problem-solving process are twofold:
Societies generally tend to first use simple and cost-effective efforts with high returns on investment. As iterations continue, solutions to maintain societal structures become more complicated and costly, with diminishing proportionate marginal returns. Beyond some of the more spectacular causes of the fall of Rome proposed by Gibbon and others, such as large-scale invasions or civil strife, this slow “rigidification” is far less visible, but no less impactful. It is likely no coincidence that waves of administrative reorganizations followed in ever-quickening succession during the Late Roman period. Societies that do not have the expertise or flexibility to deal with new challenges could undergo a “tipping point” leading to drastic societal transformations generally associated with societal collapse. However, collapse only makes sense from a top-down perspective. During the Late Bronze Age (around 1200 BCE), a widespread disintegration of polities across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East occurred, including the Hittites of Anatolia (modern Turkey), Mycenaean Greece, the Egyptian New Kingdom, and the Middle Assyrian Empire (modern Iraq). Recent archaeological research, however, has found abundant evidence for local communities that continued to be inhabited and even thrive.
An explanation can be found in another property of complex systems called “near decomposability” (Simon, 01962). This refers to stronger connectivity between units of a similar type and the ability of units to operate semi-independently from others in the system. For example, households share stronger ties and interact more frequently with other households in the same community than with those of another community. Units that make up nested systems can often continue to function even when links to other units break down. If a larger polity, say the Hittite state, were to disintegrate, local or regional levels may have continued largely unaffected. Scalar divisions can therefore act as “fault lines” along which polities can be broken up, apparently collapsed when seen from a top-down perspective, but maintaining a bottom-up continuity.
Social complexity formation is a complicated process drawing on the exploitation, processing, and consumption of interrelated flows of energy, resources, and information. It is neither intrinsically good as was the belief of social evolutionists, nor does it inevitably lead to societal collapse. It is a phenomenon with both positive and negative consequences.
Earlier I outlined how direct parallels with biological evolution resulted in social evolutionism and a problematic conceptualization of teleological trajectories of social complexity. Nevertheless, evolution can offer fruitful metaphors to generate deeper insight into social complexity formation. The evolutionary taxonomic space is composed of a near-infinite number of dimensions, each corresponding to a particular characteristic of an organism (Hutchinson, 01978). Yet, organisms are part of nested clusters (species, genus, family, order, etc.) taking up specific portions of this space. This means that even though biological evolution has been at work for millions of years, only a very limited area of the potential space has been actualized (Lewontin, 02019). Exploring the full potential taxonomic space would take millions upon millions of years.
Human societies likewise are clustered within the taxonomic space of all possible societal configurations. Current states are built from past configurations, in combination with the contingent opening of new pathways of development. At its current pace, humankind will not have sufficient time to explore the potential configuration space of societal organizations that will allow us to balance increasing social complexity with a sustainable dynamic within our natural environment. Yet, this should not discourage us from using the necessary long-term perspective to look beyond the edges of the current, toward what might be possible in the future. One thing is clear: Any foray into the future would do well to also have an eye on the past.
Auban, J., Martin, A. and Barton, C., 02013. Complex Systems, Social Networks, and the evolution of Social Complexity in the East of Spain from the Neolithic to Pre-Roman Times. In: M. Berrocal, L. Sanjuán and A. Gilman, eds. The Prehistory of Iberia: Debating Early Social Stratification and the State. New York: Routledge.
Bettencourt, L., 02013. The Origins of Scaling in Cities. Science, 340(6139), pp.1438–1441. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1235823
Cioffi-Revilla, C., 02005. A Canonical Theory of Origins and Development of Social Complexity. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 29(2), pp.133–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/00222500590920860
Daems, D., 02021. Social Complexity and Complex Systems in Archaeology. London: Routledge.
Hutchinson, G.E., 01978. An Introduction to Population Ecology. New Haven: Yale University Press.
van der Leeuw, S., 02016. Uncertainties. In: M. Brouwer Burg, H. Peeters and W.A. Lovis, eds. Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis in Archaeological Computational Modeling, Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. [online] Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp.157–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27833-9_9
Lewontin, R., 02019. Four Complications in Understanding the Evolutionary Process. In: D.C. Krakauer, ed. Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight. SFI Press. pp.97–113.
Morris, I., 02013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Service, E.R., 01962. Primitive social organization: an evolutionary perspective. New York: Random House.
Simon, H.A., 01962. The Architecture of Complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106(6), pp.467–482.
Smith, M., 02019. Energized Crowding and the Generative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization. In: A. Gyucha, ed. Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization. New York: State University of New York Press. pp.37–58.
Tainter, J., 01996. Complexity, Problem Solving and Sustainable Societies. In: R. Costanza, O. Segura and J. Martinez-Alier, eds. Getting Down To Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics. Washington DC: Island Press. pp.61–76.
Long Now is accepting pitches of essays, reported features, interviews, book reviews, shorter articles, fiction and poetry for Ideas, our living archive of long-term thinking. Below you'll find information on the kinds of stories we're looking for, how much we pay, and how to pitch us.
There is wisdom and clarity to be gained from taking the long view. Long Now Ideas gives our readers the context they need to take the long view on every issue we cover. Our stories rise above the ephemeral discourse and contextualize a given topic against a longer temporal backdrop, going further backwards and forwards in time than the typical news story. By ‘further’ we mean decades, at a minimum, and millennia, ideally. How did we get to now, a Long Now story asks, and where might we go from here? The ‘we’ of any Long Now story is ‘civilization.’
Assuming this vantage is not an abdication of the concerns of the here-and-now. On the contrary: we believe that today’s biggest challenges are best solved by understanding their deep origins and possible futures.
We’re after stories that apply this civilizational lens to inspire, educate, and surprise our readers across a variety of subjects and disciplines: climate change and the environment; the preservation of knowledge; the rise and fall of civilizations; the longevity of institutions; biotechnology and artificial intelligence; the history of science and technology; architecture, design and urbanism; the nature of time; space travel; globalization; migration; economics; governance; maintenance; and infrastructure (both physical and intellectual).
"Now" is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes.
- Brian Eno, Long Now Co-Founder
The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
We hope to help each other be good ancestors. We hope to preserve possibilities for the future.
Below you’ll find some links to recent stories to give you a sense of our tone, topical range, and what we’re looking for. We’re hoping to expand that topical range — and the kinds of stories we publish — considerably. That’s another way of saying that just because you might not see the kind of story you’d like to pitch represented below does not mean we wouldn’t be interested in publishing it.
Essays
Reported, argument-driven, or photo essays (800 - 1,800 words)
Features
Long-form reported narrative features (1,200 - 2,500 words)
Conversations
Interviews with the thinkers, artists, and makers whose projects and ideas foster long-term thinking and responsibility (1,200 - 2,000 words)
Short-form Science Journalism, News, and History
Articles breaking down the latest long-term thinking news (scientific papers, studies, projects, trends), profiling fascinating and forgotten examples of long-term thinking from the past, or exploring how today’s technological interventions are being applied to the past to make us reconsider what we thought we knew (500 - 1,200 words)
Examples:
Science Fiction Stories
Imaginative speculations at the timescale of civilization. We’re interested in stories that take unexpected angles on the future and the past, honing in on details that you only see when you take a longer view. (1000 - 4000 words)
Poems
Work that engages with long-term thinking and time in whatever ways you see fit. No restrictions on form or length.
Payment varies depending on the kind of story, the reporting involved, and the time commitment. Payment starts at $600 for features and ranges between $300 - $600 for essays, interviews, book reviews, science journalism, and news articles. We pay $100 for science fiction stories and $25 per poem (with a maximum of four poems per submission).
For non-fiction pitches: send an email to [email protected] with “Pitch” in the subject line followed by a proposed headline. In the email, describe what you're hoping to write about and how it's relevant to Long Now's topical and temporal focus. If you're pitching an essay, give us a sense of the argument you're making. If you're pitching a feature, give us a sense of the narrative structure, who you plan to speak to, and any other key logistical details. If your pitch is time-sensitive, let us know. You're welcome to provide relevant bylines and a brief bio.
For fiction and poetry, send an email to [email protected] with a subject line noting whether your submission is fiction or poetry. Attach a draft of your submission to the email. Feel free to contextualize the work with a sentence or two in the body of the email.
We are a relatively small team of editors and reviewers. While we endeavor to respond to pitches and submissions in a timely manner (within three weeks), we cannot guarantee a response to all inquiries. If you don’t hear from us within a month, it is likely that we are not interested in your submission.
Big trees, old trees, and especially big old trees have always been objects of reverence. From Athena’s sacred olive on the Acropolis to the unmistakable ginkgo leaf prevalent in Japanese art and fashion during the Edo period, our profound admiration for slow plants spans time and place as well as cultures and religions. At the same time, the utilization and indeed the desecration of ancient trees is a common feature of history. In the modern period, the American West, more than any other region, witnessed contradictory efforts to destroy and protect ancient conifers. Historian Jared Farmer reflects on our long-term relationships with long-lived trees, and considers the future of oldness on a rapidly changing planet.
Our bodies, our houses, our land, our space - we humans don’t always like to share. Author Bette Adriaanse talks with Chelsea T. Hicks, and virtual guests Brian Eno and Aqui Thami, about property and sharing, and how to make a lasting positive change in the way we share the world with each other. Alternating between thinkers and doers, whose actions help foster long term equality, this evening explores the choices that can be made to share time and resources with others in radical ways.
Chelsea T. Hicks is an author, activist, and citizen of the Osage Nation.
Brian Eno is a musician, artist, writer, and co-founder of Earth Percent and The Long Now Foundation.
Aqui Thami is an artist, activist, and Thangmi woman of the Kiratima peoples of the Himalayas.
Biosphere 2 was built in the late 01980s by the most unlikely group: a cast of creatives, a charismatic philosopher-king, a financier, theater nerds, and an amazing crew of engineers. The idea behind Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1, of course, being the Earth) was to build a self-contained structure and set of systems that could test the idea of a self-contained space colony, albeit one that was anchored to the earth. In 01991, just four years after construction began, B2 was launched: a team of Eight “econauts” were sealed into the three-acre habitat, along with a Noah’s ark-load of life. Ostensibly, the challenge was simply to see if they could survive.
A team from Long Now arrived in Oracle, Arizona to tour Biosphere 2 on the evening of October 26, 02022, just as the sun was setting. We were there to investigate: to see if there were lessons that we could extract from B2 and apply at Long Now, specifically to the Clock of the Long Now. We all had done our homework and watched Spaceship Earth, the excellent new documentary that retells the B2 origin story. But nothing can really prepare one for the experience of encountering B2 in person.
Oracle, Arizona, is a long way from anywhere. The Sonoran Desert is a reasonable analog for the surface of Mars. And the ziggurats of steel and glass rise above the high plain like an American Giza.
The point of the original Biosphere 2 was bold, but straightforward enough. It was an experiment to see if it would be possible to create a self-contained ecosystem – one large enough to support the lives of the team inside. It was a space station, right here on Earth. And yet, right away, we had so many questions:
Like, why was there what seemed to be a vent at the top of the pyramid? Why install a vent on a closed system?
And what was that UFO-like object peeking out from behind the main pyramid?
These and other questions would have to wait until morning.
The next day, the team gathered for a tour given by John Adams, the Deputy Director and Chief Operations Officer of the facility. He explained that the tower structure that had so puzzled us the day before was, in fact, an observation tower. It was assumed that the original inhabitants of B2 would need a place to retreat to where they could observe “Biosphere 1” – the earth that they had left behind. The vent was installed to cool the glass pyramid, which, in reality, became a giant solar oven in the middle of the desert whenever the sun shined through it— which, in Arizona, was essentially every day. The vent was a striking reminder that B2 is rarely operated as a completely closed system. The ambition to study earth in a hermetically-sealed system has largely been supplanted by a more practical use for the facility: an ecological laboratory that can control more variables than nature allows. Under the auspices of its new owner, The University of Arizona, B2 is now mostly operated as a very large greenhouse, but it has the capability to do far more.
Biosphere 2’s 676,000-gallon “ocean” is the site of some rather significant science. It was here, in the living coral reef that lives under the faux ocean, that scientists proved that there was a direct connection between the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere and decreasing coral calcification rates. There is currently an effort to breed and genetically engineer corals that can survive climate change – and those corals will be tested at B2 before being released into the open oceans.
The rainforest is also the site of important climate change research. Climate modelers have subjected it to drought, to floods, to higher-than-normal temperatures, and to atmospheres with higher-than-normal CO2 concentrations. The point is not to see what happens to the B2 rainforest per se, but rather to validate and calibrate the predictions that the climate models are pumping out about the fate of real rainforests during the coming Anthropocene.
B2’s former agricultural areas, the greenhouses where the original econauts grew their food, are now home to L.E.O.: the Landscape Evolution Observatory. L.E.O. has been called the first step in a new science of terraforming planets – which sounds exciting, but in practice boils down to watering sand and then watching that sand slowly turn into soil. Earth scientists have used B2 to watch dirt “grow” for eight years now. Next year they’re going to sprinkle some hay seeds over the newly-formed soil and see what happens.
The tour really got interesting when we were led into the life support system under Biosphere 2 – the so-called technosphere.
At the end of the tunnel is a giant variable volume chamber. It’s a “lung” that, when the biosphere is sealed up tight, fills and contracts with air. Remarkably, the sealed biosphere still loses less air by percentage volume than the International Space Station. When the sun rises, so does the lung’s 40-thousand-pound metal roof, which is attached to the walls by a flexible rubber membrane. And then when the sun sets, the roof settles back in place. Without the lung, B2 wouldn’t have lasted a single day – the windows would have shattered due to the changing atmospheric pressure inside.
As we wandered the grounds, it became apparent what an impressive feat of engineering Biosphere 2 was — and still is.
That evening, we gathered to consider what we saw at Biosphere 2. When B2 was first in the news back in 01991, it was hailed as a visionary piece of engineering which, by its very existence, asked us to understand ourselves differently. Biosphere 2 was the whole earth under glass, a miniature model of Spaceship Earth. We were meant to understand that while the econauts sealed inside were LARPing a trip across our solar system, the rest of us were not players in a play. We really were on board a ship, eight-thousand miles across and traveling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun – and the idiot lights on the life support system were, and still are, blinking red. B2 was a mammoth piece of engineering which embodied a philosophy, a point of view, a warning. And now? While B2 had been made scientifically useful, we all saw what was lost, too. Biosphere 2 has lost much of its original poetry and, with that, has largely fallen out of the conversation.
So, the question came back to us. How do we ensure the Clock of the Long Now doesn't suffer a similar fate?
At some point in the late fifth century, as the Western Roman empire fell, a group of Zoroastrian priests in Iran’s Fars Province lit a very special fire.
As the days passed, they kept the flame burning. Years became decades, and decades became centuries, with the fire moving between various locations, until it eventually ended up in the Yazd, a desert city around 600 km (373 miles) south-east of Tehran. In 01934, a new temple was built there to house it, where it continues to burn to this day. It’s one of only nine in the world – a flame that has been kept alive for more than 1,500 years.
This millennia-old Zoroastrian fire is an extraordinary act of long-minded maintenance – and one of many examples of long-term thinking in my new book The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time (Wildfire, March 02023). What might we learn from it if we want to think with a longer perspective?
The Yazd temple that houses the 1,500-year-old fire today is situated on a busy street with cafés, clothing stores and a tourist information centre. Once you are inside the gate, however, the world outside fades into the background. Visitors encounter a peaceful garden, containing a round pool of water lined with benches and conical trees. Beyond that is a light-coloured, one-storey brick building, with a portico topped by the Zoroastrian ‘Faravahar’ symbol: a bird’s wings outstretched like an aeroplane viewed from above, with a holy male figure for a head.
Inside the building, the everlasting fire burns within a goblet. Several times a day, priests wearing all white tend the flames with a mixture of long-burning hardwood and sweet-scented softwood. Non-Zoroastrians are not allowed to go close, but visitors can view the chamber from the entrance hall. Looking at the fire through a tinted glass window, you can see the faint reflection of tourists peering in with their cameras, attempting to capture an image that will no doubt have faded or digitally decayed long before the flame goes out.
Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest faiths, and was founded approximately 3,500 years ago. It is based on the teachings of the Iranian prophet Zarathustra (also known as Zoroaster). In the Yazd fire temple, he is depicted in a painting with a bushy beard and long hair, a halo behind his head, carrying a staff and holding up a single finger, his eyes gazing upward.
With believers concentrated mainly in Iran and India, Zoroastrianism is much smaller than the major global religions: between 100,000-200,000 followers by some estimates. But over the centuries, Zoroastrian practices and writings have significantly influenced other faiths, as well as intersecting with the politics of states and empires. It gave Christianity the three wise men who attended the birth of Jesus – scholars reckon they were Zoroastrian priests – and supposedly helped to inspire Judaism’s theology of the afterlife, with the idea that what you do on Earth affects your fate after you die.
Zoroastrians have a particularly strong relationship with fire, which they see as a focus for ritual and contemplation. The ancient flames they tend are called Atash Bahrams, which means ‘victorious fire’. The fires are not worshipped, but when standing nearby, believers feel they are in the presence of the deity Ahura Mazdā. The flame can be symbolic of various things, expressing inspiration, compassion, truth, devotion, as well as continuity and change.
Atash Bahram fires are extraordinarily difficult to start, which explains why there are so few of them. The oldest fire in India, for example, has stayed burning for more than 1,000 years in a village called Udvada, north of Mumbai. To start it, Zoroastrian priests had to walk back to Iran to fetch a collection of sacred items called the alat – such as holy ash, a ring and the hair of a bull. En route they had to hide to avoid enemy armies and could not cross any rivers or seas, because fire and water cannot mix. It then took 14,000 hours of ritual. But here’s where it got really difficult: an Atash Bahram must be made by combining 16 different fires, taken from the homes of various professions such as a bricklayer, baker, warrior and artisan, plus the fire of a burning corpse and the fire of lightning. The latter fire is particularly difficult to source, because two Zoroastrians have to witness the lightning, and within a rainy storm hope that the strike sets something alight.
It is of course impossible to verify if the ancient fires have ever fizzled out once or twice. One can imagine that the chain has been disrupted by war, disease or natural disaster – and across 1,500 years there must have been many close calls. But the tending of the Atash Bahram flames is nonetheless one of the world’s longest-term commitments to a single act. And remarkably, it has endured through the medium of one of the world’s most ephemeral substances: a flame.
In The Long View, I write about how it’s possible to develop different “timeviews”: alternative perspectives of one’s place within the past, present and future to the dominant short-termist timeview of the modern age. The tending of the Zoroastrian flame is an example of what I call the continuity timeview: an approach to long-term stewardship defined by cross-generational baton-passing; a focus on making things last. (Another example would be the 20-year reconstruction cycle of the Grand Shrine in Ise, which Long Now’s Alexander Rose observed first-hand in 02013.)
So, what elements of the Zoroastrian faith led to this longevity, apart from pious dedication?
The everlasting flames show that it’s not necessary to leave behind something designed to last forever if you want to bridge across the long term. While Zoroastrianism certainly has its precious treasures, such as the alat used to start an Atash Bahram, arguably the faith’s most valuable heirlooms are instead their community practices and habits. It is these that define the continuity timeview.
Like so many faiths and cultures, Zoroastrianism emphasizes that there is a bond between generations. Through a shared act, by focusing attention on a fire that must be tended, the Zoroastrians pass a sacred responsibility forward. What makes this so powerful is that along the way, individuals personally benefit with status and other rewards.
But this is not the only long-minded lesson we might draw from the continuity timeview. Another crucial way that Zoroastrianism – or indeed any successful religion – passes ideas across time is via the power of ritual.
The performance of ritual can be traced into human prehistory. But as societies grew larger, the more routine community-building rituals of faith came into their own, such as prayer, music, tending flames, ceremonies and more. According to the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse at the University of Oxford, rituals helped to foster the trust, cooperation and cohesion that enabled civilizations to flourish: a social glue that bound people together across space and time.
Rituals helped to spread the idea of what a ‘good’ citizen should be, gluing together heterogenous societies. Every time a prayer was recited or a ceremony performed, it signalled a commitment to shared moral beliefs and collective goals among disparate people. As the Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun observed in the fourteenth century, rituals fostered asabiyah, which in Arabic roughly means ‘social cohesion’, transporting solidarity beyond direct kinship to a national scale.
Over time, ritual practices became ever-more embedded in the major organized religions – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism. They are all different in detail, but have much in common.
Many involve synchrony or display, such as the Islamic call to prayer or the Christian singing of hymns. Food makes a regular appearance, such as in Catholic Communion, or the Buddhist preparation of meals to feed hungry ghosts (a neglected spirit or ancestor). Fire or burning incense is also seen across countries and faiths – the lighting of candles to mark the start of the shabbat, or the diya lamps during Diwali. And so is cleansing, such as the various procedures followed before entering temples, or the Hindu practice of bathing the body in holy rivers before festivals.
For the Zoroastrians, tending the fire is a ritual in itself, and the locus for regular ceremonies to mark occasions, called jashan, which involve implements such as fruits, nuts and wheat pudding in metallic trays placed on a white sheet with milk, wine and flowers, led by a priest called a zoatar, while another person looks after the fire: an atravakshi.
Plenty of rituals have no obvious reason to be performed in the specific way that they are, and one culture’s ritual norm can raise eyebrows in another. But the detail does not matter. It’s about the ideas they carry, and the community behaviours they help to foster. As well as encouraging repetition and remembrance, these rituals are a way of forging a relationship with longer-term time, marking beginnings and endings, as well as a connection with ancestors. Rituals therefore are a human behaviour by which ideas can travel across decades and centuries.
If a non-believer or secular organization were hoping to become more long-minded and create ideas that endure, they might do well to ask: what rituals and traditions bring their communities together?
Some rationally minded sceptics might be reluctant to participate in a spiritual practice, but not all rituals involve deities or worship.
Recently, I asked Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz, the director of strategy at the Long Now Foundation, how he thinks about ‘long rituals’ within the organisation. He cited the obvious events like the monthly seminars the foundation holds, inviting speakers to talk about long-minded research or writing, as well as more casual meetings for the broader Long Now community at The Interval, Long Now's office, bar, and gathering-place in San Francisco, California. But there are also less frequent traditions that Brysiewicz and his colleagues follow: for example, the team makes regular camping “pilgrimages” to the original site of the 10,000 Year Clock project in Eastern Nevada. Then there’s the annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco event in December with the Prelinger Library, he says, and the concomitant Winter Party for members and friends.
Through these activities, Brysiewicz and his colleagues are participating in the same kind of shared acts and ritual practices that have connected people for centuries – bearing witness to oration, finding fellowship in communal meals, pilgrimage, and honouring important sites.
If you think about it, your life is probably already packed with rituals: national holidays, sports events, family traditions, and far more. They can be celebratory, such as a song sung over a birthday cake, or sombre, such as a minute’s silence to remember the dead. But one question to ask yourself might be: which ones are promoting the principles of maintenance and stewardship?
Whether it is the commitment to a single act, such as tending the everlasting Zoroastrian flame, or participation in a chain of acts, observing rituals connects us across space and time. They are one of the most long-minded habits we have.
Richard Fisher is the author of The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time (Wildfire), which was published in the UK and other territories on 30 March 02023. He writes the newsletter The Long View: A Field Guide.
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Anteros, a freed slave of the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, had decided it was a good day for a walk on the beach. Damp sand stuck to his bare feet as he walked, probably deep in great thoughts about matters that continue to remain a mystery, when he felt shock travel from his foot to the rest of his body, knocking him out of breath. The source of the shock, upon close inspection, was a live torpedo ray.
“Although he initially suffered an excruciating cramp, the pain he had long endured from what might have been gout miraculously disappeared,” writes historian of neuroscience Stanley Finger in his book Doctor Franklin’s Medicine.
As painful as it was, the jolt felt by Anteros would lead to the discovery of a treatment for countless diseases such as gout, arthritis, chronic headache, and more.
Long before man had discovered the scientific principles behind electricity, ancient physicians worked with electric current to treat physical and mental disorders such as epilepsy, vertigo and depression. The ancient world depended on nature for many needs now provided by technology, including sourcing electric current. Prior to the discovery of electricity, humans utilized electric fishes for all their ‘shocking’ needs.
Ancient Egyptians were familiar with one such shock generating fish, the Malapterurus electricus or the Nile catfish. Indigenous to the Nile, the first known depiction of the catfish can be found as a mural inscribed in 02750 BC on the tomb of the architect Ti in Saqqara, Egypt. Egyptians were not the only Mediterranean culture to depict the catfish in their art; a thousand miles north and 3000 years after the Saqqara mural , similar murals could also be found in the Roman city of Pompeii. While these murals fail to reveal whether the natives of the two lands used the electric fishes for any medical purposes, ancient Egyptian writings on papyri record the use of the electric fish to relieve pain 4700 years ago. Later records by Pliny and Plutarch also report the Egyptians' use of electric eel to treat joint pain, migraines, melancholy, and epilepsy.
Approximately 2500 years following the first depiction of the Nile catfish, Hippocrates of Cos, the Greek ancient physician regarded as the "father of medicine" recorded in his book On Regimen medical uses of the Mediterranean electric ray (Torpedo torpedo) and Nile catfish for the treatment of headaches and arthritis.
In 45 AD, word of Anteros’ miraculously cured gout reached Scribonius Largus, the court physician for the Roman Emperor Claudius. In his role as imperial philosopher — a Roman title roughly equivalent to scientist — he began experimenting and recording the medical benefits of the live torpedo fish, and suggested placing a live torpedo on the forehead to treat a headache.
“Headache even if it is chronic and unbearable, is taken away and remedied forever by a live torpedo placed on the spot which is in pain, until the pain ceases. As soon as the numbness has been felt, the remedy should be removed lest the ability to feel be taken away from the part,” observed Largus. “Moreover, several torpedoes of the same kind should be prepared because the cure, that is, the torpor which is a sign of betterment, is sometimes effective only after two or three (placement of individual fishes)”.
Noting Anteros’ experience with the live torpedo, Largus, for treating gout, recommended placing a live fish under the patient’s feet. He also opted to use the electric shock produced by a torpedo in the treatment of conversion hysteria.
Scribonius Largus was a reputable physician of his time, and upon learning of his methods, other medical practitioners soon began mirroring his methodology to treat their patients with electric currents of the torpedo fish. Some physicians, hoping to find a cure for paralysis, even attempted to shock their patients with the electric fish, possibly with the hope of artificially causing a muscle contraction or twitch to break through paralysis.
Three decades after Scribonius recorded the first known medical use of electric current in human history, Dioscorides of Anazarbus, a Greek military surgeon, added new treatments with application of the fish to the already existing list. In his book On the Material of Medicine, Dioscorides records a treatment for prolapsed anus that makes use of fish-derived electric current. For centuries, these remedies were applied by the succeeding physicians without enough attempts to confirm their worth as treatments.
Claudius Galenus Galen (130 AD - 201 AD), a Greek physician and surgeon in the Roman Empire, sought to confirm their efficacy by trying the great physicians' remedies on himself. He concluded:
“The whole torpedo, I mean the sea animal, is said by some to cure headache and reduce the prolapsed seat when applied. I indeed tried both of these and found neither to be true. Therefore, I thought that the torpedo should be applied alive to the person who has the headache, and that it could be that this remedy is anodyne and could free the patient from pain as do other remedies which numb the senses: this did so for the above-mentioned reason.”
However, Galen found one use for electric fish: he treated epilepsy with the application of the electric current from the torpedo.
The ancient electro-therapeutic remedies continued to be practiced by physicians around the world until at least the eighteenth century. Steady experiments of electric discharge from the fish helped advance the medical treatments for disorders such as depression, seizures, arthritis, vertigo, headache and epilepsy.
When Middle Eastern and Asian physicians were treating diseases with the shock-inducing fishes, the Western world was just beginning to understand animal electricity. In the eighteenth century, a new field in the science of medicine emerged which was known as ‘medical electricity’. In 01745, Johann Gottlob Krüger (01715 - 01759), a professor of philosophy and medicine in Halle, Germany hypothesized that electricity, like all things, must have a utility and since it neither had any use in theology or jurisprudence, “there is obviously nothing left but medicine… The best effect would be found in paralyzed limbs.” Indeed, Krüger wasn’t entirely wrong in his hypothesis. A year later, Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, a student of Krüger, successfully treated patients suffering from contracted or otherwise disabled fingers using electrical currents. However, despite several promising results with different mechanisms like the Leyden jar, the first man-made capacitor, the use of electric current as a treatment did not immediately catch on among medical practitioners.
During the eighteenth century, scientists conducted a number of studies on the presence of electricity in nature - with a keen focus on its presence in animals such as the torpedo. By the late eighteenth century, Luigi Galvani, a professor of anatomy, explained via his famous frog experiment the animal body as the source of electricity. Since Galvani regarded animals as the source of electricity, death for him was an extinction of “that most noble electric fluid on which the motion, sensation, blood circulation, life itself seemed to depend.” For the anatomy professor, the idea that “death comes when blood ceases to circulate and to produce the electric fluid by friction in the brain and the nerves” was at least “plausible, if not true.”
Galvani’s explanation of death found reinforcement when western naturalists and researchers learned of the fish that was said to naturally produce shock equivalent or stronger than the man-made Leyden jar. It was John Walsh, a British scientist, who concluded after an in-depth investigation of the torpedo ray and the electric eel of Guyana that the shock produced by the aquatic animal was, in fact, electric in nature. Concluding his research, Walsh wrote:
“That the effect of the Torpedo appears to be absolutely Electrical, by formula its circuit through the same conductors with Electricity, for instance metals, animals and moist substance: and by being intercepted by the same non-conductors, for instance glass and sealing wax.”
Walsh’s research into electric fish, conducted between 01772 and 01775, is often considered as the dawn of electrophysiology.
However, electrophysiology wasn’t the only field to get its start from Walsh’s findings. Working along with Walsh on this research was the Scottish surgeon John Hunter. Focusing on the anatomical structure of the torpedo ray, Hunter found that the organs responsible for generating the electric current, as well as “picking up and directing” it in the fish, were formed by stacking numerous flat disks on “one above the other”. 30 years later, the Italian physicist Alexandro Volta borrowed the same stacked disc structure first identified by Hunter to create what was known initially as an “artificial electric organ,” a device that could provide constant electric current to a circuit. You may be more familiar with Volta’s invention as the first electrochemical battery.
That artificial electric organ, which produced electricity by chemical means, was at first a breakthrough for the medical field as it allowed the use of Galvani's direct current to treat tumors and other diseases. In the centuries that have followed Galvani’s experiments, electrical current has proven to be far more than a medical curiosity. We have reinvented our daily lives around electricity, taking the currents that were once only found to exist in a few obscure fish species and allowing them to course through a global network of power and information.
Imminent climate catastrophe. An unending pandemic. Rampant authoritarianism. Unceasing incarceration in the United States. Half of the United States unable to afford one $400 emergency. Grossly concentrated global wealth and 1.7 billion workers in the world residing in countries where inflation outpaces wages. A significant increase in the number of people going hungry across the globe. Some 574 million people worldwide expected to endure extreme poverty by 02030 if trends continue.
Interrelated crises abound, and the effects are felt not just in one country or a couple of countries, but across the planet. To address the crises, then, we probably ought not to take an individual nation-state as the primary unit of analysis or as the key site for transformative action.
If we operate under the ostensibly reasonable assumption that existing crises reflect sometimes difficult-to-detect historical developments, then we also ought to concern ourselves with the longue durée. The French historian Fernand Braudel and the Annales School, a tradition rooted in the study of long duration social history, popularized the concept.
“My understanding of the longue durée is that it's something that takes place over many, many centuries, if not millennia,” Omer Awass, an associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at American Islamic College.
Awass is what you might call a world-systems theorist.
At the core of world-systems thinking is the need to pay attention to and glean insights from the slow-moving historical changes that occur over the long-term, over what world-systems scholars refer to and study as the longue durée, so as to throw light on the chaotic, rapidly changing reality we live in now.
Looking at the longue durée with a world-systems lens reveals the flawed contours of our social order, like the economic imperative to subordinate the concerns of most human beings to institutionalized pressures to commodify, grow, maximize profit and accumulate capital while concentrating influence and decision-making power.
Taking the world-system, rather than a nation-state or conventional geopolitics, as the primary unit of analysis clarifies why previous attempts to realize lasting, uplifting transformative change have too often proven largely if not wholly ineffective — and in some instances disastrous. The aims of national liberation struggles and revolutionary efforts to attain and exercise state power to drastically improve people’s lives never fully materialized or endured, world-systems analysis informs us, because of the larger systemic forces at work.
Immanuel Wallerstein, perhaps the most prominent and prolific proponent of world-systems analysis, suggested that those systemic forces include the imperative to accumulate capital. They include the disparate power relations between nation-states that have expanded capital accumulation. Those features of the system prioritize constant production of surplus at the expense of people disadvantaged by existing arrangements and at the increased risk of exacerbating existential crises, ecological and otherwise.
Recalibrating our focus to the structures extending beyond and influencing international as well as intra-national relations helps us grasp why interventions at national scales likely won’t do more than provide partial palliatives for the deeper ills of the world, sans fundamental shifts in how we organize and maintain our interconnected lives.
When it comes to understanding the crises as well as the opportunities we face today, Wallerstein’s analysis also offers an apropos insight, or a prophetic prognostication, if we wish to entertain his theory with greater skepticism. Prior to his death in 02019, Wallerstein claimed that, since at least the 01970s, our modern world-system has been in a period of structural crisis. For him and for many world-systems scholars, the upturns and downturns of the capitalist world-economy that the system has cycled through for centuries, perhaps longer, have pushed it further and further away from equilibrium, to a point of no return.
“The primary characteristic of a structural crisis is chaos,” Wallerstein wrote in an essay from 02011. “Chaos is not a situation of totally random happenings. It is a situation of rapid and constant fluctuations in all the parameters of the historical system. This includes not only the world-economy, the inter-state system, and cultural-ideological currents, but also the availability of life resources, climatic conditions, and pandemics.”
Those wild fluctuations emerge from and compound the crises that surround us.
“Because the fluctuations are so wild, there is little pressure to return to equilibrium,” Wallerstein argued in a 02010 essay, explaining our predicament. “During the long, ‘normal’ lifetime of the system, such pressure was the reason why extensive social mobilizations — so-called ‘revolutions’ — had always been limited in their effects. But when the system is far from equilibrium, the opposite can happen—small social mobilizations can have very great repercussions, what complexity science refers to as the ‘butterfly effect’. We might also call it the moment when political agency prevails over structural determinism.”
A world-systems perspective on the formation and long-term transformation of enduring social arrangements can help us understand how social movements and perhaps our own personal actions and interactions might tilt the balance to bring about a better successor system, or at least give us a greater understanding of what it would take to improve human lives during these tumultuous times.
If capitalism and the somewhat synonymous modern world-system that has sustained it are ending sooner rather than later, per Wallerstein’s view, or even if we just wish to address the underlying sources of our interrelated problems, world-systems analysis offers unique insight into what not to keep doing. It helps identify the repeated large-scale patterns that must be discontinued and displaced to build a better world.
A brief genealogy of system history informed by the thoughts of those using world-systems theory should help hone that perspective.
Not all world-systems thinkers have understood the longue durée of the existing system in the same way. While Wallerstein believed it’s a 500-year-old system that’s coming to an end, what if the system dates back much farther — say, 5,000 years? A different perspective on its origins can alter our understanding of how it may end or what successor system(s) arise in its wake. At the same time, extending the longue durée view of the system could affect our grasp of its fundamental qualities, what must be transformed within it, and what social arrangements are possible beyond it.
Andre Gunder Frank, one of Wallerstein’s friends and contemporaries, took a more continuationist view of system history. Frank, along with Barry Gills, claimed enduring features of the system, like constant capital accumulation, date back several millennia and occurred throughout the world system via investment in agriculture, livestock, industry, transport, commerce, militaries and other means. In “The World System: 500 Years or 5,000?,” Frank and Gills suggested the motor force of capital accumulation and a shifting hierarchy of center-periphery complexes dates back more than just a few centuries. Wallerstein and another first generation world-systems scholar, Samir Amin, undervalued the significance of trade and market activity in the ancient world, causing them to overlook the role certain people or areas played in the development of the “world political-economic system” that’s displayed the same “structural patterns and processes for at least 5,000 years,” Frank and Gills explained.
They saw capital being accumulated, surplus being generated, and different regions benefiting disproportionately from the transfer of that surplus way before the 16th century European point that many sources, including Wallerstein, place it at. Both perspectives theorize a capitalist system that predates the industrial capitalism that Karl Marx critiqued in the nineteenth century when he analyzed the production of capital that occurred under harsh conditions in England’s factories.
If Wallerstein, Marx, and others identified qualitative shifts in social relations that became significant more recently than 5,000 years ago, adopting a continuationist view of history with an insistence on seeing enduring features of the system as several-millennia-old could make it difficult for people to imagine other possible arrangements. The late David Graeber, an anthropologist and one of the organizers of the initial Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York City circa 02011, suggested as much in a journal article which called into question the tendency to see shades of capitalism everywhere.
Graeber might have been right about the challenges associated with imagining and realizing better worlds when we privilege the longue durée over interest in the experience of social relations, focusing on the cumulative production of surplus and capital over the production of people. Yet Frank and Gills’ millennia-encompassing view of developing systemic interactions also alerts us to overlooked processes operating on grander timescales. That view brings into focus enduring arrangements responsible for disparities and sociological phenomena that we would be foolish to tie solely to post-01800 institutions.
Moreover, dating the origins of the system back several millennia might ironically even help us imagine how socioeconomic relations might be otherwise, à la Graeber.
A closer look at the work of David Wilkinson, a professor of political science at UCLA who contributed a chapter — “Civilizations, Cores, World Economies, And Oikumenes” — to the aforementioned Frank and Gills text reveals some of those imaginaries. Wilkinson opted for the framework of civilizations, which he referred to as vast social entities that “transcend the geographical boundaries of national, state, economic, linguistic, cultural, or religious groups.”
In Wilkinson’s estimation, several civilizations coexisted up until the 19th century, but today there’s a single, global civilization. This “Central Civilization” is a descendant of a civilization that emerged around 01500 BC when Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations collided and fused. Over the next 3,500 years, that civilization “then expanded over the entire planet and absorbed, on unequal terms, all other previously independent civilizations.”
Some civilizational mergers have involved groups seizing control over and incorporating other groups. But the linking of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations in the second millennium BC was an “atypical” and “egalitarian” coming together that, if Wilkinson has his history right, formed “a new joint network-entity” and differed from many future agglomerations involving annexation of one by civilization by another.
His somewhat idiosyncratic version of world-systems analysis and assessment of the longue durée frames the origins of what would much later become our globe-encircling “Central Civilization” as a fairly equitable encounter, on a certain level.
“The connection was made and maintained through mutually beneficial trade; politico-military independence and equality were preserved through the stalemating of imperialist war and the frustration of conquest,” Wilkinson explained. Records from Armana referring to gold from Egypt and royal daughters from states in Southwest Asia indicate they maintained exchange relations through a kind of luxury trade that nevertheless exacted a human toll.
The historical possibility of forging relations without domination can be seen as a source of hope — though these ancient civilizations came together via millennia-old realpolitik rather than humanitarian impulses.
As Wilkinson explained it, the merger of the two separate systems into one came as Egyptians aimed “to maintain multipolarity in southwest Asia,” and thus began treating the Mitanni kingdom in Mesopotamia not “as an external target for loot nor a potential subaltern to conquer, but as a useful check to balance the rising power of the Hittites, themselves far out of Egypt’s direct imperial reach.”
Over millennia, the network that formed at the intersection of Asia and Africa came to encompass networks to the west in Europe, the Americas, the western part of the African continent and in south and east Asia placing it, in certain respects, at the center of the world stage.
Christopher Chase-Dunn, sociologist and director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside, sees the existing system as more or less coeval with what’s considered the ascendance of the West. He follows the view of first-generation world-systems scholar Giovanni Arrighi, who claimed the modern capitalist world-system formed when Genoa and Portugal entered an alliance in the 15th century.
In a similar vein, Wallerstein argued in “The Modern World-System I,” that a “European world-economy” came into being in the late 15th and early 16th century. As a new “economic but not a political entity,” in his words, “unlike empires, city-states and nation-states,” within it, this social system was a “world” because it exceeded “juridically-defined political unit[s],” and a “world-economy” because economic relations formed the basis of connection that propelled its subsequent expansion across the globe.
Aviva Chomsky, a professor of history at Salem State University, explained how in a course she teaches at SSU, “Colonialism and the Making of the Modern World,” she draws on the late world-system scholar Janet Abu-Lughod’s “Before European Hegemony,” to explore the “Afro-Eurasian system of interlocking trade/communication spheres from East Asia to the Mediterranean/North Africa” that antedated 01492.
Similar to the Egypt-Mesopotamia partnering at the origin of the “Central Civilization,” in Wilkinson’s account, regions in that Afro-Eurasian system about 500 years ago participated, per Chomsky, with relative parity. But, she stresses, that didn’t equate to egalitarianism within them. To one degree or another, they were all “based on systems of forced/dispossessed labor, taxation,” which were, “extracted from the poor to serve the power, leisure, and consumption of elites.”
With the late-15th century rise of European hegemony — in other words, with the continent’s disproportionate influence and authority over other regions — there also arose “an Atlantic world system in which Europe, led by Spain and Portugal, conquers the Americas and develops the transatlantic slave trade, with devastating consequences for the peoples of Africa and the Americas,” Chomsky said.
World-systems scholars use language of “core” and “periphery” zones and processes, referring to the relations of operation, leverage, and control that benefit some nation-states at the expense of others. Certain nation-states or similar entities can at times obtain control over the system at large, and they call this dominance hegemony. Its full realization is considered relatively rare. Wallerstein, Chase-Dunn and others believe the United Provinces of the Netherlands became a hegemonic core power circa the 17th century, as they achieved overwhelming trading power in the fledgling market economy.
Two other powers are thought to have achieved serious hegemonic status over the longue durée of our current, now crisis-riddled system. Their hegemony and hegemonic declines coincided with significant changes in the workings of the world.
As northern European nations started to take over the slave trade and extend colonization “into the peripheries of Asia,” the Spanish and Portuguese empires declined, according to Chomsky’s reading. Then, “the shift accelerates in the [01800s] as a new ‘world system’ emerges,” the newly “independent United States joins with (primarily) Britain, France, [and] the Netherlands to establish colonial hegemony in the Americas, Africa, and much of Asia.”
Awass said in a late December 02022 interview that core regions intervened in the periphery in a direct way during the colonial period. “In a sense, they intervene[d] directly by taking over many countries or getting capitulations from countries that [they] could not take over directly, like the Ottoman Empire, or the Chinese Empire, Japan and Thailand, for example,” he said.
A key factor in this system was the exploitation of the natural resources of the periphery by the core. During this period, non-European industrial production suffered, Chomsky explained, as the other regions succumbed to pressures to export raw materials like cotton, copper, coal, tin, petroleum, and palm oil to Europe, as well as to the United States.
As it assumed a hegemonic position within the world-system in the 19th century, Britain became home to the expansive factory labor, employment, and production that horrified and fascinated thinkers like Marx, who wrote extensively about British manufacturing as he tried to understand and explain the engine of the system.
Britain’s dominance waned by the 20th century when a new world power attained what Wallerstein considered the most “extensive and total” exercise of hegemony and established conditions for what “promises to be the swiftest and most total” decline.
Most anyone who uses world-systems theory, and many who don’t, agree that after World War II, the United States emerged as a hegemonic power.
In this era, as Chomsky framed it, decolonized people achieved “nominal political independence” but faced overwhelming resistance in a struggle for an alternative economic order. The Cold War helped justify the United States in crushing attempts to redress the system and ex-colonial powers maintained “unequal exchange” and retained control of trade and financial institutions at the international level.
Awass has tried to model the world-system as a “Global Power-Field,” or GPF, drawing attention to important forces that covertly perpetuate and reshape global relations of control and subordination. His concept of “nonlocality” highlights how after decolonization the reshaping of the field made it so core powers no longer needed to remain present in peripheral regions to control or exploit them.
“It was these institutions and the rules of this new global field that everybody now had to play by because they joined the international nation-state system and all of the different global bodies, like the United Nations, which was an acknowledgment of this international nation-state system, and they set up the rules of the game, and just let the rules operate to their favor,” he said.
The supreme hegemony the United States exercised did not last long. Wallerstein held that as the most expansive phase in a cycle of the capitalist world-economy gave way to a downturn, it coincided with the commencement of American hegemonic decline. It was no accident, in his view, that social movements and popular revolts reflected and expressed world-historical changes around that time.
“He was at Columbia University when the student movement in 01968 erupted,” notes David Martinez, a documentarian at work on a project about Wallerstein’s ideas, later adding: “He was a young professor at Columbia, and he was actually on the committee of teachers to work with the students. That's when he saw that the movements of 01968 were of world historical importance.”
Various uprisings converged in what world-system theorists, following Wallerstein, call the 01968 “world revolution,” which Wallerstein thought foregrounded new developments in the analysis and orientation of anti-systemic movements.
Striking workers and students in Paris almost ushered in another French revolution that year in May. Come August, Soviet-directed forces invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring” movement that tried to create “socialism with a human face.” In the United States, organizations like Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party influenced communities as well as popular culture, and the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago put police violence on full display following a solid year of protests and riots that engulfed cities throughout the country. Authorities also shot into a crowd of thousands of student activists in the streets of Mexico City that October just before the start of the Olympics.
Intensified resistance to US aggression in Vietnam, punctuated by the Tet Offensive that kicked off the year of “world revolution,” revealed new limits on the reigning superpower’s military might, portending a waning of hegemony. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union faced scrutiny for colluding with the United States in Cold War maintenance of geopolitical power. Organizers called into question the strategy of seizing state power as the necessary initial step in trying to improve conditions and world relations, and they emphasized the oft-ignored aims and concerns of people marginalized because of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
Liberalism entailed an assumption about the possibilities for continued human progress and uplift within the established hegemonic order, but the revolutionary upheaval of 01968 ended the tenuous triumph of the “centrist liberalism” that had dominated, Wallerstein thought, “for a good hundred-odd years.”
The displacement of that previously dominant ideology epitomized and propelled what Wallerstein conceived of as the system’s ongoing phase of structural crisis. Yet these last few decades of crises might also foretell new possibilities for the next turn of the world-system.
Andre Gunder Frank understood the coming crisis as denoting both “danger and opportunity.” In his 01998 book, “ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age,” he forecast a coming period wherein East Asia would regain its preeminent world-economic position, and he claimed that “a time of crisis, especially for the previously best-placed part of the world economy/system, also opens a window of opportunity for some — not all! — more peripherally or marginally placed ones to improve their own position within the system as a whole.”
Indeed, the impetus and reverberations of the “world revolution” in 01968 foregrounded the concerns of the previously peripheral and marginal, at least at the cultural or ideological level, in Wallerstein’s reading. Those movements intimated another possible world(-system) with different popular values. They prefigured future and indeed current social movements, but they also elicited an enduring reactionary response.
When social upheavals ensued and crises emerged around 01970, major players in the global system made moves to retain their dominance that arguably initiated or accelerated all those previously mentioned trends.
Awass has written about the role of U.S. “dollar hegemony” post-WWII. The United States’ formal replacement of the gold standard with the dollar standard in early 01970s could have brought about a decisive end to American hegemony, as states outside of the Western core began to grumble about the dollar’s place as a fiat currency. In Awass’ analysis, the United States’ maintenance of hegemony was achieved by striking a deal in 01974 with Saudi Arabia, offering the regime protection. In exchange, the kingdom used its standing as the quasi-official leader of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, pressuring them to accept only the dollar in exchange for oil, which allowed the United States to continue to leverage power through the monetary system.
In his article, Awass pointed to US.-imposed sanctions on Iran as further evidence of a core power trying to maintain control with little regard for human consequences, though his piece focused on macro-modeling.
“I didn't highlight those dimensions of how it worked at the micro level of Iran, for example, on the second levels of the sort of sanctions that were taking place there, but for God's [sake], I mean, people can't even afford medicine,” he said.
The collapse of the Soviet Union near the close of the 20th century didn’t exactly spell “The End of History,” but it did temporarily reinforce the power of a descending hegemon in a volatile world order.
“After 01989 there is really no check at all left on US hegemony,” Chomsky added, “and the neoliberal order is imposed full-scale, with the Third World subject to structural adjustment, the dismantling of the social welfare state at home and abroad, deindustrialization of the core and maquiladorization, extractivism, tourism, and call centers as the new development strategies for the periphery. Meanwhile the impact of the industrial project comes home to roost with climate chaos, mass migration, [xenophobia] and hardened borders.”
Following Wallerstein’s analysis, the cost of the waste associated with economic production can no longer be so easily externalized by the businesses and industries producing it, given greater popular pressure to challenge pressing ecological injustices and curb the climate disruption driven by those externalities of capitalist production. That pressure further raises the cost of doing business within the existing system, which in turn contributes to the chaotic downturn and fluctuations characteristic of structural crisis.
For Chase-Dunn, the ongoing “contradictions of capitalism and decline of US hegemony” could contribute to “further renewal of inter-state warfare,” climate crises, and possible “deglobalization” of the global economy – possibly leading to collapse of the financial system in the next few decades.
To pursue a facet of Wallerstein’s work that seems especially urgent now, Chase-Dunn, along with Rebecca Alvarez, put together a proposal for a political vehicle that could combine the participatory elements of horizontal organization, free from top-down authority, together with a transnational steering structure. Via “The Vessel,” affinity groups and local communities could share the results of their work, facilitate collaboration, formulate visions for social change, determine preferable strategies as well as tactics, and coordinate global collective action, campaigns, and mobilizations through a delegated council. Perhaps this organizational ark or ship is capable of navigating through the proverbial flood ready to wash out a perturbed world-system during whatever kind of transitional period we’re in at present, provides one possible antidote to the preponderance of influence exercised among small slivers of the population within the confines of the interstate nexus and capitalist world-economy.
People could also carve out and coordinate a network of physical and digital spaces where care and cooperative decision-making gives everyone the ability to influence institutions, policies, relations and actions that affect them. Those spaces might embody and popularize values that could prevail over the outmoded ones embedded in the capitalist world-economy.
Similarly, Awass mentioned “courage,” “gumption” and “moral cultivation” as likely prerequisites for effective political action going forward. He acknowledged setbacks in struggle, like the crushing of the Arab Spring movement and the overturning of many of its achievements. “I think there perhaps are some positive signs of increasing global solidarity,” he qualified, referencing international climate justice activism while also lamenting forces that tend to circumvent such efforts.
Aviva Chomsky in turn recommended a piece by Jason Hickel on de-growth and anti-colonial politics as a source of ideas for action.
“In terms of what we can [or should] do now, I think that understanding the relationship between racism, colonialism, and climate chaos leads us to remaking the global industrial order with [degrowth] in the global north as a component of reparations for the ongoing damages,” she shared.
Until his death, Wallerstein argued the system had entered a structural crisis. Given our pivotal juncture, what every person “does at each moment about each immediate issue matters,” as he wrote in a 02013 commentary, again invoking the “butterfly effect” while likening all of us to “little butterflies today.” The end of the capitalist world-economy, he insisted, is coming; it’s just a matter of how and when.
“What it turns into could be something with basically all the worst features with none of the good features, or the opposite, the good features with none of the bad features,” Martinez said, conjuring the spirit of Wallerstein’s critical optimism. “Our job is to make sure that it's the latter that happens, that it turns into something better.”
The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s One World Connected gallery now features two artifacts from the Long Now Foundation: a prototype of The Clock of The Long Now’s face and a Rosetta Disk. Together, the two artifacts are placed at the end of the gallery, serving as symbols of the need to consider the long-term future in our decision-making in the present.
One World Connected, which opened in the autumn of 02022 as part of the museum’s renovations, focuses on how the aerospace revolution that began in the mid-twentieth century brought about two notable shifts: “the ease in making connections across vast distances and a new perspective of Earth as humanity’s home.” In an interview with Long Now Ideas, Dr. Teasel Muir-Harmony, the exhibit’s curator, said that the gallery’s goal was to show “how aerospace has transformed our experience of Earth” over the past century, contextualizing the aerospace history showcased in the rest of the museum’s galleries in a broader sociological and technological context.
A key part of that transformation were the first images of the whole Earth from space. The One World Connected gallery features a number of items related to those first photographs taken on the Apollo missions, including two issues of the Whole Earth Catalog. The exhibit showcases how our perspective on seeing the whole Earth from space has shifted over time. In the span of a lifetime, images of the Earth from space have gone from “rare and unfamiliar” to “constant and commonplace.”
[For more on how seeing the Earth from space changed everything, read Ahmed Kabil’s 02018 feature on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 “Earthrise” photo.]
One of Dr. Muir-Harmony’s aims in designing the gallery was impressing upon visitors that “this transformation happened rapidly” and is still in progress, pointing to recent advances in fields like satellite-driven Earth observation, navigation, and communications as continued shifts in our perspective. In Dr. Muir-Harmony’s view, “space technology is infrastructure,” and our efforts in space must be understood in terms of their effects on human well-being.
With that in mind, bringing in a long-term perspective made perfect sense to the exhibit’s curatorial team. The two Long Now artifacts in the collection “encourage visitors to think about the future,” and prompt them to consider “the risks and possibilities of interconnection” over a longer time frame.
Chief among the risks and possibilities identified by Dr. Muir-Harmony is the “exponential growth” of satellites and satellite debris in low-earth orbit — a development over the past decade or so that has enabled access to satellite-based internet nearly anywhere on Earth, including the furthest reaches of the poles. Yet the ever-growing nexus of satellites above us also raises key questions about national security and personal privacy that remain unanswered. As Dr. Muir-Harmony notes, the gallery’s priority is to get visitors to “step back and think about the long-term perspective [and] how we want to shape the future” in the face of technological advancements.
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation between two Hugo award-winning science fiction authors, Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz. Known for challenging classic science fiction tropes such as war, violence, and colonialism, both authors create vivid and immersive worlds that are filled with non-human persons, peace, and a subtle sense of hope. The authors will discuss what it means to take these alternative themes seriously, delve into their writing & world building process, and explore how science fiction can help us imagine new futures that can make sense of our current civilizational struggles.
Doors are at 6pm; drinks & small plates are available to purchase. Club Fugazi will remain open and serving drinks after the talk, for further conversation. You can also tune in to the livestream on this page and our YouTube channel.
How can we turn the tide on species loss and help biodiversity and bioabundance flourish for millennia to come?
Ryan Phelan is Executive Director of Revive & Restore; the leading wildlife conservation organization promoting the incorporation of biotechnologies into standard conservation practice. Phelan will share the new Genetic Rescue Toolkit for conservation – a suite of biotechnology tools and conservation applications that offer hope and a path to recovery for threatened species. In this talk, Phelan will present examples of the toolkit in action, including corals that better withstand rising ocean temperatures, trees that withstand a fungal blight, and the genetic rescue of the black-footed ferret, once thought to be extinct.
Revive & Restore brings biotechnologies to conservation in responsible ways; from engaging local communities where ecological restorations are underway, to connecting stakeholders in disciplines like biotech, bioethics, conservation organizations and government agencies. Together, they are forging new paths to bioabundance in our changing world.
Ryan Phelan will be joined by forecaster and Long Now Board Member Paul Saffo for the Q&A to discuss long-term outcomes and the Intended Consequences framing used by Revive & Restore.
Looking for vicuña is not for the faint of heart, or for those who suffer from car or altitude sickness. After two hours of bouncing along rough dirt roads in an all-wheel drive pickup, I finally spotted a vicuña drinking from a pond at about 17,000 feet above sea level. Then I saw another, and another. Once I knew how to look, the hillside was suddenly spotted with vicuña. Their pale cinnamon backs and white bellies blended in perfectly with the harsh rocky landscape.
The vicuña is the baby-faced, shy cousin of the llama. Their eyes are almost comically large in their delicate faces, with long eyelashes. They are famously shy and run like the wind from any perceived threat. They also have some of the softest fur in the world. That fur earned them a prominent place among the Inca’s pantheon of sacred animals. It’s also what also makes them so valuable today.
The finest natural fiber, vicuña fur is a mere nine to twelve microns in diameter. For comparison, cashmere ranges from fourteen to nineteen microns. Each delicate strand is hollow, making it incredibly lightweight and insulating.
Vicuña fur is also difficult to find. Very few companies make garments with vicuña, and they sell to a select few stores. Though the fur comes from Peru, most of what you’ll find in a shop is made in Italy. Only one brand, Kuna, sells products made in Peru. Regardless of where it’s made, a simple scarf costs $1,000 to $3,000 USD, and a full shawl can cost upwards of $10,000 USD. Each garment is sold with a certificate, showing that the fur was harvested ethically in government regulated shearings of wild vicuñas.
Vicuña fur was exceptionally valuable long before Italian manufacturing. The Inca, who ruled much of South America in the 01400s and 01500s, decreed that only the royal family could wear vicuña fur. Vicuñas were both sacred and protected: hunting one was punishable by death. Despite the Inca’s attachment to the vicuña, they were never domesticated. Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated llamas and alpacas, but the vicuña stayed wild.
During Incan times, the protection afforded the vicuña helped it thrive. When the Spanish arrived in South America, they estimated that about 2 million lived throughout the Andes. That is when the indiscriminate killing of vicuñas began, which decimated the population.
When the Inca lost control of South America, the vicuña lost its protection. In the late 01500s, hunting vicuña went from being a capital crime to being encouraged by the Spanish crown. Change started in 01777, when the Spanish Imperial Court decreed it was illegal to kill a vicuña. Simón Bolívar enacted a similar law in 01825. Neither effort had much effect, and poaching continued. In the 01960s, about 2,000 vicuña remained in Peru, and only 6,000 in all of South America.
In 01969, Peru and Bolivia signed an accord in La Paz that began a new era of protection for the vicuña. Chile and Ecuador joined soon after, followed by Argentina in 01971. After 01969, the population quickly began to recover. A census conducted by Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture in 02012 revealed over 200,000 vicuña in Peru. Convenio de la Vicuña found over 470,000 in all of South America in 02016.
Why were conservation efforts in the 01970s successful when similar laws had failed for the previous 200 years? One likely explanation is who controlled the lands where the vicuña live. Land grants from the Spanish crown to colonizers in the 01600s took control of the lands away from Indigenous Andeans. Even after independence, Peru’s rural areas suffered under a feudal system where Indigenous peoples worked as unpaid serfs, in conditions akin to modern slavery. It wasn’t until the Agrarian Reform in 01969 that Indigenous communities started to regain control of their lands. Ownership of large tracts of land passed from the descendants of Spanish colonizers to the Indigenous communities who live on them.
Today, most land in Peru’s puna, the high altitude plateau that covers much of southern Peru, is communally owned by rural Indigenous communities, though some is privately owned. According to Santiago Paredes, director of Pampas Galeras National Reserve, regardless of who owns the land, all vicuña must be protected. Any community, person or company that owns vicuña habitat must register a management plan with SERFOR, Peru’s National Forest and Wildlife Service. The plans include specific ways that vicuña will be protected from poaching, as well as how their habitat will be conserved and, if possible, improved.
Even with the population rebounding, vicuñas are still at risk. The biggest threats to their survival are loss of habitat due to climate change, competition for grazing with domestic animals, diseases like mange, and poaching.
Climate models predict decreasing rainfall in the central and southern mountain ranges in Peru, which is precisely where vicuñas live. According to USAID’s Climate Risk Profile for Peru, “temperature increases are forcing lower-elevation ecosystems to move higher, encroaching upon endemic species and ecosystems and increasing risk of extinction of high-mountain species.” As climate change pushes vicuña higher up the peaks, their habitat shrinks and fragments.
It is legal to graze livestock on vicuña habitat, which decreases their food supply. Contact with domesticated animals and rising temperatures may be causing the increasing mange outbreak among vicuña. While more research is needed, a 02021 study in Peru found that 6.1% of vicuña surveyed were infected. The parasite not only saps the animal’s energy, it destroys their fur, which makes them vulnerable to the extreme cold of the Andes. Mange is now the leading cause of death in vicuñas.
Some of these threats are easier to manage than others. In 02022, Peru’s National Agrarian Health Service (SENASA) began treating vicuña for mange in eleven regions. Enforcement of anti-poaching laws is improving. The nebulous threat of climate change is much harder to combat. Communities now focus on protecting the vicuña’s habitat, hoping that their efforts to improve the vicuña’s food and water supply will compensate for the damages of climate change.
The most important aspects of vicuña habitat are a constant source of water, native grasses for grazing, and an absence of human development. Unlike most camelids, vicuña must drink water every day. They are territorial animals and live in small herds with one alpha male and up to ten females with their offspring. During the day, they spread out in grassy meadows to graze. At night, they climb up rocky hillsides to sleep on bare slopes where predators, such as puma, don’t have enough cover to get close.
All of this makes harvesting their fur quite complicated. Centuries ago, Andean civilizations developed the chaccu, a ritual gathering of vicuña herds to shear the fur before releasing the animals to the wild. In the 01990s, the population had grown enough to bring back the ancient tradition.
During a chaccu, people spread out in a loose circle up to a mile from a vicuña herd. They close in slowly, clapping their hands and making noise to concentrate the vicuñas in the center of the circle. Small chaccus may capture a dozen animals in one day, while larger ones can capture hundreds over a few days.
Today, chaccu isn’t exactly the same as it was five hundred years ago. An Incan ruler no longer presides over the ceremony. Communities now have trucks to drive out into the puna to get close to vicuña herds, trips that would previously have taken days or even weeks on foot. Shearing is now done quickly, with electric shears. Also, the fur is no longer kept for the royal family. It’s sold to international companies, many of which export it to Italy.
Chaccu organizers register the date and location with their local government. Three government officials plus a veterinarian oversee each event and ensure that all vicuña protection protocols are followed correctly. SENASA’s plan to treat vicuña for mange relies on chaccu.
Veterinarian Óscar Áragon has worked with vicuña for years and comes from a family that has raised alpaca for at least six generations. He has a master’s degree in South American camelids from the National Altiplano University in Puno, Peru.
“There are three steps to a modern chaccu,” Áragon explains. “When a vicuña is caught, the veterinarian first checks it for disease and draws blood samples. If it is sick, it’s treated. If not, it’s sent to the second stage, where somebody checks the length of the fur. It must be at least seven centimeters long so they can shear off five centimeters. It takes two or three years for their fur to grow that long. If the fur is long enough, then the animal is taken to the shearing station.”
In the early 02000s, a kilo of uncleaned vicuña fur could sell for as much as $600 USD. According to biologist Felix de la Cruz Huamani, the price has been dropping steadily since, which could pose a threat to this ancestral practice. A large chaccu takes hundreds of people several days’ of work to carry out. Most communities hold chaccu as a cultural tradition and use the money they earn from selling the fur to subsidize the event.
As the price of vicuña fur plummets, some communities have started to appeal to the Peruvian government for help, asking for funding to continue holding chaccus. Ongoing political chaos in Peru has hampered efforts to get needed support from the government. If the government won’t help, the second line of defense is tourism.
In 02022, two communities in the north of the Ayacucho region, Ocros and Santa Cruz de Hospicio, invited tourists to participate in chaccu. Armando Pariona Antonio grew up in Ayacucho and has worked with vicuña for over fifteen years. He created the company Vicunga Travel, named for the scientific name of the vicuña, to bring tourists to communities in Ayacucho. There are a lot of challenges, he says, to making chaccu a tourist activity.
“They hold chaccus wherever the vicuña are, and that’s always a remote place at high altitude. Also, communities need a lot of training on how to work with tourists.” Despite the challenges, Pariona Antonio is determined to help communities continue the tradition.
Felix de la Cruz Huamani believes we can look at the challenge of protecting the vicuña from a different angle.
“Landowners who have a land management plan for vicuña are required to protect and improve the ecosystem as part of their commitment to protect the vicuña,” explained de la Cruz Huamani. “We know that the vicuña’s habitat is rich in water. If we focus on the benefits of the ecosystem, we see that cities in Peru all depend on the water that comes from the vicuña’s habitat.” As the climate changes and water becomes more scarce, focusing national attention on the conservation of the vicuña’s habitat as a water source may have a bigger impact on protecting the vicuña than tourism or selling fur.
Peru’s environmental goals for 02030 include strategies for improving species conservation and reducing ecosystem damage. However, political instability is a significant challenge in meeting these targets. The Ministry of Environment, which is responsible for the 02030 goals, had four different ministers in 02022.
In the end, what is most likely to save the vicuña from all the threats it faces is its strong cultural bond with Indigenous Andeans. Now that they have reestablished the tradition of chaccu, communities that coexist with wild vicuña are determined to not lose the practice again.
“Nowhere else in the world do people have this kind of interaction with wild animals,” Pariona Antonio said. “It is a unique practice that comes to us from our Wari ancestors, the civilization that was in Ayacucho before the Inca conquered them.”
Peru’s Indigenous Andeans who honor their ancestral traditions may be the vicuña’s best bet for survival.
The comments sections of Dr. Peter Neff’s TikToks are filled with this sort of stuff. He’s a glaciologist and ice scientist, stationed in Antarctica over the summer and conducting vital experiments on Antarctica’s vast ice sheets and glaciers. He responds to many of these comments with humor. At the same time, he doesn’t give them too much thought.
“[My videos] are more just to show people the reality, rather than actually address the ridiculous conspiracy theories,” Neff told me, calling from McMurdo Station on the tail end of his field season in Antarctica. “They don't really deserve much air in my mind.”
The “ice wall,” or the idea that Antarctica is not a continent at the bottom of the globe but really a wall that circumscribes the Flat Earth, is a common refrain; as is the concept that “nobody is allowed” to go to Antarctica: that “they” (shady government agents) will prevent anyone from visiting, in order to keep whatever lies behind the ice wall hidden.
At the turn of the 20th century, Antarctica was still largely unknown. As Apsley Cherry-Garrard observed in the introduction to his classic book The Worst Journey In The World (01922): “Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation.” But despite the hundred-plus years of exploration, habitation, and documentation since then, Antarctica remains utterly Other. It’s far away, it’s unlike anywhere else on the planet, and most people will never go there. They’ll only see pictures, and watch classic films like The Thing (01982) which project an image of peril and isolation onto the public consciousness.
Where gaps in public knowledge exist, conspiracies spring into life. Any post by a scientist or public figure about Antarctica will inevitably rack up comments accusing the original poster of “hiding” something, or of working for the government. Today’s landscape of Antarctic conspiracies is a tangled web — comprising everything from AI-generated Lovecraftian images purporting to be from turn-of-the-century expeditions, Nazis and UFOs, global warming denial, and flat-earthery. It’s a locus of conspiratorial thinking from all corners of the political compass, all converging, like lines of longitude, on the ice.
These sentiments might seem strange, but they're just the latest in a long history of projecting fantasies onto the southern continent. While the Arctic, thanks to its relative proximity to seafaring civilizations, was explored beginning in the Age of Discovery in the 01500s, the terra australis incognito at the bottom of the earth remained mysterious for far longer. The circumnavigations of Captain Cook in the 01770s proved that the area was frozen and uninhabitable, and fringed by seemingly impenetrable pack-ice. The reports that he brought back probably inspired Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (01798), which launched tropes of the frigid Antarctic into the wider cultural consciousness.
The southern continent itself was not observed until the 01820s, when adventurous whaling captains spotted it and added it to their charts. The simultaneous voyages of Ross (Britain), D’Urville (France), and Wilkes (USA) in 01839 added much to the world’s stock of knowledge of the Antarctic, but after that, investigation did not resume for over 50 years. When the North’s mysteries ceased to hold appeal, the world’s attention turned south to the Antarctic in the 01890s. Suddenly the region seemed to hold immense promise for scientific investigation, the claiming of new territories, and perhaps even the exploitation of mineral resources. The ensuing openly imperial Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration segued into the slightly more covert geopolitical jockeying of the mid-20th century. This reached a fever pitch with the International Geophysical Year of 01957-58, resulting in the Antarctic Treaty of 01959, which officially demilitarized the continent and set it aside as the exclusive preserve of scientific activity.
Many of the favored points for conspiracists have to do with government and military operations during this Cold War era. Neff points out the importance of the military presence on Antarctica, specifically the US military: “Their ability to operate their logistical capabilities are what give us the greatest scientific capability in Antarctica of basically any country.”
Despite Antarctica being “the continent of science,” with all military operations being banned since the Antarctic Treaty of 01959, the ongoing game of international geopolitics forms the underlying purpose of activity in the region. While military activity qua activity is verboten, it is the planes and personnel of various militaries which provide the structural capacity for people to live and work there.
Sara Wheeler, in her transformational Antarctic travel book Terra Incognita (01996), succinctly defines that paradox: “Collective consciousness must believe in the deification of science on the ice, otherwise it would have to admit that the reason for each nation’s presence in Antarctica is political, not scientific.”
That isn’t to say the vital climatic science done on Antarctica is in any way false or tainted. Scientists like Neff just want to be transparent about how it is they get to do the things they do, and go to the places they go. “It’s so hard to access these places, and the best way to get to them from a science perspective is through organized government programs,” he says. The mantling of the truth, though, is something that perhaps the conspiracists can sense, but are unable to understand or articulate, and so seek explanation in the outlandish. So the communal cooperative fantasy fails, and through the cracks come the crackpots.
A great deal of Antarctic theories, whether their proponents are aware of it or not, have roots in the original polar conspiracy of John Cleve Symmes Jr. Symmes was a US Army officer from Cincinnati who devoted his life to promoting his theory of the “hollow earth.” His claims changed over time, but the central thrust of the idea was that the earth was a hollow shell 800 miles thick, with thousand-mile-wide openings at both of the poles, through which a fertile interior could be accessed by intrepid explorers. In the late 01810s he confined his ideas to privately printed circulars and pamphlets, but by 01820 had begun lecturing around the country. He became somewhat well known, with his theories gaining traction after publication in outlets like the National Intelligencer; and it was his disciple Joshua Reynolds who helped drum up government support to launch the Wilkes Exploring Expedition of 01839, America’s first official venture to Antarctica.
The presence of Symmes’s theories in the public consciousness is visible in Edgar Allan Poe’s novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (01838), in which the titular character is carried in an open boat below the Antarctic Circle to a tropical land populated by dark-skinned subhumans, and thence to a frigid whirlpool at the North Pole, seemingly leading to some kind of mysterious interior space, inhabited by a giant shrouded figure: “And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.”
The desire for polar and Antarctic space to be indeterminate and undiscovered, for something beyond human understanding to be hiding underneath or within the ice, is a common underlying feature to Antarctic conspiracies.
In the mid-20th century, after the fervor of the Heroic Age of Shackleton and Scott died down, and the old school of isolated cross-continental man-hauling through ice and wind had been made obsolete by motors, planes, and radios, it was the Antarctic flights of Richard Byrd that captured the world’s imagination. Byrd, a decorated officer in the US Navy, was a pioneer of early flight. He claimed to be the first person to fly over the North Pole in 01926 (though that claim has since been disputed, thanks to evidence belatedly discovered in Byrd’s diary) and led five separate expeditions to the Antarctic from the 01920s through the 01950s. While the first two of these expeditions were independent, the latter three were conducted by the US government. Operation Highjump, the 01946-7 expedition led by Byrd, established a research base on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Little America IV; and Operation Deep Freeze of the 01950s under his direction was a massive operation which saw the first permanent American bases being constructed at McMurdo and the South Pole by Navy Seabees.
These expeditions, and Byrd himself, form the nucleus of a galaxy of conspiracies. The comments section of a newsreel video about Byrd’s explorations are filled to the brim with assertions about what he “really” saw down there. In the Ancient Aliens segment about Byrd’s “discoveries,” one common version of the tale is described, ostensibly recorded in a recently-recovered “lost diary.” Byrd, on his flight over the continent, enters a fertile hollow earth and meets a race of UFO-flying inhabitants who express disappointment in humanity’s recourse to nuclear power. Alternatively: he met and fought with Nazi-piloted flying saucers, which is why Operation Highjump necessitated such a large expeditionary force being brought back to Antarctica.
Nazis in Antarctica? Well, there’s a kernel of truth there. In 01939, the Third Reich sent an expedition to explore and claim part of Antarctica. The Schwabenland was equipped with planes, which dropped thousands and thousands of iron swastikas over the ice as they surveyed — none of which have ever been recovered.
The claim, in the remote sector of Dronning Maud Land already claimed by the Norwegians, was abandoned by the end of the war, but the concept of a Nazi base in the Antarctic lived on, messily pleated into the greater world of Antarctic conspiracy. Uncountable variations on the “Antarctic Nazis” myth have proliferated, including many versions in which Hitler and other senior Nazis did not die but sought shelter at an underground Antarctic base in New Schwabenland, and others that incorporate advanced Nazi technology in the form of UFOs and weapons.
On one of Neff’s TikToks, a commenter pleads: “The earth is hallow [sic], there’s entrances at the north and south pole where it suddenly gets warmer. if you can prove me wrong and go to the south pole could you try? i’ve been heavily convinced it’s hallow and it drives me crazy man [...]”
Being reduced to seeking confirmation of one’s conspiracy in the comments of a scientist is unfortunate. But it is also an example of how intoxicating the otherworldly potential of Antarctica is.
It may not be the location of the entrance to a hollow earth, but it is, in fact, hallow(ed). The only continent with no history of human habitation, the vast ice fields of Antarctica have formed a blank slate onto which humanity can project itself: all of itself, from the heroic, imperial superego to the conspiratorial id. It has attracted pilgrims and truth-seekers, scientists and artists, writers and soldiers.
Mapmakers of the early modern period placed monsters in the unknown corners of their charts: hic sunt dragones (“here be dragons”). The beasts were pushed further and further to the margins of the mappa mundi as the globe was explored, and eventually off the maps altogether, but the impulse to assign familiar, fire-breathing forms of danger and mystery to what would otherwise be unforgiving, cold, quiet places remain. The heated excitement of Antarctic conspiracies are the dragons of today.
[Read: Ahmed Kabil’s 02018 Long Now Ideas essay on early modern maps and the tendency for mapmakers to imagine monsters in uncharted regions]
Polar scholar Hester Blum, in her book The News At The Ends Of The Earth (02019), suggests that John Cleves Symmes’ conception of the hole at the bottom of the earth, the “polar verge,” with its five concentric spheres inside folding in on each other like a planetary Russian doll, is a fantasy about climactic extremities: a dream of impossible warmth and life where one would expect mundane cold and death.
So too, then, might be the fantasy of Byrd’s Symmesian discoveries, and the crystal cities and advanced beings inside the earth; or, as Joe Rogan associate Sam Tripoli frames it on an episode of Rogan’s popular podcast, “some time-traveling Nazi shit” involving a worldwide “spiritual war” centering on New Schwabenland. As the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove puts it in Apollo's Eye (02001), “there seems to be an unwillingness to contemplate these global regions without anxiety.” In the face of endless reports of the Earth’s climactic demise issuing from Antarctic research, many might find it easier to believe that the official line of doom and gloom disguises awesome and awful spectacles of aliens, Nazis, and denizens of a hollow (or flat) earth.
And let’s not forget that Antarctica is the planet’s most concentrated record of deep time. It is, as many scholars have noted, an archive in and of itself, stretching back eons, documenting changes to Earth’s atmosphere going back long past the last ice age. Human activity on the continent constitutes barely the smallest sliver of that time — and only on the fringes of the coasts and at a few minimal inland stations. The vastness of Antarctica is untouched and implacable; difficult to comprehend from a limited human perspective. Like the Shoggoths and Old Ones which inhabit the ancient, abandoned Antarctic of Lovecraft’s imagination in “At The Mountains of Madness,” the continent itself is apt to induce a sort of insanity, even for those who are not physically present.
But of course, there are people at this moment trying to comprehend it more fully and objectively. Way out on the ice, at the remote Dome C location on the Antarctic Plateau, scientists are beginning a project to retrieve ice core samples that are over one million years old. It will take them five years to retrieve the oldest samples which lie miles down, against the bedrock of the continent, but scientists will begin to analyze samples right away, seeking evidence of atmospheric shifts in the distant past, which can then be used to predict those that are coming in the near future.
Neff, and other environmental scientists and educators, were recruited by TikTok during the pandemic to make educational content for the platform. He sees the broad channels afforded by social media as a vital tool for environmental awareness. “We’re trying to share useful information, to keep people's baseline understanding of climate change up, rather than trying to save the people who have just been terribly misled,” he says. He is tentatively excited about the possibilities for Starlink and other new connectivity technologies to help communicate the realities of the Antarctic to the public.
But as climate scientists and communicators know all too well, just because evidence is provided doesn’t mean people will believe it. The inextricability of Antarctic history and military history is always going to induce skepticism amongst those already primed to distrust the establishment. There will always be people who dream at a distance of a “polar verge” and the secrets lurking beyond it.
In autumn 02021, I visited my hometown in Maryland for the first time in years after living across the country in New Mexico. I determined that the first stop on my trip would be a visit with my grandmother on the Eastern Shore. In Maryland, especially if one lives in proximity to the Bay, there is a delineation between the Western Shore and the Eastern Shore. The two coasts are connected by the Bay Bridge, but they’re quite different: The east is rural. Farmland is dotted with cows and the fields are filled to the brim with soybeans. Hunting for ducks is popular. There are no large cities and, instead, small, historic towns. The pace is slow. Many make their living by the water, whether that is via the tourism industry that booms in the summertime when families in cities flock to the quiet waterways, or through manning and repairing the boats that wander throughout rivers, streams, and the Bay proper. Others choose to drop crab traps and lines into the waters and cross their fingers as they yank them from the depths.
The Western Shore, on the other hand, is wrapped in highways. The land, if it wasn’t so developed, would be just as beautiful as the east. When I was growing up, most commuted into Annapolis, Washington D.C., or Baltimore for work. Because of that, the main conversation between adults was complaining about omnipresent, nerve-shredding traffic. My grandmother was born in the mountains of western Maryland, raised her family on the Western Shore, and retired to the Eastern Shore. I can’t help but correlate her with the waterways, the breeze, and the idle pace of the town, perhaps better called a village a hundred years ago, that she has called home for decades now.
Once I arrived at my grandmother’s, I was confronted by a simple fact: Even though I had been warned, her eyes were deteriorating. Prior to retirement, she had been a preschool teacher. She loved to read novels, play the piano, and paint. I spent a week with her each summer as I was growing up and savored the lazy, quiet days spent lounging across the fluffy comforters on her bed talking about books. I was a voracious reader, which grew into wanting to become a writer. Members of my nuclear family didn’t understand how anyone could find anything but drowsiness in a book, but my grandmother did. She was a creature with the same quiet habits.
My grandmother also had a rare, remarkable quality, even then: She spoke to me like I was an adult. She asked a lot of questions not because she needed to, but because she wanted to, and listened attentively to my reply. She was curious. At eight years old, I remember sitting on her bed and talking to her about World War II and what it was like for her to be a child during that era. She showed me ration stamps she kept from the 01940s and described the women of her life huddled around the family porch in the mountains, weaving and chatting about where their men could be right then in Europe. The resounding themes from my conversations with her always seemed to be about tolerance, despite differences in faith, color, or creed. Growing up in a time when intolerance defined her world left an enormous impression on her. Maybe she talked to me like an adult because she recalled understanding very adult things when she was just as small.
During my autumn visit, I realized that the sole figure in my life who had always mirrored my bookishness couldn’t hold one up and see it anymore. Thus, one afternoon we stood in front of her bookshelf and she plucked a paperback from the cherry-hued shelves and passed it to me. It was a copy of Chesapeake (01978) by James Michener, which was based on the Eastern Shore. I packed the weathered paperback and flew it to New Mexico. From the desert I seeped into a tale of my homeland I had never heard before: the Bay was the central character, except the narrative also featured Indigenous people seeing Europeans on their waterways for the first time. It featured Catholics fleeing England, Quakers running from Boston, pirates, ship-builders, slave-traders, fisherman, and the view of both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars from the Eastern Shore. When I visited Maryland again a few months later, my grandmother passed along more of her James Michener collection: Caribbean (01989), Poland (01983), Hawaii (01959), and Alaska (01988).
James Michener was born in Pennsylvania and raised a Quaker. He was decades older than my grandmother, yet they had a core fact in common: They were deeply touched by World War II. Michener was in his late thirties at the time with religious exemption but volunteered to go to the Pacific anyway. The experience of seeing the worst of humanity had everything to do with what came next: When he returned, he was staunch in his commitment to become a writer. It was like after the profundity of the war, there was no turning back:
“I never said I was going to be a great man because I had no idea what my capacities were. I had no great confidence; nothing in my background gave me a reason to think so. But I was not forestalled from acting as if I were. That is, deal with big subjects… Associate with people who are brighter than you are. Grapple with the problems of your time. And it was as clear to me as if a voice were telling me to do this: “This is the choosing-up point, kiddo, from here on.” I had no idea that life was as short as it is. That concept comes very late in any human life, I think. I thought life was immeasurable, extensive to the horizon and beyond. But I did know that my capacities were not unlimited. I had only so much to spend, and let’s do it in a big way. And I think that was all the difference.”
Throughout his career, Michener wrote dozens of books. The novels that my grandmother passed along to me rest at about a thousand pages apiece. Hawaii opens millions of years ago by describing how tectonic plates shifted to unleash the magma that formed the islands. A few million more years pass before a single, brave bird lands upon the rocky shore, empties its bowels, and releases the first seed onto the island. Caribbean opens similarly to Chesapeake in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the Indigenous peoples whose civilizations were intertwined with the respective lands. Poland opens with the Taters of Mongolia rushing an attack on Krakow with a stop in Kyiv that resulted in ancient violences. Looking at news coverage today, it reminds the reader that history keeps repeating itself.
Michener’s process for writing a book started with meticulous research. For Chesapeake, he lived in St. Michaels on the eastern shore of Maryland. For Poland, he commissioned more than twenty leading academics in the nation to draft papers outlining what topics in Polish history were top-of-mind for scholars. Tonally, the books are patient. They are not arrogant. Most characters have heaps of goodness and wretchedness as real people do. This commitment to dive deep and take on complex topics caused his books to lean into the glories and shames of a place, and that didn’t come without repercussions. It took bravery. Poland was written while the USSR was still intact. Some books were temporarily banned in the precise countries they were based on.
In the introduction of Hawaii, writer Steve Berry noted that in one of Michener’s interviews later in life, he acknowledged that his books couldn’t have been written in the modern era. He knew he was lucky to write at a time when people had the attention spans to support dense, demanding works. It paid off. His fans were loyal, like my grandmother. Most of all, when I pick up Poland and read it now, I know that the depictions of various regional forces, even while fictionalized, contain central tendrils of truth that get me closer to understanding what I want to in the world around me. And understanding what I wish to isn’t about one narrative steamrolling over another: It’s the mess of what constitutes truth. I worry for a future where art is created that finds the search for multifaceted, complex, unpopular truths to be too arduous or controversial and, instead, simply ignores it.
A few years ago, I decided to go about becoming a writer by entering the freelance writing industry. As a contractor, I build my own schedule and balance creative pursuits alongside professional ones. Despite that flexibility, I’m constantly confronted by the understanding that how fast I can write a pitch, make phone calls, draft copy, write interview questions, and whip a story together defines my survival as a writer. But for a working creative, that’s the name of the game. You can’t survive without doing so. And on the purely literary end of the spectrum, there is an insatiable hunger to achieve everything I can as fast as possible to get the attention of an audience before they get distracted again. All of that goes against the grain of taking the concentrated time to see the big picture and create based on not the immediacy of right now, but on a human heritage much larger than that.
Yet James Michener’s books put forth the argument that thinking in the wider context of place and time doesn’t just benefit you as an artist; in the right hands, it has the capacity to make a lasting impact on the world. Doing so requires writers to train themselves to become more methodical and less reactionary. It requires patience with ourselves, one another, and the effort to understand that a single action is, more often than not, not an anomaly: It's likely a part of a pattern that may stretch across continents and cultures and only be visible for full examination in another fifty, hundred, or thousand years.
Once, a cousin noted that a character flaw of my grandmother was that she was not reactive. It’s not untrue—my grandmother avoids conflict. Yet my grandmother’s wisdom is that she can sit and watch the strangeness and the backwardness of modern times accumulate without having a knee-jerk reaction. Instead, she reflects, tries to make sense of things, and sees them in a wider context of now versus the world she was raised in. How did it change? What has improved? What did she dream would shift that hasn’t? On our visits, she answers all of these questions for me patiently. It's that quality of seeking a bird’s eye view that, funny enough, is why I think she adored James Michener’s books. It’s a brand of wisdom that I’ve always coveted in everyone I’ve ever met and rarely find. Even my fiancé regrets only meeting my grandmother later in her life because he wishes he could have seen these traits and been shaped by them, too.
Understanding all I wish to takes time. Every so often, I wonder if I, or anyone else, should put forth their best attempts at writing, painting, or creating any art that reflects the culture of our time if patience is such a virtue. And the answer is yes. There is so much mystery in our world and understanding any corner of it takes concentrated, sustained attention. It takes diligence. It takes bravery. And perhaps with a bit of bravery, more ambitious works that require commitment will become a trend once again. I’m waiting for it, preparing for it, thinking about where I should set my energies to create something meaningful. I don’t know how much longer my grandmother will be with me, but I try to think of her when I don’t know what to do: What would she tell me? What questions would she ask? What questions should I ask?
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