The Epoch of the Child

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.

Honoring Alexander Rose

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.

Origins

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.”

Clock Maker

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.”

Culture Builder

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.”

The Interval

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.

Travels

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.

Futures

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.

Reimagining the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

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:

1. Energy
2. Resources
3. Information

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):

1. An episodic process of opportunistic decision-making; which feeds
2. A gradual process of socio-political development or decline

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:

1. Institutional structures grow more rigid, reducing the capacity of societies to adequately respond to new situational events
2. Societies tend to focus on frequently occurring challenges, increasing the dangers of unknown challenges

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.

Bette Adriaanse

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.

The Fire That Never Goes Out

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.

Members of Long Now

With thousands of members from all around the world, the Long Now community has a wide range of perspectives, stories, and experiences to offer. We're excited to showcase our annual curated set of short Ignite Talks created and given by the Long Now Members themselves. Presenting on the subjects of their choice, speakers have precisely 5 minutes to amuse, educate, enlighten, or inspire the audience.

Our speakers and their talks:

Natasha Blum: Famous Last Words: Self-Discovery for Life, Death, and Rebirth
Dave Elfving: My AI Co-Teacher
Altay Guvench: Ultraviolet Exploration: Fluorescence in Nature
Trevor Haldenby: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Fossil?
Andra Keay: Robotopia
Alyssa Ravasio: Recreation for Restoration
Jason Roberts: To State The Obvious: Addressing History's Blind Spot
Ya'el Shatz: From Dirt to Treasure
Sarah Cameron Sunde: Water Sensing: Proposals Toward Living on Tidal Time
Diane Tate: Diving into Oral History
Natalia Vasquez: Visualizing Climate Futures
Jason Winn: Stories as Ancient Maps: A Tale Told for Ten Thousand Five Hundred Years
Connie Yang: Nonagenarians Doing Shit

Join us in-person and online for a fun and fast-paced event full of surprising and thoughtful ideas.

Understanding the Modern World-System in the Longue Durée

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.

The End of the World-System as We Know It

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.

500 Years or 5,000?

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.

Five Centuries of European Domination

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.

A New System Of Exploitation

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.

The U.S., Alone

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.

Revolution, Reaction, and Reorganization

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.”

What Comes Next?

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.”

Becky Chambers & Annalee Newitz

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.

Reviving the Vicuña

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.

Inheriting My Grandmother's James Michener Collection

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?

How DNA is Helping Black Brazilians Uncover Their Roots

In December 02019, a group of scientists from the University of São Paulo, in partnership with diagnostic medicine company Dasa and cloud computing platform Google Cloud, launched DNA do Brasil (DNA of Brazil), a project that aims to trace the country's genetic roots through mass genetic sequencing. Among the project’s main objectives is to create a genomic database of the Brazilian population that can help in the production of medicines and in the research of complex diseases. Led by geneticist Lygia da Veiga Pereira, the project has already analyzed thousands of genomes and sequenced 2,100 with funds to reach 4,400. Their ambitions are more expansive: they aim to sequence and analyze up to 200,000 genomes.

About 80% of the sequenced genomes in the world come from white people of European or North American origin, notes Pereira. In practice, this means that studies that rely on pre-existing genetic databases may not fully capture the world’s genetic diversity. In turn, the diagnostic tests derived from these studies — and future therapies targeting specific genes — may not be as effective on all population groups. The long-standing racial imbalances in access to medical treatment are thus recapitulated into future generations. In very racially-mixed societies like Brazil, where 43% of the population identifies as mixed-race, these imbalances add even more complexity to an already unequal situation.

The genomes analyzed by the project so far reveal a disproportionate European contribution to certain portions of Brazil’s gene pool when compared to the indigenous and African contribution — describing, in effect, a history of violence in the formation of the Brazilian nation. During the colonization of Brazil, starting in 01500, Portuguese imperial governments used forced labor — first of Brazil’s indigenous people violently captured by Portuguese bandeirantes, and then of African slaves imported from across the Atlantic — to build an economy based around sugar plantations and precious metal mines with harsh, often-deadly conditions.

Even after the decline of these industries, slave labor was central to Brazilian domestic life, and Brazilian-born slaves and freed Black people, often the product of a white father and an enslaved Black mother, became an increasing part of Brazilian society. To Tábita Hünemeier, biologist and geneticist at the Biosciences Institute of the University of São Paulo who’s also a member of the DNA do Brasil research group, “the scars of Brazil’s colonization process are too deep to be forgotten” and are indeed embedded in the population’s DNA.

A few studies focused on the US have used 23andMe data to trace Black and Latino ancestry through genomic analysis. DNA do Brasil, however, is the most comprehensive study of its kind in Brazil and all of Latin America. Some of its unique findings help shed light on Brazil’s past. Yet the most powerful impacts of the study may be those that look towards the future, using science and technology to challenge established mainstream narratives and bring focus to the peripheries and those excluded throughout history. By understanding the past, and in this case the collective past of an entire nation, it’s possible to formulate policies to improve the lives of citizens, particularly minorities, and create a better future for all.

“Deep down, this myth still guides us.”

DNA do Brasil is more than a simple research initiative aimed at creating a Brazilian database of genomes as an idle scientific concern; it is a thread through which many Brazilians will learn more about the country's violent past and the complicated process of forming their identities. Through the genetic insights of the project, the Brazilian public may finally be able to grapple with a history of romanticization of the immense violence and brutality of 400 years of slavery, genocide of entire indigenous populations, rape, and inequality.

A persistent myth in the formation of Brazilian identity is the idea of 'racial democracy': that is, that Blacks, indigenous peoples, and white Europeans have mixed freely since the early 01530s, when Brazil was first divided into colonial ‘captaincies’ by the Portuguese crown. This myth has been disputed by sociologists, historians, and anthropologists for many years. Now, DNA do Brasil is mounting a distinct challenge to the country’s civic mythmaking, showing with scientific precision that the formation of Brazil was much more violent and complicated.

This challenge involves revisiting some of the cruelest episodes in the history of Brazilian colonization and slavery to expose the racial machinery behind them. As an example, Hilário Ferreira, a social scientist and historian at Centro Universitário Ateneu, explains that “in old newspapers it was possible to find advertisements offering rewards to those returning white slaves who ran away. Slavery was related to the womb, so if the child was white, it meant that the slave owner’s relationship with the slave was most of the times due to rape.”

These pieces of historical evidence are supported by tell-tale genetic markers indicating an imbalance in the ancestry of many Brazilians. For DNA do Brasil, the researchers analyzed both the ancestry of mitochondrial DNA (which tracks maternal inheritance) and Y chromosome (which does the same for paternal inheritance) and found that 75% of the paternal Y chromosome inheritance is of European and white origin, while only 14% of mitochondrial DNA, and thus maternal inheritance, is of European origin. Further, 36% of inherited mitochondrial DNA is African and 34% indigenous. Only 1% of the Y chromosome ancestry comes from indigenous men.

Put another way, European men occupy an outsize share of the Brazilian gene pool relative to both European women and Black/Indigenous men. While the presence of genetic markers connected to European heritage within the broader mixed Brazilian population can be explained through a natural process of intermarriage and other peaceful racial mixing, the greater proportion of European Y-chromosomal markers in the overall pool relative to the presence of European mitochondrial DNA markers indicates what the historical record already shows: Brazilian slavery was a system of rampant sexual exploitation and violence.

“Although the Black movements have always confronted the fantasy of racial democracy and denounced racism in Brazil, this narrative is still very strong and present among us,” says Andréa Franco, a PhD candidate in sociology at the Federal University of Paraíba who studies racial relations and Black feminist thought. “This is why the results of the survey were received with such surprise by so many sectors of society, even among people who recognize Brazilian racism. Because, deep down, this myth still guides us.”

Franco, a self-described "Black woman born into a family made up of interracial relations," is one of several Black researchers and activists interviewed for this story who were not surprised by the study’s findings. “The Brazilian population has gone through an intense process of miscegenation,” she says. “And this process has occurred in an asymmetrical way.”

Over the course of Portuguese colonization of Brazil and the subsequent oppressive regimes, both Portuguese and Brazilian, that have ruled over the country, millions of indigenous people have been killed in massacres that lasted from the 01500s into the 01960s and the present day, with many ethnic groups disappearing completely. Today, there are just over 800,000 of them left in a country of more than 200 million, many living in reservations, others in cities, constantly struggling to preserve their customs and traditions.

Part of the colonization process also took place through the slave trade. Millions of Black people were brought from Africa for centuries and enslaved until complete abolition, signed into law on 13 May 01888. The scars of this period remain extremely current, both in Brazilian social and economic inequality — with a majority of Blacks still subjected to violence, prejudice and exclusion — and, as the study points out, indicated in the population's DNA.

After the abolition of slavery until the 01940s, invited thousands of immigrants exclusively from Europe to settle in the country. Decree 528, passed by the Brazilian Republic’s Provisional Government on June 28, 01890, just two years after the final abolition of slavery, legalized and encouraged immigration from all peoples “exceptuados os indigenas da Asia, ou da Africa” [except those indigenous to Asia or to Africa.] In effect, this law implemented in Brazil an official policy of whitening the population. This demographic white-washing of the population via immigration restrictions was coupled with a more tacit whitewashing of Brazilian history. “Brazil had a policy of forgetting there was slavery, even if 70% of the population descended from these individuals,” Hünemeier says.

Piecing Together A Fragmented History

A few years ago, with the popularization of home DNA tests, more people were able to trace their genetic ancestry and learn more about their past. Some results seemed so surprising that they caught the media’s attention, as was the case with the singer Neguinho da Beija Flor, whose Black identity was core to his stage name— Neguinho literally means “little Black.” Yet Neguinho discovered in 02007 that 67.1% of his genes are of European origin and only 31.5% from Africa.

In 02013, data scientist Marco Gomes wrote a long post on his blog about his experience with the 23andMe service. When I contacted him to discuss DNA do Brasil’s findings, he immediately made it clear that he was not surprised by the results of the research. “Black women, the victims of violence, have been complaining about it for many centuries,” he wrote. Yet for many Brazilians, these testimonies were not enough — it was necessary “to wait for genetic studies: 100, 150, 300 years of evolution of science” in order to verify a long chain of history.

The research relates to Gomes' own life: His mother is white, and his father is Black. He said that "it is even difficult to comment" on the process of erasing Black people and the historical violence they have suffered.

The consequences of the attempt at erasure and whitewashing of Brazil’s history and population are still with us today. Franco, the PhD candidate in sociology at the Federal University of Paraíba, tells me that when she sought out the origins of her family, she found plenty of material on the European-white side, but only barriers and uncertainties when researching her Black roots.

Franco explains that she has a white grandmother who came from Portugal to Brazil in the beginning of the 20th century. It was relatively easy to find information about this side of her family. But “as for my Black origins, I need to access their stories in another way. There are no records, no papers. There is memory, loose threads that we sew in conversations with the elders.”

She recalls that “one of my maternal great-grandfathers, it is said, was the son of a landowner and slave owner of a well-known, traditional and important family from Minas Gerais, who had a son with a Black woman (probably a slave woman) and who gave him his surname.”

Franco says that “the desire to know my ancestry by DNA was replaced by the curiosity to gradually reconstruct this story.” She already knows the name of the slave owner, and that “in the middle of the 19th century he had a white wife, 200 slaves from the regions that today are Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and that among these slaves inventoried, only one was registered by name.”

Emilio Moreno, a journalist from the state of Ceará, says that while his Black friends were not surprised by the DNA do Brasil findings, many white journalists were. Moreno’s own heritage is involved in this complex debate.

"Until recently I did not see myself completely Black, because I am lighter-skinned. Only by reading, I was able to understand myself better".

Moreno tells me that he comes from a poor family from the countryside of Ceará and that "we have little record of our origins, we were a farming family and were extremely poor.”

Moreno notes, much as Franco did, that “there is no way to investigate, because it is very common in Brazil that people of Black origin cannot make the connections, unlike those who have a family that comes from Europe, who know the whole origin of their family; we cannot do this research.” The disregard paid to Black Brazilians for centuries is reflected back in their absence from the archives.

The potential result of the research, explains Anna Claudia Evangelista, a medical geneticist and Black woman, "is yet another confirmation – this time through the molecular tool – of the history and the way in which Brazilian colonization took place."

In her medical practice, working in an oncogenetics clinic, "it is very important to ask about family history and ancestry. It is not uncommon for patients to say that their grandmother or great-grandmother, who was an enslaved Black or indigenous, was 'lassoed' by an immigrant of European origin."

Journalist Carlos Alberto Ferreira is one of those who has in his family stories of women who were "lassoed,” and his mother “lived with a grandfather who was enslaved and may have been begotten of a rape.”

He explains that he did two DNA tests (Genera and My Heritage) and "both served to prove several old stories in my family.”

His family story is one quite common in Brazil. He grew up in a very multiracial family, with white, lighter skinned Black and dark skinned Black people all intermixed. “I remember people not believing me and my cousins belonged to the same family because I was Black and some of them white.”

He continues by saying that “I can clearly see that the lighter-skinned part of my family has had access to better education, lives in better neighborhoods and has progressed better in life. On the other hand, the part of the family with darker skin have not completed higher education, live in more peripheral neighborhoods and have a lower quality of life. It's subtle, it's not spoken about, but it exists and it's open. Racism in Brazil is inside the house with people hiding it with shame, even if it is with the same DNA.”

The role of the new studies into Brazil’s DNA is key here. Scientific research can shed light on what Black people have always known and felt.

An Incorrigible Optimism

DNA do Brasil offers more than just a reconsideration of national and personal histories. Beyond everything else, the findings of the study are providing a wealth of scientific knowledge that could lead to groundbreaking practical uses.

Pereira explains, without hiding the excitement, that "we are already seeing that by sequencing the genome of Brazilians we find a number of variants of unidentified sequences not yet found in other populations." These findings, according to Pereira, are “very significant” for a variety of reasons.

Besides the "enormous opportunity for us to get to know new genomic variants associated with phenotypic and genomic characteristics, we are also seeing the ancestry of an American population that no longer exists,” explains Pereira. “Sequences of extinct populations and mixture of African ancestry – we find mixtures of African populations that we don't even find in Africa, but that are found in Brazil.”

Hünemeier jumps in, saying that she’s “thinking of the number of indigenous people we had here, about 3 million, and this African contingent forced to come to Brazil," both with vast genetic and linguistic diversity. She notes that "We can map this out by working at the genomic level. And also, many Europeans, from various parts, with diverse histories – as fugitives, for example. There is all this mosaic represented in Brazil, with the largest Black population outside of Africa and, for the first time, we have included indigenous people in genomic studies.”

For those of African descent, the research sheds light on their past. If in many cases it does not bring surprising news, it does give them a tool with which they might change Brazil's racist mentality little by little. Moreno explains to me that this research "ends up being yet another indicator that the country structures its racism to maintain the privilege of white people and of those who have a more comfortable place [in society]. So perhaps I can tell you, from my incorrigible optimism, that it helps whites understand how they are part of this structural racism.” For those long left out of the upper echelons of Brazilian society, they can now hope to tell the story as it really happened, rather than the institutionally supported narrative that denies centuries of genocide, violence, and attempts to erase the country’s Black history.

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Climate Fiction Storytellers

This event will take place the evenings of May 12th & May 13th at St. Joseph's Arts Society; there is one show each night, doors are at 7:00pm and the show starts at 8:00pm.

Arrive early, get a drink from the in-house bar and explore the intriguing installations at the St Joseph's Arts Society.

The Long Now Foundation has teamed up with Anthropocene Magazine (a publication of Future Earth) and Back Pocket Media to take the magazine’s new fiction series “The Climate Parables,” from the page to the stage.

The series starts with the idea that survival in the Anthropocene depends on upgrading not just our technology, but also our collective imagination. From there, acclaimed storytellers will perform work from some of the most creative science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Eliot Peper, speculating on what life could be like after we’ve actually mitigated climate change and adapted to chronic environmental stresses.

Think of it as climate reporting from the future. Tales of how we succeeded in harnessing new technology and science to work with nature, rather than against it. It’s all wrapped up in an evening of performed journalism that blends science and technology, fiction and non-fiction, video, art, and music. What could possibly go right?

Jenny Odell

"What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose."  - Jenny Odell

Join us for an evening on long-term thinking with a talk & reading from Jenny Odell and conversation with Long Now's Executive Director Alexander Rose.

Artist and writer Jenny Odell brings her acutely insightful observations to the dominant framework of time, based on industrial and colonial worldviews, that is embedded within our societies. Addressing the inability to reconcile the artificially constructed time pressures of modern culture with planetary-scale crisis, she offers a series of histories, concepts, and places as "provocations that can defamiliarize an old language of time, while pointing in the direction of something else."

Tickets are bundled with a copy of the new book. Long Now Members purchase the book but get their usual complimentary tickets for the in-person event.

We'll have a pre-show bar at SFJAZZ and additional copies of Odell's new book for sale. Afterwards, attendees can gather at The Madrigal for further drinks and conversation. This evening is in partnership with The Booksmith and City Arts & Lectures.