Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking can help Earth now by Vincent Ialenti

This book is the result of Ialenti's thirty-two month fieldwork with the members of the Finnish "Safety Case" project, who are tasked with the safe disposal of an underground nuclear waste repository. Their forecasts require them to think about long term futures, often going tens of thousands and even millions of years into the future. Ialenti shares some of their thinking and methods in the book, presenting them in a series of "Reckonings."

Ialenti writes the book to contribute to two related crises: 1. the ecological crisis and 2. the "deflation of expertise." Short-term thinking in politics, by businesses, and by individuals have led to the Anthropocene, while public trust in expertise has been degraded and has disempowered those who are most able to contribute to potential solutions. Ialenti hopes to encourage long term thinking by sharing some of the Safety Case project's methods and thinking, while reaffirming the importance of expertise and experts.

The Reckonings are a bit simple and disappointing, although I understand that there are limits to what can be communicated; the Safety Case project team are experts with decades of experience in geology, hydrology, ecology, etc. and employ complex methods and models--that aspect cannot be transmitted to interested members of the public. Instead, what is communicated are relatively simple thinking exercises.

The first set of Reckonings are centred on analogies. To determine possible future geological conditions on the nuclear waste repository, the Safety Case project team uses other geological formations as stand-in and uses analogies to determine if the repository's buffer material can withstand changes over time. Of course, no two situations can be completely analogous; analogies can be contested, can be supported, and can be used as learning opportunities even if they are insufficient. Sometimes, these disagreements can originate due to different theoretical and scientific perspectives; the Safety Case team made use of a methodologically omnivorous approach, using "multiple lines of reasoning," or "intentionally having many different teams of experts, each working with different disciplinary backgrounds and intellectual tendencies, working in parallel on the same long-sighted challenges" (p. 55). I think many will concur that this is good practice for all futures-related projects.

Ialenti suggests the use of landscapes and urban areas (although not limited to these two) as "interscalar vehicles" (p. 57), or as devices to stimulate analogies and exercise futures oriented thinking--in his words, "long-termist intellectual calisthenics" (p. 59). How have the landscapes, material objects, cityscapes, etc. around you changed over the past decades, centuries, and millennia, and how could they change in the years to come? How could these be used to provoke the imagination, and how can these be used as analogies for understanding the futures of other things? Ialenti provokes these reflections.

The second set of Reckonings are much weaker; Ialenti shows how basic thinking patterns and organizational structures created the multiple potential futures. These include basic if-then logical structures and input/output patterns, which weave together to form the work of the team, the work of a collective consciousness that is much greater than any one individual could comprehend.

The third set of Reckonings advocate for the use of multiple perspectives for long-term futures thinking. By zooming in and out of multiple time frames, multiple scales, and different theoretical perspectives, one can obtain a better understanding of the details as well as an holistic image.

The final set of Reckonings use the untimely death of Seppo, a key figure of the Safety Case project, to think about the preservation of vital expert knowledge and about effective knowledge transmission in organizations.

Ialenti ends the book with suggestions for developing a society whose members are capable in long-termist thinking; there are some interesting suggestions, but I will not elaborate here.

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