Futurist Peter Schwartz distills the lessons learned from his work in scenario planning for organizations. Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash The following transcript of Peter Schwartz’s Long Now talk on scenario planning has been edited for length and clarity. The Role of Mental Maps This is a map of North America. It was made by a Dutch […]
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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The Role of Mental Maps This is a map of North America. It was made by a Dutch map maker by the name of Herman Moll, working in London in 01701. I bought it on Portobello Road for about 60 pounds back in 01981. Which
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In an article in Forbes, David Bressan writes that the giant rift in the USA’s political voting blocs is in part a consequence of collisions between continental plates, the literal giant rift that used to separate the two halves of North America, and recent glacial activity: The same region that had once been covered in
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Even now, even in shallow waters, the sea continues to surprise us with new wonders (many of them rich in “living fossils” like the chambered nautilus and various sharks). Reefs are themselves fabulous living examples of multitudinous pace layers, not unlike the structural layers of a house Stewart Brand details in How Buildings Learn—only these
Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. The need to draw on our capacity to think long-term has never been more urgent, whether in areas such as public health care, to deal
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Once again on the theme of how the technological/cultural pace layer’s accelerating decoupling from the ecological pace layer in which we evolved poses serious risks to the integrity of both the human body and biosphere: When daycare workers in Finland rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth such as dwarf heather and blueberries, and allowed
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An interview with Vincent Ialenti, author of Deep Time Reckoning Inside Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository, 1,500 feet underground. Photo Credit: Peter Guenzel With half-lives ranging from 30 to 24,000, or even 16 million years, the radioactive elements in nuclear waste defy our typical operating time frames. The questions around nuclear waste storage — how to keep it
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Inside Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository, 1,500 feet underground. Photo Credit: Peter Guenzel With half-lives ranging from 30 to 24,000, or even 16 million years, the radioactive elements in nuclear waste defy our typical operating time frames. The questions around nuclear waste storage — how to keep it safe from those who might wish to weaponize it, where
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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. I want to lead you through some of the research that I’ve been doing on a meta-level around long-lived institutions, as well as some observations of the ways various systems have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. Long Now as a Long-lived Institution This
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Join the Long Now Community for a night of films that inspire long-term thinking. On October 27, 02020, we’ll screen Samsara followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey at Fort Mason. SAMSARA Drive-in Screening on Tuesday October 27, 02020 at 6:00pm PT Get Tickets SAMSARA is a Sanskrit word that means “the ever turning wheel of life”
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