Curating Content To Support Learning About Humanity's Transition

This content was posted on  21 Jul 19  by   The Long Now Foundation  on  Podcast
Marcia Bjornerud – Timefulness

We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mostly invisible to us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud teaches that kind of time literacy. With it, we become at home in the deep past and engaged with the deep future. We learn to “think like a planet.”

As for climate change… “Dazzled by our own creations,” Bjornerud writes, “we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted…. Averse to even the smallest changes, we have now set the stage for environmental deviations that will be larger and less predictable than any we have faced before.”

A professor of geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, Marcia Bjornerud is author of “Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World”: https://smile.amazon.com/Timefulness-Thinking-Like-Geologist-World/dp/0691181209/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1 (2018) and “Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth”: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B001JAH7RE/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1 (2005).

“Timefulness” was given on July 22, 02019 as part of Long Now’s Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world’s leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can:

Subscribe to our podcasts: http://longnow.org/seminars/podcast
Explore the full series: http://longnow.org/seminars
More ideas on long-term thinking: http://blog.longnow.org

The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Our projects include a 10,000 Year Clock, endangered language preservation, thousand year+ data storage, and Long Bets, an arena for accountable predictions.

Become a Long Now member to support this series, join our community, and connect with our ongoing work to explore and deepen long-term thinking: http://longnow.org/membership

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/longnow
Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/longnow
Subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/longnow

Scroll to Top
Scroll to Top