Long Now

Forest Ecologist Suzanne Simard reveals that trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground mycorrhizal networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities, and share and exchange resources and support.

Simard's extraordinary research and tenacious efforts to raise awareness on the interconnectedness of forest systems, both above and below ground, has revolutionized our understanding of forest ecology. This increasing knowledge is driving a call for more sustainable practices in forestry and land management, ones that develop strategies based on the forest as a whole entity, not on trees as isolated individuals.

In _The Clock of the Long Now_, Long Now founder Stewart Brand wrote, in response to Zen poet Gary Snyder, the following musing on the nature of time:

>THIS PRESENT

MOMENT

USED TO BE

THE UNIMAGINABLE

FUTURE

Interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert’s work uses neon, steel, and time to expand the scope and possibilities of the carefully chosen quotes she uses in her work. In This Present Moment, Brand’s quote flickers between its original form to Eggert’s subtly edited version:

>THIS

MOMENT

USED TO BE

THE

FUTURE

In this Long Now Talk, Alicia Eggert and Long Now's Executive Director Alexander Rose discussed time, art and long-term thinking.

Jonathan Haidt sees that we have entered a social-psychological phase change that was initiated in 02009 when social media platforms introduced several fateful innovations that changed the course of our society and disintegrated our consensus on reality.

In this conversation with Long Now co-founders Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, Haidt explored questions of technological optimism, morality vs ethics, teen mental health, possible platform tweaks that could reduce the damage and just how long this next cycle of history could last.

Prompted by Haidt's piece on [Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/), this discussion offers a behind the scenes look at the thinking going into Haidt's next book, _The Anxious Generation_.

Governance moves slow.

The work of the politician and the public servant ought to inherently be one of long-term thinking — of taking in concerns both urgent and longstanding and crafting solutions to them that will live on beyond any official’s term of office.

As Mayor of Stockton, California, Special Advisor for Economic Mobility to California Governor Gavin Newsom, and founder of End Poverty in California, Michael Tubbs has taken on some of the deepest problems in the public sphere. In his Long Now Talk, he focused on one of the most long-standing of all issues in human society: poverty. To Tubbs, who grew up in poverty in Stockton and witnessed its consequences first-hand, poverty is not just an ill for its immediate negative effects but how it shapes one’s perceptions. When you’re living under the deprivation of poverty, it’s harder to think about the long-term future. You are faced with an array of short-term demands on your resources: not just your financial resources, but also your mental ones. It is an “incredible privilege,” Tubbs noted, “to have the space, to have the time, to have the mental capacity to think about the future.”

Tubbs’ solution — both in his talk and in his time as mayor and advocate — is to start by providing the direct, near-term aid to those pressing problems in the form of cash: a Universal Basic Income. Tubbs pointed to the positive results from UBI trial runs both in Stockton and cities across the country, showing how lifting people out of extreme scarcity allowed them to start thinking about the future.

In his remarks, Tubbs was realistic about the depth of the challenge of fighting poverty. No one policy proposal can fully solve a problem that, he said, was built into the “setup” of this country. Yet his tone throughout was one of deep optimism, invoking what he called the “prophetic” power of long-term thinking and calling on all of us to take an active role in planning for the future. Once we are all committed to creating a brighter tomorrow, the slow work of governance can succeed.

Philosopher Edward Slingerland’s latest research is a deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization — and the evolutionary roots of humanity’s appetite for intoxication. “Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization” elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends that surround our notions of intoxication to provide a rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers.

More than one hundred million pieces of human-made space debris currently orbit our planet, most moving at more than 10,000 mph. Every year their number increases, creating a progressively more dangerous environment for working spacecraft. In order to operate in space, we track most of this debris through a patchwork of private efforts and government defense networks.

Creon Levit spent over three decades at NASA, and is now the Director of R&D; at Planet, a company that is imaging the earth everyday with one of the largest swarms of micro-satellites in the world. In his Long Now Talk, Levit discusses the history of space debris, the way the debris is currently tracked, and how we might work to reduce it before we see a cascading effect of ballistic interactions that could render low orbit all but unusable.

Personal goals need a long-term strategy too.

Dorie Clark offers concrete practices to sharpen strategic thinking and incorporate a long-term perspective within a personal time scale. By reorienting ourselves to focus on the big picture, and using the power of small but persistent changes over time, Clark shows how long-term thinking can be applied to reshape our own futures.

**Dorie Clark** is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and consults and speaks for clients such as Google, Yale University, and the World Bank. Clark teaches executive education for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School, and offers continuing professional education through her newsletter, courses, writing and appearances.

Clark is author of [_The Long Game_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781647820572), [_Entrepreneurial You_](https://dorieclark.com/entrepreneurialyou/), [_Reinventing You_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781422144138), and [_Stand Out_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781591847403); all books which delve deep into her business acumen around helping individuals and companies realize their best ideas, take control of their futures and make an impact on the world.

Long Now continued our dialogue with the acclaimed writer Kim Stanley Robinson around [COP26](https://unfccc.int/conference/glasgow-climate-change-conference-october-november-2021) and his award-winning book [_The Ministry for the Future_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316300131). Clean energy advocate & author [Ramez Naam](https://rameznaam.com/) joined Robinson on stage after the talk for a further discussion.

Tackling topics from carbon quantitative easing, to political action, to planetary-level engineering, Robinson describes our current situation as "all-hands-on-deck" where every possible mitigation strategy should be tried. You can find our [other talks with Kim Stanley Robinson](https://www.youtube.com/c/longnow/search?query=Robinson) on our YouTube channel.

In his Long Now Talk, John Markoff was joined in conversation with Long Now's Co-founder Stewart Brand and Executive Director Alexander Rose around Markoff's new biography of Brand.

Journalist John Markoff writes about technology, society and the key figures who shaped Silicon Valley and the personal computer revolution. Along the way, his stories and reporting intersected with Stewart Brand's paths numerous times and in surprising ways.

And now Markoff has distilled Brand's formative rise from the Merry Pranksters and the Whole Earth Catalog, to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism into his newest book, [_Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780735223943).

As a society, how do we address the "wicked hard problem" of vaccine acceptance? How can public health institutions reach those who are hesitant when even robust fact-based campaigns don't seem to work?

Infectious diseases are one of the long-standing challenges for humanity; historical plagues and flare ups of disease have transformed societies, redrawn boundaries across the globe and instigated mass migrations. Successive civilizations have grappled with attempts to control contagion and tried to protect their populations. With the advent of vaccines in the late 1700's it seemed humanity had finally found the way out of this potentially existential threat.

But despite humans' deeply embedded fear of infectious disease, issues of vaccine acceptance arose from the start. Through decades of public health campaigns in multiple countries, a persistent thread can be seen of reluctance to adopt vaccines, despite extensive educational campaigns or even coercive tactics to get populations fully vaccinated.

Prerna Singh asks how do we go beyond the usual behavior modeling to find out what actually works for these critical public health campaigns? Can we uncover the keys to human motivation to get people to act for their own protection and for the greater good?

**This Long Now Talk was presented in partnership with the[Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us)** (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.