Proposing Deep Time as a Methodology
After all, decisions made now and in the coming decades may well determine the trajectory of the earth system for millennia. Thus, by expanding our temporal horizons, deep time thinkers aim to encourage reflection on sustainable practices in the present.
The Dangers of Deep Time
In this symposium, however, we want to investigate the dangers of deep time.
Is this concept able to generate the sort of behavioural change needed if global society is to address the ecological crisis for current and future generations? Or is the concept vulnerable to co-option by those seeking to perpetuate the existing trajectory? There are dangers that exist in the long-term future, but there are also dangers entailed in employing the concept of deep time as a means of thinking about that future.
Key questions
What are the threats to the Earth’s future—including those with an anthropogenic cause—and how do they impact our sense of time? How might our notions of time be said to collapse under the pressure of envisioned catastrophe? And what sort of temporalities are invoked by the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene?
And yet, what are the risks associated with this interest in long-term thinking? How might concepts such as deep time do more harm than good? And what are the dangers of advocating for this so-called ‘geological turn’ in the context of plural and interlocking human crises?
Symposium Details
About the symposium
It has been generously supported by ECODISTURB, University of Oslo, alongside the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, and Pembroke College, University of Oxford.