Immanent Futures and the Value of Knowledge

Mandated by the Finnish regulatory state, Posiva is a nuclear waste management firm owned by two energy companies that supply nuclear power for some 30 percent of Finland's energy needs. It will soon begin operating a high-level waste disposal facility deep in the granite bedrock under an offshore island in the gulf that separates Finland from Sweden. This highly radioactive waste will be sealed into iron, then into copper tubes, packed within the bedrock with absorbent clay, and then the cavities will be backfilled and sealed. Deep geological repositories for nuclear waste have represented one of the only apparently long-term solutions to the accumulation of tons of extremely dangerous materials, and yet claims about its safety remain highly controversial given the waste's very long life. While radioactive waste currently remains stored in surface level cooling ponds, regulators hope for a high degree of confidence that long-term geological, climatological and human factors will not undermine the geological storage for human and nonhuman inhabitants in the far distant future. Vincent Ialenti's recent book, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now, asks its readers to learn techniques for thinking about such radically distant futures.

As part of its mandate, Posiva has organized a vast research agenda tasked with anticipating risks of exposure extending far into the future—a complex modeling effort known as Safety Case. Safety Case is the ethnographic subject of Ialenti's monograph, and he offers, through a classical form of fieldwork with Finnish experts, a kind of anthropology of reason (Rabinow 1996). In a spirit of lateral thinking, Ialenti wants to think about how these experts think—about the deep future, in a context of public commitment to expert knowledge.

The task of these experts is to determine, with confidence, that nuclear waste buried deep within a geological rock stratum will pose only minimal risk of ecological harm, including to future human residents, on timescales of hundreds of thousands of years. Considering that biologically modern humans have only been around for about 300,000 years—and have been behaviorally modern for perhaps only 100,000 years—we can start to appreciate why this task is a priori impossible. On what grounds could anyone claim to predict anything about human societies that far again into the future? And why should those expert claims take precedence in a democratic society?

But the impossibility of knowing the future hardly defines the value of trying. Unlike a typical academic ethnography, Ialenti has distilled for the non-academic reader a series of "how to think about deep time" lessons that are offered as a contribution to the revaluation of expertise given our collective ecological predicament. Because his book is written for an audience that goes beyond his academic peers, the tone of his writing is less about debates over the scientific viability of modeling or its epistemic constraints and possibilities. Arguably, it is offered more in the spirit of Margaret Mead's efforts to translate cultural difference for public edification. In this case, the value of such experts' patterns of thought characterizes Ialenti's contribution to public debate. The reader does not get an in depth examination of the critical politics of nuclear waste storage in Finland or a discussion of the role of expertise in democratic deliberation of ecological risk. Some readers may find that disappointing. Because the book is structured with each chapter providing lessons in how to think about deep time, its contribution is to isolate and communicate some of the epistemic backdrop in use by seasoned pros. This may prove valuable for undergraduates interested in high-risk facets of late industrialism, as well as providing a general exposure to Anthropocene discourse.

Within debates about the public validation of risky endeavors, nuclear energy has long occupied pride of place for the contested ability of expertise to make claims about safety, especially in Europe. In Ulrich Beck's (1992) understanding, "risk society" arose in the 1980s as a specifically ecological...