Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now by Vincent Ialenti (review)

The year 2020 will likely be remembered as a year of reckoning. Humanity faced a global pandemic, economic collapse, environmental crises, and a massive uprising in the United States against structural racism. According to many, we are well into the Anthropocene, a new geologic epoch marked by humanity's dominant and destructive ecological footprint. In scientific debates about the origins of the Anthropocene, some suggest that the beginning of nuclear weapons testing in 1945, which dispersed human-made radionuclides around the globe, represents a significant marker of human-induced change to earth systems. Long-lived radionuclides like plutonium 239 take 24,000 years for half of their content to decay to a safe state. The safe and ongoing storage of nuclear waste is one of the central concerns of the Anthropocene, and it requires a wider, more expansive view of time than most of us are used to.

In Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now, Vincent Ialenti looks to Finland's nuclear waste "Safety Case" project for lessons that might be applied to wider issues of the Anthropocene. As a cultural anthropologist, Ialenti spent two years conducting ethnographic fieldwork with Finland's nuclear waste experts. His goal was to glean "long-termist sensibilities" (p. xiv) to help address the ecological crisis we face in the Anthropocene, and also to address what he names the "deflation of expertise" (p. xiii)—an overall denigration of expert authority. He combines the methods of anthropology with a popular-science approach to writing in order to reach the widest audience. Each chapter explores specific lessons Ialenti culls from the Safety Case experts and ends with recommendations meant to be approached like a toolkit that the author calls "reckonings" (p. 8).

In chapter 1, titled "How to Ride Analogies Across Deep Time," Ialenti examines how Safety Case experts utilize geologic and archaeological data from the ancient past to provide metaphors and reference points to help imagine the distant future. For example, the team looked at a 2,100-year-old well-preserved human cadaver embedded in clay in China for clues about how to use bentonite clay buffers to contain radioactive waste for millennia. Ialenti notes the need to supplement scientific knowledge with imagination in order to inspire deep time thinking and learning.

Ialenti's focus on the technical and disciplined expertise of the Safety Case experts is highlighted in chapter 2, titled "How Far Future Worlds Sprout from Simple Repeating Patterns." He identifies the input/output patterns within Safety Case as an important example of a tactic that helped to engage the far future in a more ordered and realistic way. In Safety Case, the nuclear waste experts worked in tandem to weave together complex datasets, models, and scenarios in order to construct a coherent engagement with a far-flung future in which nuclear waste is safely contained below ground. Inherent in this work is a necessary engagement with a multiplicity of potential disaster scenarios in the future. Ialenti admits that the challenge facing the Safety Case experts, as well as the challenge facing humanity with the Anthropocene, could inspire paralysis instead of action. He sees the methodological and disciplined approach of Safety Case experts as one way of challenging paralysis and taking one disciplined action at a time.

Chapter 3, titled "How to Zoom In and Out on Deep Time from Different Angles," expands on chapter 2 by identifying another particular strategy of Safety Case experts: toggling back and forth between near and far engagements with time. Ialenti argues that everyone involved with the work of deep time thinking can practice this strategy by shifting angles and scales to look at a particular issue from multiple perspectives and time scales. He includes the following questions as food for thought (p. 116): "What does my work look like from your perspective? What does yours look like from mine? What does the year 22,000 CE look like from...