Where are the world's best places to encounter 'deep time'?

Plus an article in The Observer, the 5 best books on long-term time, and more conversations about The Long View

Hello,

Two years ago, we asked Long View readers: which living thing is the best mascot for long-term thinking? You sent many excellent suggestions, from trees to tardigrades. Now, we're asking for your thoughts again. We want to know – where are the world’s best places to feel a sense of deep time?  We’ve compiled an A-Z of some we know, but we’d love to hear where you’d nominate. Email us! thelongviewbook@gmail.com

Also in The Long View: A Field Guide this week is a list of book recommendations about time, an article from The Observer, and more wonderful conversations about thinking in centuries…

The A-to-Z of “Temporal Windows”

By Xander Balwit

In the last newsletter, you read about the Pando, an aspen grove whose 80,000-year-old root system allows us a glimpse (and a listen) into the past. Somewhere between an organism and a location, to be in the presence of the Pando is to inhabit an expansive timeview. It is one of those special places capable of shrinking the urgency of the “now”.

While we are at risk of losing some such places to climate change or the slow erosion of time, there are many “temporal windows”: places that make deep time feel closer and more tangible. In this edition of the Field Guide, we want to introduce you to an alphabet of them.

This list is non-exhaustive, and we are eager to hear what locations come to mind for you, especially those that are unusual or off the beaten path. Where in the world deserves to be better known as a window into deep time?

A - Acropolis of Athens

This ancient citadel is one of the most recognisable archaeological sites representing Western antiquity. Still splendid millennia later, it stands as a reminder of both the fragility and grandeur of great civilisations.

B - Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site

This list would be incomplete without a site acknowledging humanity's entrance into the atomic age. Used as a place to test A-bombs on navel vessels, this eerily beautiful lagoon holds traces of residual radioactivity whose effects will linger for generations to come.

C - Celilo Falls

Carved out by repeated floods following the melt of the world’s last global ice age, this horseshoe-shaped falls in Oregon is striking not only for its geologic history but also its socio-cultural one. A location of enormous significance for native populations, Celilo Falls has been at the center of a battle between industrial and indigenous timeviews for centuries. Its story contains a powerful history, and its resonance with deep time perspectives cannot be overstated.

Fishing at Celilo Falls - Wikicommons

D - Dingle Peninsula

The early Christian sites on the Dingle Peninsula jump out like strange stone beehives against the arid landscape. The most famous of these, the Gallarus Oratory, was built in 700CE. For millennia, peace-seeking monks pursued a tranquil and secluded existence there working as scholars and craftsmen.

E - Easter Island Moai

Located on Easter Island, in one of the most remote places on Earth, are nearly 1,000 statues of monolithic stone figures. Both the remoteness of the location and the anonymity behind the construction of the Moai have beguiled people since the Island’s discovery in 1722.

F - Fleet Moss

Fleet moss is a peat blanket bog that has been dated to the Neolithic period. Not only is this upland area in North Yorkshire, England remarkable for its boggy beauty, but for its composition. Formed by the partial decomposition of organic matter, peat is comprised of ancient plants and is the first stage in the long process of plant material turning into coal. As such, it is a material that bridges the ages.

Fleet moss - Wikicommons

G - Galapagos Island

It was his time visiting the Galapagos in 1835, that helped Charles Darwin formulate his theory of evolution by natural selection. This remote volcanic archipelago off the coast of Ecuador is the cradle of evolutionary history. Its flora and fauna are windows into deep time and common ancestry. If ever a place inspired an explosion of temporal history, it would be here.

H - Herodotus Basin

Located between Cyprus, Crete, and Egypt, is an area of seafloor that scientists think is a remnant of the Tethys Ocean, which existed at the time of the Pangaea supercontinent. This area, known as the Herodotus Basin, is between 315 and 365 million years old. This ancient piece of oceanic crust is a stark reminder that while the Earth appears a static rock, it is actually continuously changing at rates imperceptible to us.

I - Ise Grand Shrine

In The Long View, you can read about how followers of the Shinto faith in Ise, Japan, have ritualistically rebuilt their grand shrine 66 times, in a practice that has lasted for 1,300 years. There are around 80,000 shrines around Japan, known as jinja, but the one at Ise is particularly important and marks the end of a pilgrimage route walked by foot.

J - Jodrell Bank Observatory

Located in northwest England, Jodrell Bank is one of the world's leading radio astronomy observatories. If you contemplate deep time long enough, you will doubtlessly zoom out and consider the age of the Earth and perhaps even that of the entire Universe. From the cosmic background radiation to quasars, observatories such as Jodrell Bank usher in some of the most temporally expansive encounters of all.

K - Knossos, Crete

After the Acropolis of Athens, the site of Knossos (on the island of Crete) is Greece’s most popular tourist attraction. However, it is not its popularity but its legacy that warrants inclusion on this list. Said to contain a legendary labyrinth, the ancient palace of Knossos speaks to the potency of mythos in the comprehension of deep time. A place where archaeology meets lore, Knossos reflects a two-fold approach to interpreting our relationship to previous civilisations through stories and science.

L - Lake Baikal

Situated in the mountainous Russian region of Siberia, Lake Baikal is estimated to be between 25 and 30 million years old. Not only is it the oldest lake in the world, but also the deepest, with a central basin going down to a depth of 1,642 metres (5,387 feet). If that were not enough, Lake Baikal’s pristine waters are home to around 2,000 unique known species of animal that are not found anywhere else on Earth.

M - Millennium Seed Bank

The Millennium Seed Bank is the world’s leading seed conservation programme led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London. Containing 2.4 billion individual seeds representing a total of 40,020 different species of wild plants, the MSB is an extensive repository of genetic diversity and horticultural history. Should humanity ever face an existential global catastrophe, seed vaults such as this and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault may hold the secret to agricultural recovery.

N -  Nyiragongo Volcano

There is nothing like a volcano to remind one of the volatility and animation of nature. Nyiragongo volcano, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, contains the largest continuously active lava lake. One can imagine that staring into its 1.2 km-diameter summit caldera via satellite is akin to witnessing the violent bombardment that created the Earth.

O - Onkala

"Onkalo" is a Finnish word for a cave or a hollow. Fittingly, it is the name for a giant tomb for Finland’s nuclear waste. While nuclear energy is incredibly efficient, it produces waste that remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Onkalo is a solution for storing this waste and protecting future people from its harm. A mausoleum for humanity’s malignant byproducts, Onkala is a place that will ask us to confront what kind of legacy we wish to leave for our descendants.

P - Pando

The Pando appeared in last week’s newsletter. An enormous and ancient organism, much like the honey mushroom growing in the Malheur National Forest, the Pando is a living reminder that humans may more closely resemble the Emphemenoptera.

Q - Qinshihuang Mausoleum

The Quinshihuang mausoleum holds China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died in 210BCE, after conquering six warring states to create the first unified nation of China. Containing an army of life-like terracotta warriors, this menagerie is an excellent example of the elaborate mortuary practices that speak to how we approach eternity and the afterlife. Breathtaking in its scope and detail, the mausoleum is an illustration of our yearning for posterity, a future, that, if it does not contain us, contains our protectors.

R - Redwoods

Perhaps the most beautiful and famed forest in the world, the California redwoods are an old-growth forest of epic proportions. With trees that are descendants of a group of conifers (cone-bearing trees) that flourished more than 144 million years ago, to stand amongst them is to be transported back through time.

S - Skara Brae

Another location from the archeological canon, Skara Brae is a Neolithic Age site, consisting of 10 stone structures, near the Bay of Skaill, Orkney, Scotland. Likely inhabited between 3100-2500BCE, this site is remarkable for the glimpse it gives us at ancient domesticity. Rather than a labyrinth or citadel, Skara Brae is a collection of odd stone houses. Containing tools of daily life rather than weapons of warfare, Skara Brae erases the distance that we can feel when casting our minds across time. There, amongst the excavated buildings, it is not impossible to imagine the lives of distantly living people.

T - Tyrolean Alps

It was in the Tyrolean Alps, near the Tisenjoch pass, where the mummified body of Ötzi the ice man was found in 1991 by two German tourists. Ötzi, a well-preserved 5,000-year-old human corpse, is among the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th Century. Found with scattered bits of leather, plant fibre, animal hide, string, his axe, and an unfinished bow, Ötzi provides an unusually detailed peek into life in the Bronze Age. Much like how Skara Brae lets us look back into private life, the man sheathed in these glacial ridges lets us look back at ourselves.

U - Utrecht

Covering the many ways to expand one’s timeview, The Long View touches on participatory artworks and acts of continuation. One example can be found in the Dutch city of Utrecht. There, a poem is being written over many years, letter by letter, with different poets passing the baton between one another. Every Saturday at lunchtime, a stonemason in the city centre carves a new letter into a cubic block. Known as The Letters of Utrecht, the poem is currently about 100 metres (328 feet) long.

V - Vitus Cathedral in Prague

This list would not be complete without a cathedral. In The Long View, Richard writes about how cathedral thinking is often held up as an example of our ancestors’ admirable long-term view. While ‘cathedral-thinking’ speaks to a time of cyclical temporal imagining, wherein lives played out in a way that looked very similar across generations, the act of cathedral building is indeed an astonishing multi-generational feat. Founded in 1344, St. Vitus Cathedral was constructed upon the site of the original Romanesque rotunda and took nearly 600 years to complete.

W - White Horse of Uffington

Also mentioned in The Long View, is the White Horse of Uffington - a giant work of art created 3,000 years ago in Oxfordshire. Shaped like a horse and filled in with crushed chalk, the White Horse of Uffington is another long-term project that requires regular acts of maintenance that connect people through time. Every year, a group led by Chris Daniel of Long Now London returns to the horse to help “rechalk” it. If you’d like to join them on 24 July, sign up here.

X - Xochicalco Temple of the Feathered Serpent

In the ancient city of Xochicalco, Mexico is a Mayan Pyramid known as Xochicalco Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Replete with glyphs portraying jaguars and owls and stylistic elements of both Mayan and Teotihuacan civilisations, the temple is another archeological site that strikes one as both profoundly familiar and distinctly archaic. While it may be challenging to imagine how these civilisations lived, their iconography is a symbolism all too familiar and resonant.

Y -  Yellowstone National Park

Another location striking for its geology is Yellowstone National Park, located in the northwest corner of Wyoming and extending into Montana and Idaho. Comprising lakes, canyons, geysers, rivers, and mountain ranges, the park contains such a diversity of physical topography that one cannot help but be overcome by the vastness and sublimity of the landscape.

Z - Zeitpyramide

Begun in 1993, on the 1,200th anniversary of its host town Wemding, the Zeitpyrimide is a work of public art intended to be a giant pyramid built from cubic concrete blocks that will take more than 1,000 years to be completed, in the year 3183. As of 2021, the first three of its 120 concrete blocks have been placed. While it may look simple now, the idea is that future generations will see it in its full form.

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The Long View in The Observer

‘A different perspective lets you transcend the stresses of today’. Illustration: Eva Bee in The Observer

Last Sunday, Richard had an adaptation of The Long View published in The Observer about how the many concatenating crises of today warp our time sense.

Observing that “crisis tends to trap you in the present,” Richard acknowledges how difficult it can be to adopt the long view. But even despite these difficulties, it is essential that we try.

“If we are to navigate our way through 2023 and beyond, it begins by changing the way we see time.”

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The best books for taking a longer view

For Shepherd books, Richard recommends five excellent books on how to adopt a longer view of time, and why they inspired him.

At the same website, you can also browse this ‘bookshelf’ of books related to time.

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Reasons to be cheerful

Read an interview on how long-term thinking is having an impact right now, Richard’s reason for writing The Long View, and more . . .

“The real benefit of taking the long view is that, as well as seeing the trends that are worsening, you also see the things that are getting better.”

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An interview for The Psychologist with Alina Ivan

Richard discusses some of the psychological biases and habits that influence long-term thinking, a grammar for the future, and how taking a longer view offers us therapeutic benefits.

‘We human beings are just flashes of sunlight on a pond’

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Would you be willing to review The Long View?

If you’ve read or listened to The Long View, and would recommend it to others, it would be wonderful if you’d consider adding a review to Amazon or Goodreads. (Please let us know if you do, so we can thank you personally!)

The Long View is available for purchase! You can look for a copy at your local book shop or you can get it here from other retailers, as well as the e-book and Audible version (read by Richard!) If you’d like 25% off the cover price and live in the UK, visit the Headline shop, and use this code at checkout: LONGVIEW25

thanks for reading,

best wishes,

Xander and Richard