Humans don’t tend to think in the long-term. Lunchtime is the extent of most folks plans. Let’s face it, most of us don’t have to go above and beyond our immediate needs. Slightly ambitious people will look ahead to next weekend or maybe shop early for Christmas. We may have some vague notions as to how we want our lives to proceed or how our business careers will develop but mostly we don’t go into minute detail as to how things will go.
Bosses, business leaders, politicians, and other people who are in charge have to think ahead. But even these plans don’t go past next year or some five-year plan.
As I said, we don’t plan for the long haul. It’s just not necessary for most of us because it’s won’t really affect us negatively if we don’t.
In fact, in some cases it may be detrimental to be thinking about the long-term while others grasp the opportunities that present themselves in the present. Those quick enough to grasp those opportunities benefit. Those that don’t suffer so the tendency is to go after the quick reward and eschew looking at the long-term.
So why should anyone plan for the long-term or even just understand long-term change? Well cause at a deeper and more fundamental level most of the important things in life happen in the long-term. I mean really long-term.
It’s somewhat difficult for the average person to visualize what deep time is or how it works. Deep time is the concept that most of the big things in life-like plate tectonics, evolution, long-term climate, these things don’t work themselves out immediately or even slowly. These things work themselves out ultra slowly. They work on the principle of slow and steady pressure over an unfathomable time scale to coalesce and to morph from one situation into another. They defy the attempts for a young impatient species to define and visualize.
The sun affects our planet through gravity and radiation shaping and altering the landforms which in turn determine the type of vegetation that will grow and then makes animal life adapt to fit these available plants and finally humans take stock of all these factors and change their lifestyle, their culture, their religion to suit these things. We begin the process on one end with billions of years of change and at the other centuries or just decades of change.
I don’t want to get all Disney but it is a huge web but not just a web of life but a web of reality. A delicate balance that has worked itself out and harmonized over an unimaginable time scale.
Yet in the last few hundred years we as humans have done things to our environment to alter and disturb these long-term cycles without any sort of thought towards the long-term consequences of our actions.
We force a meandering river to stay in a particular channel because it suits our needs, we cut down a forest on a hillside without considering erosion, we wipe out entire species for our convenience.
Even in our own man-made world we do things without forethought. Some giant retailer comes to a small town and devastates the local small shop owners, clogs the local small roads with traffic that these roads can’t handle, and litters the ground with a plague of cheap plastic shopping bags. The retailers only concern is if the local community can be harvested for a profit. The other ramifications of their actions are unimportant.
We not only have to be cognizant that our actions have immediate repercussions but we also have to consider how our plans fit into the long-term development of any system.
Why is this so important nowadays? Our progress, our industry, our consumption of raw resources is such that we are approaching a point that no deviation from our current course will be possible. A sort of inertia is building up that threatens to be not just unstoppable but unalterable. We may not be able to force this path to deviate at all.
And if it does turn out to be the wrong path, what then? We are as far as I know the only creature in the world that is able to think in an abstract manner. We can visualize, plan, and consider things in our minds long before we move a muscle or disturb a blade of grass. Why is that we have to rush headlong into what might be a dangerous and foolhardy path? Let’s use this gift we have (perhaps the only real gift we have) to think and figure things out before embarking on what might be a tragic course of events.
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