Ice and sediment cores give researchers the paleoclimate data necessary to understand what the earth’s climate was like 100,000 years ago. Now, that same data helps inform the IPCC’s analysis of our climate futures. . . .   Read More

Fire has always been a part of California’s ecology. For millennia indigenous Californians managed ecosystems through controlled burns, but centuries of European & American fire suppression have turned the state’s forests into tinderboxes. Can we recover? . . . .   Read More

In our efforts to foster long-term thinking and preservation, we at Long Now do not typically think of single use plastic as an ally. Yet that’s precisely what the non-profit art project Letters to the future does, harnessing plastic’s lack of biodegradability to make a . . .   Read More

With thousands of members from all around the world, from artists and writers to engineers and farmers, the Long Now community has a wide range of perspectives, stories, and experience to offer. On October 20, 02020, we heard 12 of them in a curated set of short Ignite talks given by Long Now Members. . . .   Read More

Antarctic Sea Ice Melt — 02019 (Source: Maxar) The Ancient Greeks had two different words fortime. The first, chronos, is time as we think of it now: marching forward, ceaselessly creating our past, present, and future. The second, kairos, is time in the opportune sense: the ideal moment to act, as captured by . . .   Read More

In an article in Forbes, David Bressan writes that the giant rift in the USA’s political voting blocs is in part a consequence of collisions between continental plates, the literal giant rift that used to separate the two halves of North America, and recent glacial activity: The same region that had once . . .   Read More

Once again on the theme of how the technological/cultural pace layer’s accelerating decoupling from the ecological pace layer in which we evolved poses serious risks to the integrity of both the human body and biosphere: When daycare workers in Finland rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth such as dwarf heather . . .   Read More

Inside Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository, 1,500 feet underground. Photo Credit: Peter Guenzel With half-lives ranging from 30 to 24,000, or even 16 million years, the radioactive elements in nuclear waste defy our typical operating time frames. The questions around nuclear waste storage — how to keep it safe from . . .   Read More

Archaeologist Stefani Crabtree writes about her work to reconstruct Indigenous food and use networks for the National Park Service. . .   Read More

Alex Ross has written a moving tribute to Long Now’s unofficial mascot, the bristlecone pine, in The New Yorker. What is most astonishing about Pinus longaeva is not the age of any single organism but the collective oldness and otherness of its entire community. No two super-elderly trees look alike, to . . .   Read More