How to abandon the ‘tyranny of the now’? Decolonising the future of the Anthropocene. Geosciences, waste and the long term

Whether or not we acknowledge the Anthropocene as a geological epoch (AWG 2024) – it is obvious that humanity has altered the Earth’s face and it is certain that our behaviour will worsen bioclimatic conditions and resources in the future. Thus, it is inherent that environmental issues are also societal and cultural issues. Industrial societies have not only caused damage to the environment but virtually colonised past and present – Nature, other cultures, even our own. Do we refrain from “colonising the future”, an assertion by the early German-Austrian futurologist Robert Jungk over 70 years ago (Jungk 1954)? Is the Australian philosopher Roman Krznaric right in claiming: “We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk and nuclear waste, and which we can plunder as we please” (Krznaric 2020)?  We are obsessed over instantaneous benefit what Krznaric labels the “tyranny of the now”, a kind of presentism that is one of the underlying characteristics of our behaviour. Well, we cannot undo what we did, but we might change – with one essential prerequisite: to overcome our fallacy to focus on (our) present.
As historians of Nature, geoscientists are sensitive to the long term. The controversial environmental issues of nuclear waste, special waste, carbon  storage (cf. Flüeler 2023) or “forever chemicals” are symptomatically longlasting. This contribution aims to explore how society and technology may find sustainable ways to cope with these issues in the long future. They not only need long-term safety demonstrations but also long-term institutional arrangements and engagement of scientists, engineers, waste producers, public administrators, NGOs and the public. This includes an adequate transfer of knowledge, concept and system understanding, experience and documentation to these audiences. Substantive and institutional approaches were investigated (Flüeler 2024) and are developed, such as criteria and means for individual “long-term” literacy and resilience, constitutions or declarations, legislations, governments, custodians like “guardians for future generations” or “councils for the future”, other collaborative approaches, knowledge bases or platforms and networks  – goal- and process-centred, from personal to social to political levels. The Copernican principle for space stating that humans are not privileged observers of the universe (Peacock 1999) must be enlarged to time, for environmental policy and governance are only sustainable if they are long-term.

____________________

AWG, Anthropocene Working Group 2024. https://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene.
Flüeler, T. 2023. Governance of Radioactive Waste, Special Waste and Carbon Storage. Literacy in Dealing with Long-
Term Controversial Sociotechnical Issues. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-
03902-7.

Flüeler, T. 2024. Decolonising the future – how come and how? Geosciences, waste and long-term issues. 22nd Swiss
Geoscience Meeting, Basel.

Jungk, R. 1954. Tomorrow Is Already here. Simon & Schuster, New York (orig. German: Die Zukunft hat schon begonnen.
Scherz, Bern, 1952).

Krznaric, R. 2020. The Good Ancestor. How to Think Long-term in a Short-term World. WH Allan, London.

Peacock, J.A. 1999. Cosmological Physics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.