Timefulness | Marcia Bjornerud

We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mostly invisible to us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud teaches that kind of time literacy. With it, we become at home in the deep past and engaged with the deep future. We learn to “think like a planet.”

As for climate change... “Dazzled by our own creations,” Bjornerud writes, “we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted…. Averse to even the smallest changes, we have now set the stage for environmental deviations that will be larger and less predictable than any we have faced before.”

"Timefulness" was given on July 22, 02019 as part of Long Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world's leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can:

The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Our projects include a 10,000 Year Clock, endangered language preservation, thousand year+ data storage, and Long Bets, an arena for accountable predictions.

[Wanderlustig]

We need more #ScientistforFuture like Marcia Bjornerud ! She should be awarded the Nobel Prize For geology, if there was one . Please spread her message far and wide ! Why do I see only 20 likes for tis lecture ? That's ridiculous !

[marilynfrench-st.george]

I am so pleased to have discovered you and your book at the recent on line BROTO conference. Your approach and understanding have provided a profound framework for me to hang my emerging understanding of earth and its dynamics. Thank you.

[dancooper]

Amazing lecture! Agree 100% with what she said.

[Lothar]

This was a great talk! She's a good speaker and basically everything she says matters and is often also quite profound.

[noeditbookreviews]

I just bought her book after a vague googling for geology books. I am really liking her mind.

[cosmobiologist]

Really loved her book (even if in the intro she had a small bit against astrobiology - which is an entire realm of thought that tries to understand the nature of life through myriad scales of time).