Join this book talk by Dr. Vincent Ialenti, Postdoctoral Fellow at the UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, to learn about his new work, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now, a guide to how to envision the far future of Earth.
A video recording is available below:
Remarks: Director and Professor Allison Macfarlane, UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs
Dr. Vincent Ialenti confronts two overlapping and urgent global crises: the Anthropocene, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Listening to scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is critical to tackling our planet’s emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism.
Dr. Ialenti turns to Finland’s nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts to explore how these scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens and hundreds of thousands of years. They are not pop culture “futurists” but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy, Dr. Ialenti argues, that we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.
Regarding his work, Dr. Ialenti stated: “Based on my 32-months of anthropological fieldwork among Finland’s nuclear waste repository safety case experts, Deep Time Reckoning offers practical strategies – I call them ‘reckonings’ – for envisioning potential future worlds, despite today’s collapsing societal faith in expertise.”
One book reviewer shared: “Imagine yourself as an ancestor of people living ten thousand or a hundred thousand years in the future. Ialenti focuses on these unfathomable timescales through the lens of radioactive waste and illuminates how readjusting our time horizon underlies our survival.” — Ruth DeFries, Denning Family University Professor of Sustainable Development, Columbia University; author of What Would Nature Do?
Bio: Vincent Ialenti is an anthropologist who studies the cultures of nuclear waste experts in Finland and the United States. His current ethnographic project explores the political-economic drivers behind U.S. transuranic waste “drum breach” accidents. Vincent’s research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, and The MacArthur Foundation. Alongside his academic publications, he has written for NPR, Forbes, Nautilus, Atlas Obscura, and other outlets. Vincent holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University and a MSc in Law, Anthropology & Society from the London School of Economics.
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