How hacking our sense of time can combat climate change
Can you remember what you were doing in 2006? 12 years ago, you weren’t watching Netflix or using a smartphone. You might have been sat on an unfathomably squeaky inflatable chair reading one of the world’s first tweets. Perhaps you were embracing the launch of chip and pin machines for credit card payments. Those halcyon days; no global recession, no credit crunch. The forests of Siberia and Sweden weren’t aflame come the summer months.
Memory vs Imagination
Now, try to imagine yourself 12 years from now: 2030. Rather than rely on memory, you’ll need to use your imagination. Significantly trickier. Of course, based on comprehensive data, leading climate scientists agree that life will have changed once more. If we reach 1.5 degree celsius global warming as expected, many more glaciers will have melted, and sea levels risen. The Earth will be irreversibly damaged and radically transformed. Indonesia’s sinking capital Jakarta is likely to be underwater along with its 35.6 million future inhabitants. Florida, too. Yet the likelihood of this future does nothing to halt rampant property construction in Miami or Jakarta.
Imagining Climate Change
Huge environmental shifts such as submerged cities will become commonplace within decades. Can you say you can truly imagine what everyday life would be like under these conditions? If not, you aren’t unusual.
Our past selves may have struggled to imagine being addicted to scrolling through a social platform named after the sounds of avian communication.
I certainly couldn’t have imagined wildfires raging across Arctic countries during the year 2019. Yet here we are.
The temporally biased brain
Our brains are to blame. Not only does our grey matter struggle to imagine the future, our present-biased cognition also makes decisions which our future selves are completely dependent upon. These two difficulties are interconnected.
Firstly, our inability to emotionally connect with the future is attributed to a near universal phenomenon experienced by human beings called “temporal myopia” — the inability to properly comprehend the long term outcome of an action during decision making. Unfortunately, temporal discounting increases under conditions of uncertainty (such as climate change and economic precariousness) leading to a more immediate temporal orientation and lower levels of sustainable behaviour.
Secondly, we are psychologically predisposed to automatically prioritise rewards in the present over the future because of a cognitive bias which hinders future thinking. This hyperbolic discounting is related to temporal myopia and results in the prioritisation of the current or near self, over the longer term self.
Training ourselves in ‘timefulness’
This bias towards the present is an extremely warped perception of what scientists understand about time. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud diagnoses
our entire species as time illiterate, defined by a widespread ignorance
of planetary time and duration. Whether this is ignorance, or cognitive dissonance, this disregard of the future is damaging for ourselves and
the future of human civilisation and the biosphere. Bjornerud proposes
the antidote might be to learn a sense of timefulness.
Bjornerud is onto something in more ways than one. A concrete connection with our longer-term future self has been shown to lead to greater generosity and compassion for that self further into the future. And, recent research led by neuropsychologist, Marc Wittman indicates that a balanced time perspective — namely a strong future orientation and mindful present orientation — are predictors of sustainable behaviour.
Which raises the question: How can we cultivate that concrete connection and improve our sense of timefulness?
Tangible time travelling
Art and fiction can transport us beyond the reality of ‘Now’, to physically experience temporally distant events in an embodied way: by emotionally reacting to possible future consequences in the present. Experiences of this kind increase temporal proximity as our bodies (situated in the present) undergo physical and affective reactions to the stimulus happening in the moment. These emotional reactions influence decision-making by instigating situational evaluation in concrete, rather than abstract and analytic terms.
This is why artworks like Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing’s interactive ecological work ‘Ice Watch’ are so powerful. The ‘Ice Watch’ installation features large glaciers which have broken away from the mainland of Greenland due to rising global temperatures. The glaciers were then
collected by (artist) Eliasson and (geologist) Rosing and transported to various European locations where they were ‘installed’ in outdoor locations and left to slowly melt. Members of the public were invited to touch, lick, stand beside and even clamber over the glaciers as they slowly, visibly melt
in front of them. Directly sensing the consequences of our inaction over climate change in the present has such an impact because of its capacity
to trigger an emotional reaction experientially within our own personal narrative. These melting glaciers are a tangible representation
of a future that is approaching faster than we think.
Sound artist and activist Kat Austen takes a less multi-sensory approach, focusing on capturing the sound of dying Icebergs by hacking conductivity instruments which measure salinity. This temporal representation of salinity through tempo is intended to establish empathy with an environment we are spatially disconnected from but intimately dependent on for survival.
By sensorily experiencing the speed in which icebergs are melting it is easier to directly understand the rate of change in an embodied sense, rather than technically understanding the in an intangible, numerical way.
Our recent project at Superflux, ‘Mitigation of Shock’ brings systemic future consequences of climate change into the present using storytelling and speculative design. The installation transports visitors to a familiar-looking London apartment situated in 2050. Yet a once spacious family home is cramped by a towering, homemade domestic food production system bathed in a violet light. Food computers monitor vegetables which grow without light, soil or water in only nutrient dense fog. In this future world, such tactics have become essential as a result of extreme weather conditions, economic uncertainty and broken global supply chains which have caused widespread resource scarcity. The space tells a story; and by being immersed within it people are able to feel this future for themselves.
The power of speculative fiction
Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculative climate fiction ‘New York 2140’ whisks the reader’s imagination to a future world where sea levels have risen 50 ft and much of New York City is underwater. Streets have become canals jammed with boat taxis and sky bridges connect skyscrapers. The detailed world building and character development in this story from the perspectives of
so many different individuals from vastly different walks of life helps develop a strong sense of empathy. You can’t help but feel the nuances of the trials and tribulations of the characters as your own.
Wittman explains the significance of present feeling over future thinking:
“In emotional situations, the ‘now’ is physically experienced in an
‘embodied’ way. ‘Later’ is beyond the horizon of immediate experience
and, thus, hypothetical.”
We all have the power to prevent further climate change; by making more sustainable lifestyle choices and by putting pressure on governments and corporations to back big, structural, political and economic change.
First, we must feel the future. Then, we will have the motivation to change
our behaviour in the present. For the sake of the future, and ourselves.
This post is written by Danielle Knight, who is a researcher and partnerships lead at Superflux.
