Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The long term is a defining characteristic of sustainability. Other goals may have an implicit long-term element, but they are not defining. In other goals—democracy, growth, peace, for instance—the long term element is thin; it merely follows from the very desirability of the goal itself: since peace is a good thing, obviously we want it all the time. In sustainability, the long term element must be thick, it must stand out, bold and explicit, constantly debated and negotiated to be sure, but prominent and defining. In part this is because the sustainability goal has arisen at a historical juncture (roughly the 1980s to the present) where so much decision making is short term. A primary reason is the ever-increasing penetration of the market where more and more of life, especially everyday life, is commodified and where the externalization of costs, the distancing of commerce, all informed by modern economics, a form of reasoning inherently short term, even atemporal prevails. But the larger reason for developing a thick notion of the long term is the state of the environment, both the biophysical environment, that is, the material underpinnings of all economies, and the social environment, the relations among people and between people and the natural world. The strain on these dimensions are well documented, and the trends are rarely positive. Yet for many, that is, those who can buy their way out of the consequences of environmental degradation (for now), things look good. For them, roughly a fifth of the world’s population, concentrated in the North and in capital cities of the South, the challenges of life are indeed short term; the future, as always, will take care of itself. The trends speak otherwise, however, for rich and poor alike: no one escapes climate change or persistent toxics or the consequences of depleted soils.
The challenge of so constructing a “thick” long term rests on a central dilemma in the global environmental problematic: the incidence and scope of cause-effect time lags and consequent proliferation of risks is expanding at the same time that time scales of practice are contracting (from the years and seasons of agrarians to the minutes and nanoseconds of technologists, for instance). Overlaying this twin phenomenon is a pervasive belief that humans are inherently short term, a belief buttressed by:
i. everyday experience (e.g., shopping as recreation and expression; throw-away product design, packaging, and buildings for ; investing as gambling;
ii. science (especially behavioral biology: it’s all a fight for day-to-day survival and reproduction);
iii. markets (especially those dominated by discounted financial mechanisms); and
iv. politics (especially that driven by public opinion polls and marketing reports).
In this paper I argue that it is not enough to make pleas for long-term thinking. Scientific evidence for time-lagged risk proliferation has no more bearing on policymaking or everyday life (e.g., consumption) than historical evidence has on the imperialistic ambitions of political leaders (with the urge to dominate and the likelihood of overextension). A more fruitful approach is, on the one hand, to expose the seemingly natural or inevitable short-termness of contemporary thought and practice and, on the other, to identify structural conditions that lean decisionmaking away from the short term and toward the long term.
This paper, then, is an attempt to construct a long term, not through scientific proof or appeals to environmental necessity, but through a logic of thought and action grounded in history, ecology, organization and politics. I start with a brief characterization of the biophysical and social context for which the imperative of long-term thinking is most evident—“long crises”—then turn to what is perhaps the most vexing issue in the consideration of the long term, namely, the modern belief that humans are inherently short term. Here I trace several intellectual traditions that contribute to that belief. I then construct an alternative view, one grounded in research on human thinking and adapting and provide contrary evidence, some anecdotal, some historical, in modern business practice (cases) and theory (discount rate). I conclude by positing minimal conditions for a policy environment oriented to the long term, what I term a neo-prudential order.