The Daily Planet #120: Deep Time Continued

Much historical analysis is either about 'recorded time,' i.e., history as evidenced in texts and other inscriptions, or about 'end time,' e.g., Edenic beginnings or apocalyptic endings.

What's missing?

Deep Time: the time of biological and geological processes that nevertheless shape human societies: for example, we are where we are today because we learned how to metabolize fossil fuels.

Thinking about deep time reveals a contradiction: human history that lives in recorded time, is crashing into planetary history and being reconstituted by it.

From Frederic Hanusch's "The Politics of Deep Time."

Within the last 2.5 billion years, for example, no other force had a greater impact on the nitrogen cycle than humans, largely due to nitrogen fertilizers used in agriculture (Canﬁeld et al., 2010). Yet, we overlook political practices and institutions that are capable of dealing with these kinds of timeframes, timeframes so vast that numbers lose meaning. This encapsulates the politics ofdeep time.