A Longer Measure

Asked whether humanity is programmed to destroy the living systems on which it depends, Næss responded: "There is no good reason to believe that there is such a programming. And the great uncertainty about the remote developments of Homo sapiens and its technologies makes it natural for us to concentrate on possible effects of our behavior for the first thousand years to come." The sentence contains the full architecture of deep ecology's relationship to time. There is no inevitability. There is no guarantee. What there is, is a timescale — a thousand years, long enough to reveal the consequences of present choices but not so long that speculation replaces responsibility. The timescale is the measure, and the measure changes what counts as wisdom.