Editor’s Note: John D. Sutter is a CNN contributor and a National Geographic Explorer. He is director of the forthcoming BASELINE series, which is visiting four locations on the front lines of the climate crisis every five years until 2050. Visit the project’s website. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
When you hear people – presidential candidates, policy wonks, scientists, whomever – talk about the climate crisis, you’re sure to get an earful of dates.
Eliminate fossil fuel pollution by 2050. Cut emissions in half by 2030. Expect sea level rise perhaps a meter or so by 2100 (or more than that in worst-case scenarios).
Those years – 2030, 2050, 2100 – can seem a way-off future, beyond the gravity of this-second news cycles. Who actually imagines, as part of daily life, what the year 2100 will look like? We’re just trying to get through the US election cycle this year – or through the coronavirus pandemic. We view the world through a right-now lens.
The artist and philosopher Jonathon Keats, however, finds daily, yearly and even decadal timeframes to be incredibly myopic. To try to get us to think outside our own time, Keats has developed a “Millennium Camera” that now is taking a 1,000-year exposure of Lake Tahoe in California. Keats has installed two other thousand-year cameras, one in Massachusetts and another in Arizona. More are in the works. The aim of this long-duration photography is to trigger new thinking about the planetary crisis that’s caused by humanity’s inability to stop burning fossil fuels and chopping down forests.
The Millennium Camera is of the pinhole variety. It contains an oil paint that bleaches slightly over time, capturing a time-lapse image of the landscape, which can be expected to shift – perhaps becoming more arid – beneath the forces of global warming. “If the landscape changes over time, the photographic plate will show multiple overlapping scenes or the motion blur of a scene that gradually morphs,” Keats told me.
“It’s like a whole movie compressed into a single frame.”
The images from each camera won’t be ready until the 31st Century.
Yep, 3020-ish.
“In geological terms, that’s practically next week,” he said.
In climate change terms, that’s true, as well.
Not that we usually think of it that way.
“Pretty much all of the warming that we’ve seen will persist for 1,000 years,” said Kirsten Zickfeld, an associate professor of geography at Simon Fraser University, who thinks about the year 3000 way more than most of us (which, outside sci-fi, is probably never). “Almost none of the warming we’re experiencing today will have vanished.”
The reason? Something like 40% to 50% of the carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere now will still be traveling through atmospheric and oceanic systems in the year 3000, Zickfeld said, ensuring that temperatures remain elevated and sea level rise continues to accelerate. The carbon that’s junking up the atmosphere will last even longer than that – perhaps 10,000 years, she said – if we really keep polluting at out-of-control rates.
“Imagining that the decisions that we made in the past and that we make today will affect Earth and life on Earth for such a long period of time – it’s mind boggling,” Zickfeld told me.
Knowing today’s pollution lasts at least 1,000 years is potentially paralyzing news. But look at the inverse: If and when we decide to end the fossil fuel era, stopping the pollution that’s heating up the Earth, those actions will matter for a millennium, too.
Our actions reverberate for thousands of years – at least!
Those of us who tell the story of the climate crisis rarely acknowledge that timescale.
Maybe that’s just as well, Zickfeld told me, because, from a policy perspective, we really do need to reach net-zero carbon emissions in the next few decades to have even the slightest glimmer of hope of meeting international targets set in the Paris Agreement. In other words, there truly is such an extreme urgency to the now-now, the next-10-years now, that a person could be forgiven for not engaging in 1,000-year thought experiments.
But this is only part of the picture. Because without recognizing the intra-millennial consequences of our today-actions, we’ll fail to see the urgency of this moment.
I believe that’s already happening. Activists love to say that the climate crisis is extremely urgent and fast-moving – that momentum for change is building like never before. I want this to be true.
While it is true that we are able to see evidence of massive changes all around us – fires, droughts, storms and so on – this crisis is happening more slowly than our own human psychology can perceive. Academics call this “shifting baseline syndrome” or “generational amnesia” – the idea that environmental change is happening slowly enough that we don’t see it (or don’t live long enough to see it). And we therefore unknowingly accept an increasingly degraded and dangerous planet as normal. Our very conception of “normal” shifts forward with us through time. We may always feel a little freaked out, but we rarely or never consciously see the scope of change.
One example: Frances C. Moore, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, analyzed tweets about the weather and found that we only access a memory bank that’s about two to eight years long when we decide whether today is “hot.” That memory shifts forward with us through time, creating the prospect that the Earth will always “feel” about as hot as it does right now, even as temperatures increase dramatically.
My documentary series, BASELINE, which is revisiting four communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis every five years, until 2050, is one attempt to make sense of the magnitude of change that is getting right past the alarm systems in our brains.
Keats’ 1,000-year camera is another take.
He aims to show the climate crisis on its own timescale, not ours.
Will it work?
Well …
“Although I’ve taken great care to make these cameras as durable and functional as possible, I think it’s highly unlikely that any will survive the next millennium of wear and tear,” he said. “And even if a camera is still intact after 1,000 years, and somebody recovers it, I think it’s unlikely that the image will be properly exposed.”
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Still, that’s beside the point, and Keats knows it.
He’s not creating 1,000-year images for future people, not really.
He’s making them for us.
To connect us to that future.
And to help us realize that we’re already living it.
