The Ancient-Future-Now

Our planet earth has a destructive side. We all saw it last week– the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Eventually, the earth will find its equilibrium again. It will heal itself in the passing of the seasons to come. So will humanity; the human spirit will endure and prevail, working through grief and loss, and eventually find footing again. We learn from the earth, our only home; we will die and rise again through the seasons of the generations to come.

But something is different about the third of this so-called triple disaster in Japan. The nuclear crisis has overshadowed the strength, courage, hope, and resiliency of human communities coming and working together, that had risen in the first two natural disasters. While I admire the spirit of the 50 faceless workers who willingly put themselves in danger to contain the nuclear disaster to save others, I fear their sacrifice would not solve the long-term problem for future generations. They could only contain the disaster temporarily. As I heard about the contamination of the water and food supplies, I felt a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. This human-made crisis killed my optimism as I watched helicopters dump water into a reactor building where water levels in a cooling pool for spent fuel rods was dangerously low. Wait a minute! “Spent fuel rods” – these are code words for nuclear wastes. What are nuclear wastes doing next to nuclear reactors? So I did some research and here is what I found.  

A New York Times article by Keith Bradsher and Hiroko Tabuchi on March 17 headlined: Greater Danger Lies in Spent Fuel Than in Reactors. The article opens with “Years of procrastination in deciding on long-term disposal of highly radioactive fuel rods from nuclear reactors are now coming back to haunt Japanese authorities as they try to control fires and explosions at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.” Tokyo Electric Power said that a total of 11,125 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site. That is about four times as much radioactive material as in the reactor cores combined. The most disturbing fact for me is that these cooling pools were supposed to be temporary.

So just how dangerous are these spent fuel rods? Spent fuel rods contain fission products that emit beta and gamma radiation, and actinides that emit alpha particles, such as uranium-234, neptunium-237, plutonium-238 and americium-241. Uranium-234 has a half-life of 346,000 years!  Neptunium-236 has a half-life of 154,000 years.  In plain language, this means that these spent fuel rods will be emitting dangerous radiation for over 150,000+ years! 

How shortsighted are we to keep something that dangerous for that long in a temporary storage pool of water?  The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said this on its website:

There are two acceptable storage methods for spent fuel after it is removed from the reactor core:

• Spent Fuel Pools - Currently, most spent nuclear fuel is safely stored in specially designed pools at individual reactor sites around the country.
• Dry Cask Storage - If pool capacity is reached, licensees may move toward use of above-ground dry storage casks.

For 150,000+ years!  No container or cooling system can last that long. This nature-induced human-made disaster in Japan exposes the short-termism that has been reigning in our time. Are the short-term gains so great that we don’t need to think about the wellbeing of the next 30,000 generations?  And what happened to the money that was made by these private nuclear power companies in the last 40 years? (The Fukushima Daiichi power plant had been in operation since 1970.)  Shouldn’t they have invested some of the billions of dollars back into solving this long-term problem since they had created it and benefited financially from it?  In a 40-year time period, shouldn’t we have found a safe way to recycle the nuclear waste by now?  And if they had tried, and the solution was still to put them in pools of water, then should we have even started the process in the first place?

A sustainist will never start to draw a plan to build a nuclear power plant until he/she has solved the problem of re-cycling the waste – because a sustainist takes a long-term view of the future and not just interests in immediate gains.     

Stewart Brand, author of The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, wrote,

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.  The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distraction of personal multitasking.” 

He proposed a “large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes.  It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.”  By building the slowest computer in the world, Brand wants to challenge us to make “long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.” He also wants to create a "Ten-Thousand Year Library," to preserve enormous amounts of knowledge from history and other long-perspective disciplines.

“Sustainism (re-)connects the present to history and the future to the present. It’s temporal perspective incorporates future generations . . .”  (Quote from Sustainism Is the New Modernism by Michiel Schwarz and Joost Elffers.)

This perspective of time is not new. Take a look at this text from the Hebrew Bible:

A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:4)

This psalm was attributed to Moses. If this is true, this text is about 3,500 years old. This poem/song/prayer has been recited/sung regularly in the Jewish community for thousands of years. About 1,500 years later, another text in the Christian bible said this:

But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. (2 Peter 3:8)

In Judeo-Christian tradition, God’s “now” includes at least 1,000 years in the past and 1,000 years in the future. A sustainable community teaches its people to practice this Ancient-Future-Now spirituality. It is a discipline of learning from the past, reaping the wisdom, knowledge, and gifts of the successes and failures of past generations and at the same time, imagining the wellbeing of future generations as we act in the presence. How can this Ancient-Future-Now impact our daily action and decision? How can we teach this as a spiritual discipline for our community today?

Here is a sustainist leadership skill that practices the Ancient-Future-Now spirituality:

Before arriving at a decision,

• First, invite people in the community to research using our global network to discover failures and successes in the past in addressing the issue at hand. 

• Second, engage them in a time of analysis of these discoveries putting them in the present context to reach a number of options to be considered.

• Third, invite them to imagine how each option may impact the wellbeing of future generations. Based on these explorations of the past and future, decide what is the best course of action.

Eric H. F. Law
Kaleidoscope Institute
www.kscopeinstitute.org