Why it's helpful to think in ecological time

What a 400-year-old shark can teach us about sustainable planning

Dec 03, 2024

A mindful sceptic often questions narratives. But have we ever questioned our perception of time? Are we making decisions based on a myopic view of the world, blind to the long-term consequences of our actions?

Imagine for a moment that you could witness the entire lifespan of Earth in a single day. You'd see continents collide, oceans form, and life emerge in the blink of an eye. On this cosmic day, human civilisation would appear at the last second before midnight, a few milliseconds before the clock chimes.

In this Mindful Sceptic issue, we invite you to expand your perception of time beyond the confines of human experience. We explore how understanding ecological timescales can revolutionise our approach to environmental stewardship.

Aligning our thinking with nature's timescales could be the key to solving our most pressing environmental challenges. It's time to think beyond our lifetimes and embrace the wisdom of ecological time.

The Diverse Timescales of Life on Earth

An adult mayfly has one task: to mate. They do not feed and have only vestigial (unusable) mouthparts, while their digestive systems are filled with air. They do not live very long. Adult female Dolania americana has the shortest adult lifespan of any mayfly—less than five minutes.

Many plant species are annuals that complete their life cycle, from germination to seed production, within one growing season and then die. For some species, this might take only a few months.

The average domestic dog has a modest lifetime of 10 to 13 years, depending on the breed. This is long enough to see the human kids through school, but only just.

Elephants live as long as people. Adult females even go through menopause, presumably to prolong their lives and give their offspring the benefit of their memory of where the water was during the last drought.

Red sea urchins found in the shallow water of the Pacific Ocean along the West Coast of North America are known to live for more than 200 years. So do Bowhead whales that live in the cold Arctic and sub-Arctic seas—one whale was even found with fragments of a harpoon dating back to the 1800s in its blubber.

The Greenland Shark can reach the age of 200, too, although one individual was found to be 400 years old, making it the oldest vertebrate in the world. They live so long because they grow very slowly in cold water and only reach maturity at about 100 years old. Imagine human adolescence lasting that long.

Giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, occurs naturally only in groves on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. They are the most massive individual trees in the world, growing to an average height of 50–85 m (164–279 ft). Based on dendrochronology—the analysis of tree rings—the oldest known giant sequoia is 3,200–3,266 years old, making sequoias among the oldest living organisms on Earth.

Ecological time is long and short

All these lifetimes, from a few minutes to centuries, span ecological time.

Periods long enough for an organism's generation to emerge and for recognisable changes to the environment to occur. However, because whole groups of organisms, notably trees, live longer than human perception of time, ecological time is longer than our typical frame of reference.

Ecological time is longer than turnover in human food production systems, business decisions, and political cycles. Decisions on almost everything that affects our everyday lives happen in real time, not ecological time.

This disjunct is one reason we have trouble understanding trends that become problems, from resource use and soil degradation to biodiversity loss.

But there is a contradiction here, too.

Years to centuries of ecological time sound like a wide range of time from a human perspective. Still, all ecological time is infinitesimal relative to the age of the solar system, the age of the Earth, and the duration of life on Earth.

In evolutionary time that spans thousands to millions of years, the average mammal species will exist for around one million years. In this timeframe, the life of any one organism is infinitesimally small; ecology happens in the immediate.

Words that describe ecological time through a geological lens are rapid, dynamic, fast, short, and local. They are the things that happen when organisms interact with each other and with the environment around them.

Ecology is quick compared to evolution.

A Thousand-Year Perspective

The average farmer in the West has lived for over 60 years, and many are still working the land well into their dotage. The farm was likely passed down through a succession with as much drama as the show of the same name. Many of these family farms would feel like heirlooms, old and part of the furniture.

But what about the farm's lifetime?

It has outlived several owners, and the incumbent has no reason to worry that it will persist long after he has passed on. Only the longevity question is important. How long would we expect a farm to exist as a productive parcel of land?

Realistically, it should be centuries. Some farms in Europe have produced food for this length of time. They change their shape, size, and configuration throughout their life. The type and frequency of inputs to maintain the soil change too, as does the disturbance from the plough and the livestock. The kind of soil will make a difference, as will the weather.

But for the sake of discussion, we can anticipate a thousand years of crop or livestock production before a farm dies.

old wooden farm building — Farm buildings like this one might last 100 years or 10 in the case of my termite-infested garden shed, which I use as an office and can quickly be rebuilt, but will the soil last 1,000 years?

Farm lifetime in Australia

In Australia, most rural landholdings are less than 200 years old. The majority are around a hundred years old, given that it took quite a while before the colonists managed to push their way into the dryer, more remote parts of the continent.

In our thousand-year timeframe, farms in Australia are in their early adolescence.

They've gone through a reasonably raucous youth playing around with massive sheep and cattle production and experimenting with rabbits and other invasives. And they're coming to the end of that party period with a hefty hangover.

Many farms look tired and worn.

They've been on the wrong end of too many late nights. Depending on who you ask, two-thirds of agricultural land in Australia is depleted in carbon, has lost nutrients and structure or is degraded from erosion, salinity, acidity and contamination. If you're expected to live a thousand years, it's a challenge when you are knackered before you get to university.

If they are to survive intact for another nine hundred years or more, a zen moment, an awareness-raising and well-being exercise, is required to bring them mindfulness.

Before that, they need a holiday, some rest, and rehabilitation, which would last at least a decade in human time. Because there is some heavy work ahead.

combine harvesters harvesting wheat — caption...

Australia is one of the world's largest wheat exporters, with an annual production of 20-30 million tonnes and a significant beef producer, with a yearly output usually around 2.5 million tonnes of beef and veal.

The dairy industry produces about 9-10 billion litres of milk annually.

Annual sugar production is typically around 4-5 million tonnes.

The gross value of agricultural, fisheries and forestry production has increased by 51% in the past 20 years in real terms (adjusted for consumer price inflation) to $94.3 billion in 2022–23, which is 13.6% of goods and services exports and 2.7% of GDP.

Approximately 76,000 agricultural businesses (or 56% of the total) reported applying fertiliser to their holdings across 41.8 million hectares to keep this production going. Although Australia is a minor player in the global market, fertiliser consumption was 1 million tonnes of nitrogen, 0.4 million tonnes of phosphorus, and 0.2 million tonnes of potassium, just over 1% of global consumption.

Farms that, presumably, we would like to persist for many hundreds of years are being asked to work very hard.

In a sporting analogy, it's like sending your teenage centre forward to play every minute of every game for this and every season to come. He won’t make it.

Productive for a thousand years

Just thinking of lifetimes helps to understand what is needed to sustain the land for long-term production. Imagine thinking of the farm not as something owned and passed down to the children but as something that has to be intact for dozens of human generations.

In a hundred human lifetimes, that farm will experience many ups and downs and changes in context. The current owners, who are in possession of a partying adolescent addicted to fossil fuel inputs, face an interesting moral conundrum.

Do the farmers realise that they're looking after an adolescent as they pass into their dotage?

We suspect not.

Landholders know that the farm will be there after they die. But perhaps their priority is the state they leave it in for their own offspring—their sons and daughters, whom they hope will come back from the cities and take over the family legacy.

three generations of subsistence farmers — There are at least 570 million farms in the world, and most of them are passed down to the next generation.

So, who should think about a farm as having a long, productive life?

The farmer has a role. Whether owner, tenant, or custodian, the decisions the farmer makes on a day-to-day basis affect the lifestyle and longevity of the farm.

The farmer is the one present and investing time and money to manage the land for his livelihood, family, and legacy.

There is a role for government. Public policy should be able to last longer than the lifetime of the ownership cycle. The challenge, of course, is that governments have a short lifetime—almost mayfly length. Politicians struggle to look beyond the next election cycle.

This is why the planning departments are hived off into a little silo on their own. This helps protect them from the temptation that politicians have to leverage their decisions for their short-term advantage. Not that that doesn't happen, but you can see the problem.

Governments find it challenging to make decisions regarding the long lifetime of landholding. So much so that they barely even recognise such a timeframe; instead, they rely on tenure laws and let landholders and leaseholders get on with it.

There is a role for scientists. Science is supposed to be objective and has the luxury of a long view, at least for those scientists trying to understand nature.

Ecologists are more comfortable with time frames that extend to the lifetime of the oldest organisms in the habitat, but they are human. They can struggle with the thousand-year timeframe equivalent to multiple generations of the longest-lived animals.

What science does have is the ability to abstract. Models, especially scenario analysis, can backcast and forecast in ecological and evolutionary time, which is essential.

Everyone else has a role. We could leave all the thinking for the long game to the farmers and the people who define the social context of farming. However, that would be abdication because every person on earth is a consumer of food.

It is just as important for the people who eat the produce from the millions of farms worldwide to think about the lifetimes of those farms. If we do, our decisions on what we eat will change.

From aging farmers to degraded soils, from fossil fuel dependence to fragile food supply chains, this provocative guide challenges everything you thought you knew about feeding humanity—and offers hope through a radical rethinking of how we grow our food. Find out more about Mindful Sceptics Guide to Farmers

Being a mindful sceptic about ecological time

What a mindful sceptic takes from this weird anecdote about farm lifetime is the need to look long.

The solutions to both meet our current demand for food and well-being and maintain that humanity must have the long view. We need ecological time to pass through our demographic transition and still have natural capital left. The outcomes are beyond the typical time horizon of human decisions.

Modern humans are believed to have evolved around 300,000 years ago and emerged from the African savannas to travel around the world. By about 100,000 years ago, they had become the only bipedal primates to survive on all continents.

So humanity as a species lived its early childhood on the plains of Africa, went on its gap year around the world, and stayed.

Humanity might want its reproductive years to lie ahead, middle age and retirement to look forward to, and to reach the million-year average for a mammal species.

A thousand years for a landholding is not even a blink in the remaining time of Homo sapiens as a species if the average is what we will achieve.

But unlike our psyche, which believes we're above average at everything, humanity is on track for being one of those very short-lived animal species unable to adapt to an environment that has changed because of what we have done.

As individuals, why should we care less?

As long as we leave our house to our children, we have done our bit. Unfortunately, that is actually how we treat the world at the moment, as though our four-score and ten-year human lifetime was all that mattered.

And maybe that's true; maybe in our universe, self is the one thing that matters.

Reflect on your relationship with time

How often do you pause to observe the subtle changes in your environment?

Perhaps you've noticed the gradual shift of seasons, watching trees shed their leaves in autumn and burst into bloom come spring. These annual cycles offer a glimpse into nature's rhythms, but they're just the beginning.

Think about the oldest tree in your neighbourhood. That mighty oak or towering river redgum might have stood witness to decades or even centuries of human history. It has weathered countless storms, adapted to changing climates, and silently observed the ebb and flow of urban development around it. How does your perception of time change when you consider the lifespan of such an enduring organism?

Do you rush through your local park during a lunch break, or do you take the time to notice the intricate ecosystem thriving beneath your feet? The microorganisms in a handful of soil could tell a story spanning millions of years, yet their world exists in a timeframe we can barely comprehend.

That apple you enjoyed might result from decades of careful orchard management, while the soil it grew in tells a tale of geological processes spanning millennia. How might your consumption habits change if you viewed each meal through the lens of ecological time?

The plastic bottle you recycle today might outlive your great-grandchildren. The carbon footprint of a single flight could influence climate patterns for centuries to come. How does this long-term perspective influence your decisions and vision for the future?

In the end

Astrophysicists predict that the sun will follow its lifetime, expand, and absorb the inner planets' orbits. The earth will be consumed by the sun in roughly 7.5 billion years.

Humanity won't be there to see any of that. Not in our wildest dreams could humanity live that long as a species or anything else.

However, exactly how long Homo sapiens persists is dependent on what we do now. Our future is dependent on thinking in lifetimes that are beyond our own.

Look long and prosper.

Key points

Ecological time spans far beyond human perception, ranging from the fleeting lives of mayflies to the millennia-long existence of giant sequoias. This vast spectrum of natural lifespans highlights the importance of considering long-term ecological processes when addressing environmental issues. Understanding ecological time encourages us to think beyond our immediate human timescales and consider the broader impacts of our actions on the planet's ecosystems.

The concept of farm lifetimes, ideally spanning thousands of years, challenges our current approach to agriculture and land management. Many farms, particularly in countries like Australia, are relatively young and showing signs of degradation. This emphasises the need for sustainable farming practices that consider the long-term health and productivity of the land. It calls for a shift in perspective from short-term gains to multi-generational stewardship of agricultural resources.

Multiple stakeholders, including farmers, governments, scientists, and consumers, have crucial roles in adopting a long-term ecological perspective. However, each group faces unique challenges in implementing this approach. Farmers must balance immediate needs with long-term land health, governments struggle with short political cycles, scientists grapple with conceptualising extended timescales, and consumers often focus on immediate gratification. Overcoming these challenges requires a collective effort and a fundamental shift in valuing and managing our natural resources.

Adopting a mindful sceptic’s approach to ecological time can lead to more informed and sustainable decision-making. We can develop a more nuanced understanding of environmental issues by questioning our assumptions about time and nature. This perspective encourages us to consider the long-term consequences of our actions, from individual choices to policy decisions, potentially leading to more effective conservation efforts and sustainable practices. It reminds us that our choices today will have impacts far beyond our lifetimes, emphasising our role as stewards of the planet for future generations.

If you enjoyed thinking beyond human timescales, imagine what other insights await.

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In the next issue

Next week, we tackle a modern paradox—why we trust our smartphones more than the scientists who created them. We'll dive into fascinating new research showing that while most people believe in the importance of science, they're surprisingly sceptical of scientists themselves.

From the peculiarities of peer review to the challenge of cognitive dissonance, we'll explore why trust in science is eroding and what mindful sceptics can do about it.

Prepare for some uncomfortable truths, and perhaps a few chuckles at our collective contradictions.