The addict, the elder, and the time horizon

The problem of the time horizon plagues restoration.

When I was living in San Francisco I met a recovered crack addict. One afternoon, driven by morbid curiosity, I asked him what it was like. He told me, “You can’t think past tomorrow, even on your best day. Some days all you can think about is the next hit—which might be fifteen minutes away.

So what you do is score some crack, get a hotel room, put a rock in the pipe and hit it. Put a rock in the pipe, hit it. Call a hooker, buy some booze, put a rock in the pipe, hit it.

Until one day you wake up and the money’s gone, the rock’s gone, your wife’s gone, your business is gone, everything’s gone. I went into recovery right there, but some of the guys who didn’t are still homeless, crawling around on the sidewalk looking for rocks somebody’s dropped. We called it crack farming.”

In stark contrast to this bleak shortest-possible-term planning, consider the great law of the Iroquois nation, which required that the Council consider the impact of their decisions on seven generations of people to come—around 150 years. You know anybody that’s doing that kind of planning?

Most of us fit somewhere in between these two extremes: the average ‘consumer’ lives for the weekend, their boss is thinking about retirement, traders in exotic derivatives buy and sell on a minute-to-minute basis, politicians can’t see beyond the next election, and some interesting fraction of the population believes we have enough of everything to last forever. Their time horizon is effectively zero, but that’s by choice—a kind of willful blindness to the mounting and unavoidable evidence that no such resource base ever existed.

Coupled with the law of unintended consequences, the problem of the time horizon grows some world-ending teeth. We’re living this sad reality right now. COVID is crushing the economy because our feckless “leaders” refused to look beyond the election. California’s wildfires rage ever larger because 90 years ago somebody thought it was a good idea to suppress every fire, every time. Peak oil, called out as an inevitability all the way back in 1965, has come and gone.

And we’re still burning fossil fuels with climate-changing effects measured in centuries, to harden stream channels that might remain fossilized for decades, using unproven techniques developed in the 1980s that are based on bad science from the 1950s derived from anthropogenic sediments laid down in the 1800s that are only possible because we destroyed indigenous cultures starting back in 1492.

And we’re doing all of this without having the humility to say that the terrible ideas of today are the great ideas of not that long ago. Remember when smoking was good for mothers because it lowered fetal birth weight?

What if we made decisions today that allowed the restorationists of tomorrow to correct our mistakes? Instead of moving thousands of yards of rock, we’d be cutting encroaching conifers to reduce fuel load, while raising water tables and complexifying habitat, and doing all of it without burning fossil fuels that make the problem worse.

Call me crazy, but leaving our descendants MORE choices rather than less just makes sense.