‘The next few years are probably the most important in our history’, stated Debra Roberts, co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group in 2018, with an urgency that has since only intensified and been lived through by millions of people affected by extreme weather events with fire, floods, hurricanes, or drought.

The ‘large scale geophysical experiment’, recognised as early as the 1950s, which we humans have conjured up as agents of anthropogenic change, has been unfolding across multiple timescales both looking backward into the past and forwards into the future. But who are the agents of that experiment? Who should be included in the ‘we’ of the traces left by humans in the geological record?

We believe that specifying time and place – the when and the where – is essential to engage meaningfully with these questions and seek to counter the political inaction and cultural indifference to the climate emergency pervading many nations and governments worldwide.

Inaction and indifference are, arguably, fueled by the dissonance between the different timescales of the natural systems, the social and built environment, and the human imagination, a dissonance which is hard to reconcile by resorting only to human lifespans.

Becoming literate across multiple interlocking timescales is an exercise in expanding our horizons well beyond the human. This means, for example, considering timelines which are hard to grasp such as the thousands and millions of years of the geological record, and understanding their relevance for our everyday experience.

Similarly, what we may call a new temporal literacy includes the compression and acceleration of socio-technical change which has led to the transformation of the Earth system at rates that are 170 times faster than natural processes. This is exemplified by, among others, the effects of extractive economies and the estimates of net present value prevalent in government planning.

Yet the way we frame these temporalities can be different and sharpened if we focus on the local.

A significant part of the coastline along the Morecambe Bay is predicted to be under water by 2050, which could affect circa 150,000 people.[i] The Bay features a nuclear power station (Heysham), protected Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (Arnside and Silverdale), formerly thriving fishing communities (Fleetwood), and the planned new eco-tourism development of Eden Project Morecambe.

Changes to the Bay coastline are neither new nor will they be the last. The Bay was once under the ocean, its emergence linked to a mountain building event dating back circa 300 million years. Archaeological evidence has shown activity along the coastline by early humans and a range of megafauna during the Later Mesolithic (6,500-5,500 BCE).

More recently, since the opening of the Furness railway in 1846, transport infrastructure has intensified mineral extraction (iron ore) and encouraged the growth of communities in the Cartmel and Furness peninsulas.

As was argued in the Handbook of Social Futures (2022), connecting the multiple timescales, the manifold rhythms of acceleration and contraction, and identifying the challenges when trying to integrate them is at its core ‘an exercise in unthinking the thinkable, in other words, relearning the process of what times and which timescales we should consider when imagining new social futures.’[ii]

Joining the expertise from the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences, the MA programme in Global Environmental Futures based in the Lancaster School of Global Affairs will enable students to interrogate the conditions, controversies and effects of environmental change as is experienced in the first quarter of the 21^st century. What have been the causes, multiple temporalities, and the main drivers of that change? What can we do collectively to steer new directions and shape a more sustaining relationship between people and the environment today and for future generations?

These and related questions seek to frame our challenge in critical, creative and collaborative ways. Join us in Lancaster to develop and chart fitting responses so that the next few years become too the most hopeful, the most equitable, and the most inclusive.

Professor Carlos López-Galviz and Professor Deborah Sutton

[i] See, for example, the Coastal Risk Screening Tool developed by Climate Central, https://coastal.climatecentral.org/, last accessed 4 August 2024.

[ii] Selected further reading: J. Urry, What is the Future? (Polity, 2016); J. Zalasiewicz et al (2017) Scale and diversity of the physical technosphere: A geological perspective, The Anthropocene Review 4 (1), 9-22; M. Berners-Lee, There is No Planet B. A Handbook for the Make or Break Years (Cambridge University Press, 2019); B. Shoshitaishvili (2020) Deep time and compressed time in the Anthropocene: The new timescape and the value of cosmic storytelling, The Anthropocene Review 7 (2), 125-137; D. Farrier, Footprints. In Search of Future Fossils (4^th Estate, 2020); S. Newby, Exploring local arts and culture organisations’ impact on social and environmental regeneration in the Bay and wider areas of the North West coast (MA diss., Lancaster University, 2021); C. López Galviz and E. Spiers (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Social Futures (Routledge, 2022).

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