highlights from the clock of the long now

The main problems might be stated, How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? How do we make the taking of long-term responsibility inevitable?
For the purposes of this book it is strictly notional, a Clock of the mind, an instrument for thinking about time in a different way.
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 distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where “the long term” is measured at least in centuries.
The overall intent is exploratory rather than convergent. These are early days. Thinking in ten-thousand-year terms is new to us. We have a long way to go to comprehend even the size of the subject of very long-term responsibility.
The number of human beings now alive is around six billion. The estimated number of humans who have ever been alive is about one hundred billion.
What do we owe the future humans? Existence, skills, and a not-bad world. Maybe even a better world.
Accepting responsibility for the health of the whole planet, we are gradually realizing, also means responsibility for the whole future.
It didn’t start as a law, it started as a prediction. In retrospect it turned out to be the most accurate and consequential prediction in the history of technology, and it exposed the structure of technological hyperacceleration in the late twentieth century.
thirty-seven doublings, about a 137 billionfold increase of power in fifty-six years.
According to a rule of thumb among engineers, any tenfold quantitative change is a qualitative change, a fundamentally new situation rather than a simple extrapolation.
The proliferation of personal computers and the digitizing of communications via the Internet set off what came to be called Metcalfe’s Law, named after Xerox engineer Bob Metcalfe. It states that the power of a network grows as the square of the number of users (people or devices) on the net.
The diagram shows that the costs of a network system are linear, whereas the growing value of the net is exponential, and that therefore the value will surpass the costs at the “critical mass crossover” and thereafter ascend to glory.
Now that we have progress so rapid that it can be observed from year to year, no one calls it progress. People call it change, and rather than yearn for it, they brace themselves against its force.
Technology is treated as something that pushes us around rather than something we create.
Later doublings in an exponential sequence, we come to realize, are absolutely ferocious. The changes no longer feel quantitative or qualitative but cataclysmic; each new doubling is a new world.
I remember when skydiving—actually “flying” during freefall—that a couple minutes in the sky spanned a mental day of adventure.
I was having a great time, but I kept feeling there was a conceptual poverty of a particular kind in the society I moved within. Exactly what this was became clear to me one day when I was invited over to the very glamorous loft of a celebrity—a $2 million design job located in a rough part of town. We climbed over the bums on the doorstep, having bumped our way down the dreadful streets in a crappy taxi, and walked into this vision of total decadent luxury. During dinner I asked the hostess, “Do you like living here?” “Oh sure,” she replied, “this is the loveliest place I’ve ever lived.” I realized that the “here” she lived in stopped at her front door. This was a very strange thought to me. My “here” includes the neighborhood at least. After that, I noticed that young arty New Yorkers were just as local in their sense of “now.” “Now” meant “this week.” Everyone had just got there, and was just going somewhere else. No one had any investment in any kind of future except their own, conceived in the narrowest terms. I wrote in my notebook that December, “More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.” I guess part of the reason the idea attracted me is that it offered a justification for the type of music I was starting to make at the time—a music which was sort of suspended in an eternal present tense.”
In a 1978 paper Boulding proposed a simple solution: expand our idea of the present to two hundred years—a hundred years forward, a hundred years back.
Ten thousand years is not all that long. It is only four hundred generations—counting a new generation every twenty-five years, four to a century, for a hundred centuries.
Those original farmers ten millennia ago were the first systemic futurists. They mastered the six-month lag between sowing and reaping, and they remembered enough crop experience and matched it with enough astronomy to be able to use the sky as an accurate signal of when to plant. Such tricks confer advantage. Agriculture-based civilizations replaced hunter-gatherers and in time were able to prevail over even the fiercest marauders.
Returning comets will let us know whether civilization is developing more continuity of knowledge or less.
The trick is learning how to treat the last ten thousand years as if it were last week, and the next ten thousand as if it were next week. Such tricks confer advantage.
All civilizations suffer shocks, yet only those that absorb the shocks survive.
In recent years a few scientists (such as R. V. O’Neill and C. S. Holling) have been probing a similar issue in ecological systems: How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they were malleable. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity. The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with the way the differently paced parts affect each other. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.
The mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson makes a related observation about human society: The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.
Considered operationally rather than in terms of loyalty, I propose six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. From fast to slow the levels are: • Fashion/art • Commerce • Infrastructure • Governance • Culture • Nature
Note that as people get older, their interests tend to migrate to the slower parts of the continuum.
Even New York City, the most demolition-driven metropolis in America, began to preserve its downtown.
When we disturb nature at its own scale—as with our “extinction engine” and greenhouse gases of recent times—we risk triggering apocalyptic forces. Like it or not, we now have to comprehend and engage the still Longer Now of nature.
Mechanical clocks were first invented for monasteries in the late thirteenth century and only later ordered the life of towns. The miniature clock strapped to your wrist is the direct descendent of European monastic practice. It was the monks who taught us to keep time.
1. We will describe what we currently hope to be the experience of the full-size Clock/Library complex. You exit your vehicle in a parking area at the base of a mountain somewhere in the high desert of the Southwest United States. Looking up, you see a flight of shallow steps, each step carved from a layer of rock representing approximately 10,000 years of geologic time. After climbing one hundred of these steps, or one million years into the future, you are somewhat awed and belittled by the greatness of geologic time. You arrive at a flat knoll where you see a cave ahead. Through the opening of the cave you see some large but slow movement. You proceed and gradually make out a giant pendulum swinging back and forth deep within the cave. Once you reach the center you realize that you are actually within the clock mechanism itself and you are aware of the pendulum beating out its 10-second period. You proceed up a spiral staircase that will take you through the relatively low ceiling and up into the first layer of clock mechanics. On this layer you see the fastest of the mechanical calculation devices, which ticks once per day. As you go up flight after flight you see each progressive mechanism with its relatively slower tick, the last being the precession of the equinoxes, a 25,784-year cycle. The next few layers are the abstraction layers that adjust solar time to actual time and the delay for the pendulum-impulsing mechanism. When you reach the top of the stairs you are in a huge room several stories tall. It is dimly lit from a slot cut through the living rock of the mountain on the southern face. You make out two giant helices, one descending either wall, each being rotated by a falling weight that must weigh several tons. Then you are surprised by an immediate brightness in the room. It is coming from the sun that has just become directly in line with the slit on the wall. It is reflecting off a hemispherical mirror lighting up the whole room and heating up a sphere in the center of a great dial. The heating of this sphere actuates a synchronization mechanism which automatically adjusts the time of the clock to local noon. You are able to make out the dial around this sphere, now showing you the year in the cryptic method of keeping time when this clock was built. It reads the year 11,567. You then look at the rings in from this to find images you recognize of the Sun and Moon in their current phases, as well as a diagram of the current night sky. From these you are able to work backward the actual time to your newer and more familiar time scale. But you are struck that the people of this ancient time had the foresight to think this far into their future and create this place. At this point you wander through the rest of the facility to find a library and people accessing and preserving the data stored there. Akin to the truly ancient library of Alexandria, there is a constant forward migration of the data to increasingly better and denser…
The ambition and folly of the Clock/Library is to reframe human endeavor, and to do so not with a thesis but with a thing. All this thing can do is give permission to think long term. If it succeeds in that, the rest may follow.
The main characteristic of the Clock is its linearity. It treats one year absolutely like another, oblivious of Moore’s Law accelerations, national fates, wars, dark ages, or climate changes. In its company there is nothing special about now. While we discount on a sliding scale both the future and the past, the Clock does neither. Far future and near future are the same; distant past and recent past have equal value. In times of turbulence the Clock emanates calm. In calm times it reminds us that no equilibrium is stable for long.
Clock/Library aims for the mythic depth to become, as Brian Eno puts it, “one of those system-level ideas which sets in motion all sorts of behavior without ever having to be referred to directly again. This is what dominant myths do: they make some sorts of behavior ring with recognition and familiarity and value and a sense of goodness, and thus lay deep templates for social cohesion about what would otherwise be very hard-to-discuss topics.”
Another Eno idea revolves around a sound environment that may encourage visitors to contribute silence: Quiet music stops people talking. It makes people aware that they may be intruding on someone else’s experience if they talk loudly. It slows them down, makes them realize they’re having an experience which exists in time, has duration, and that therefore they might want to stop shuffling around and sit still for a bit to wait for the experience to unfold.
The historian Daniel Boorstin reports that the Inner Shrine at Ise was first built in 4 B.C.E., the Outer Shrine in 478 C.E. Every twenty years for well over a thousand years the all-wood shrine has been totally reconstructed—a perfect replica built next to the previous building.
Big Ben, the world’s largest accurate clock, is a prime example of “sublime” technology: an engineering artifact that inspires public awe and fetishistic fascination. Other sublime works are the Eiffel Tower, Hoover Dam, Golden Gate Bridge, and Saturn 5 rocket that took men to the Moon.
You can stand it bare-eared, even revel in it. It shakes you physically, like the roar from a space-rocket launch. You are at the core sound of Britain and its abiding myth.
Accuracy exact to the second was thought to be impossible in a turret (tower) clock in the early 1800s, when the “gifted amateur” horologist Denison designed Big Ben’s clockwork. It would have to drive eight huge hands on four faces out in the wind and ice without any pressure feeding back to the mechanism. To make the energy flow only one way he devised Grimthorpe’s double three-legged gravity escapement (Denison was later Lord Grimthorpe). The best innovation of its kind in centuries, it became the standard escapement for pendulum clocks, including grandfather clocks. No patents. Denison never did work for money.
The best book about Big Ben was written in the mid 1980s by the resident engineer, John Darwin. He remarks in The Triumphs of Big Ben that the repairs he oversaw were intended to give the clock two centuries of reliable service before the next major overhaul. How different a future-oriented mechanism is from a mere monument. How much more alive.
In the event of prolonged cloudiness from volcanic eruptions, nuclear winters, or large meteor impacts, the Clock’s pendulum could keep close-enough time for a few years until the Sun came out again.
“From the very beginning clocks were simulacra. The first clocks were models of the heavens—Sun and Moon rotating overhead. Later clockmakers modeled a universe of seasons and time and birth and death, displayed as marching jacks and crowing cocks. Only later, in the minimalist modern period, were clocks abstracted into the naked passage of seconds and minutes.”
Contrast this with the heroic effort that an IWC “Da Vinci” mechanical wristwatch has to make to display centuries accurately. The gear train requires a reduction ratio of 6,315,840,000 to 1. After 25.245 billion balance spring oscillations the century display advances by one on the watch face.
Journalists have noted the irony—or poetry—of Hillis moving directly from designing and building the world’s fastest supercomputers to designing and building the world’s slowest computer.
I gained a somewhat new perspective on designing for 10,000 years last night in a conversation with Rob Ritchey, a professor at Berkeley. Prof. Ritchey was referred to us by the folks at Amorphous Technologies International (metallic glass, Liquid Metal Golf) as a leading researcher in materials science, specifically in fatigue. The spin that Ritchey had was that there has not been enough long-time materials testing on metals to know how much our materials will wear, corrode, or creep. Interestingly, the longest-term data on materials’ properties just came out of Japan a year or two ago and foretells—stretching—only 100 million cycles, where we’re looking for on the order of 100 billion cycles. Therefore, using a material that is known to just plain not change state and design completely around that is the way to go. His suggestions were silicon and silicon carbide. I expressed my reservations as to the brittleness of these materials and he said yes, of course they’re brittle, but we’ll know whether a Si part works for 10,000 years because it will catastrophically fail immediately if it doesn’t work. If it doesn’t fail on you immediately, well then there you are!
So who burned the Library of Alexandria? War did three times, inadvertently. Religious bigotry did twice, on purpose. We are right to grieve. Only one in ten of the major Greek classics survived. Nothing like Alexandria’s library was seen again for a thousand years.
Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purity can make real the wondrous new vision.
The American Revolution of 1776, by contrast, was highly conservative. Its instigators studied Roman, Venetian, and even Iroquois history for precedents. There was little of the brutal rhetoric of making a total break with the past. As a result, all the leaders who started the revolution lived to see it through to completion, and its innovations in governance aged relatively well. The Americans severed the political bonds with the Old World but not the cultural bonds. They burned their bridges, not their libraries.
How do we keep from being crushed by the total past, instantly accessible on the Net?
People complain about overwhelming masses of information on the Web, but one of its inventors, Tim Berners-Lee, comments, “To be overloaded by the existence of so much on the Web is like being overloaded by the mass of a beautiful countryside. You don’t have to visit it, but it’s nice to know it’s there. Especially the variety and freedom.”
If you write something this week with Word in Windows 98 on a Dell computer, what are the chances of anybody being able to read it in 2008? The same doubt hangs over the big iron—the mainframes and minicomputers that process the digits that run and record our world.
Behind every hot new working computer is a trail of bodies—of extinct computers, extinct storage media, extinct applications, extinct files.
Here’s the real fear. Thanks to proliferating optical-fiber land lines worldwide and the arrival of low-Earth-orbit data satellite systems such as Teledesic, we are in the process of building one vast global computer. (“The network is the computer,” proclaims Sun Microsystems.) This world computer could easily become the Legacy System from Hell that holds civilization hostage: The system doesn’t really work, it can’t be fixed, no one understands it, no one is in charge of it, it can’t be lived without, and it gets worse every year.
today’s bleeding-edge technology is tomorrow’s broken legacy system.
Pure information can have astonishing longevity. In 1090 C.E. the Chinese genius Su Sung built a monumental water-driven mechanical clock for his emperor. It was dazzling, two centuries ahead of anything like it in Europe. Yet the succeeding emperor discredited it, vandals made off with the bronze parts, and the clock and all its ingenious devices were utterly forgotten. In the nineteenth century an illustrated manuscript, lost since 1172, turned up: “New Design for a Mechanized Armillary Sphere and Celestial Globe,” by Su Sung. The description is so complete that working replicas of the original clock have been built. The material clock lasted only a decade; the informational clock, indefinitely.
In 1998 a major (but unheralded) milestone occurred: Available digital data storage capacity surpassed the total of information in the world.
Digital storage is easy; digital preservation is hard. Preservation means keeping the stored information catalogued, accessible, and usable on current media, which requires constant effort and expense.
Furthermore, though contemporary information has economic value and pays its way, there is no business case for archives, so the creators or original collectors of digital information rarely have the incentive—or skills or continuity—to preserve their material. It’s a task for long-lived nonprofit organizations such as libraries, universities, and government agencies, who may or may not have the mandate and funding to do the job.
Exercise is the best preserver. Jaron Lanier notes that documents such as the Torah, the Koran, and the I Ching are impressively persistent because every age copies, analyzes, critiques, and uses them.
Digital industries must shift from being the main source of society’s ever-shortening attention span to becoming a reliable guarantor of long-term perspective.
Building real value into a 10,000-Year Library could be an intellectual adventure as challenging as space travel.
The fantasy continues: What might be the best time-spanning, future-engaging categories to collect? History, obviously, and historiography: the history of the idea of history. Archaeology and paleontology, for the long human perspective. Environmental books, for their reach into the future. Science fiction, for the same reason, organized by date rather than author, so the browser could scan the progress of the zeitgeist about the future. (The world’s best in science fiction is the Eaton Collection of some four hundred thousand volumes at the University of California Riverside Library.) Likewise, nonfiction books about the future. Science and technology books, because their subject has become a major driver of history and is likely to remain so. Demographic and epidemiological texts, for trend analysis. And sundry Long Now special interests: texts on libraries, clocks, and durable institutions. A library such as this, in token form, produced the book you are now reading.
Time capsules, by the way, are a splendid and common future-oriented practice—hundreds of thousands have been buried—yet some 70 percent are completely lost track of almost immediately.
The Library should specialize in trends too slow to notice but that gradually dominate everything as they accumulate: these are the genuine megatrends in economics, demographics, and environmental data. Our civilization is skilled at focusing on content, Esther Dyson points out, but we have not developed good peripheral vision for gradual shifts in context.
Civilization now is global. It is ever more tightly linked and ever more leveraged out over the abyss on an elaborate superstructure of highly sophisticated technology, every part of which depends on the success of every other part. All this may make it more robust against catastrophe, or more frail, we don’t know yet. What we do know is that a global collapse cannot count on some other civilization coming to the rescue, since by then there will be no other. It is strange to contemplate, except in light of thousands of years and the demise of twenty-some previous civilizations.
The problem everyone has is that you never know what will be treasured later. When we look at old magazines, the ads are far more fascinating and informative than the articles.
One of the great instruments of civilization is the idea of the canon: the select set of items deemed to represent the best of a genre and the main line of progress and transmission from generation to generation in that genre.
One canon I would like to see established is that of the great textbooks. Just knowing the current list—The Cell in microbiology, The Art of Computer Programming, Renfrew’s Archaeology—would enable anyone to pursue top-level education on their own. All the best textbooks in combination would nearly add up to Lovelock’s primer of civilization.
The late, great futurist Kahn used to ponder the question of free will with his audiences. “It’s a fundamental question,” he would say. “Do we have free will, or is everything determined? I don’t have an answer I’m sure of, but I am convinced that people behave better when they think they have free will. They take responsibility more and they think about their choices more. So I believe in free will,” said Herman Kahn.
If I gave this talk anywhere in Europe—Sweden, for example—I would be attacked viciously for my ignorance, naiveté, and callow irresponsibility. I suppose I could defend myself with Arthur Herman’s wonderful book, The Idea of Decline in Western History. He says that in Europe high-minded cultural pessimism began with the failure of the French Revolution and culminated in Nazi Germany. It was tremendously destructive. It still is.
Paul Saffo says that in the short term the pessimists are right, and in the long term the optimists are right.
The distinguishing trait of futurismists is that they have an agenda: something they want to have happen or something they want to prevent from happening in the future, often based on a particular ideology, political bent, theory of history, or special interest.
Still, the most important developments in the future, says Freeman Dyson, keep being missed by both the forecasters and the storytellers: “Economic forecasting misses the real future because it has too short a range; fiction misses the future because it has too little imagination.”
One surprising by-product of the scenario-planning process is increased responsibility. Corporations discover the need to take care of their industry as a whole, or to protect the natural environment, or to promote civil liberties. This comes not from virtue but solely from the ability to engage longer periods of time.
The bodies of most animals are configured toward the future, our faces leading the way in the direction of travel.
To produce the benefits of more cooperation in the world, Axelrod proves, all you need to do is lengthen the shadow of the future—that is, ensure more durable relationships. Thus marriage is common to every society, because trusting partners have an advantage over lone wolves.
It is no accident that among the finest leaders of the 20th century is a professional historian. Describing Winston Churchill, Isaiah Berlin wrote, “the single, central, organizing principle of his moral and intellectual universe is a historical imagination so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the present and the whole of the future in a framework of a rich and multicolored past.” Reading history, writing history, and creating history were all one enterprise for Churchill.
When a design problem resists solution, reframe the problem in such a way that it invites solution.
What with accelerating technology and the short-horizon perspective that goes with burgeoning market economies (next quarter) and the spread of democracy (next election), we have a situation where steady but gradual environmental degradation escapes our notice. The slow, inexorable pace of ecological and climatic cycles and lag times bear no relation to the hasty cycles and lag times of human attention, decision, and action. We can’t slow down all of human behavior, and shouldn’t, but we might slow down parts.
In fact, healthy self-governing commons systems are frequent in the world and in history, as examined in Elinor Ostrum’s Governing the Commons. The commons she dissects include communally held mountain meadows and forests in Switzerland, irrigation cooperatives in Japan and Spain, and jointly managed fisheries in Turkey, Sri Lanka, and Nova Scotia. The successful ones are maintained (and maintainable) neither by the state nor the market but by a local set of community feedbacks adroitly tuned to ensure the system’s long-term health and prosperity. Ostrum detects eight design principles that keep a wide variety of commons self-balancing. They are: clear boundaries; locally appropriate rules; collective agreement; monitoring; graduated sanctions; conflict-resolution mechanisms; rights to organize; nested enterprises.
The benefits of very long-term scientific studies are so obvious it is hard to understand why they are so rare.
A nine-year study in Africa concluded that burning new woody growth in open grassland could not prevent the woods from taking over. A forty-year study of the same subject proved the opposite, that annual burning was an ideal way to keep the grasslands open. It takes more than a decade of fires to keep woody rootstocks from resprouting, that’s all.
So in light of their great accumulative value, why are long-term scientific studies so rare? Well, (1) they’re not about proving or disproving hypotheses, the coin of the scientific realm; (2) they don’t generate quick papers, the coin of a scientific career; (3) they bear no relation to scientific fashion, where the excitement is; (4) they’re not subject to money-making patent or copyright; (5) the few that exist usually die when their primary researcher dies; (6) they’re extremely difficult to maintain funding for; and (7) ever-growing archives are an expensive hassle to service and keep accessible (“We can’t stop the future to take care of the past!”).
At Copan, a site with some of the most impressive inscribed stone slabs, there was one with a long count date of more than four billion years. The Maya clearly knew how to celebrate the dance of deep time.
The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.
In one century elders have gone from being rare and honored to common and powerful.
If long life leads to greater responsibility, because you hang around long enough to suffer the consequences of your shortsighted actions, then immortality logically leads to infinite responsibility.
Earthquakes, war, murder, the burning of libraries . . . bad things happen fast. Reforestation, the growth of a child, the maturing of an adult, building a library . . . good things happen slow.
There are two ways to make systems fault-tolerant: One is to make them small, so that correction is local and quick; the other is to make them slow, so that correction has time to permeate the system. When you proceed too rapidly with something mistakes cascade, whereas when you proceed slowly the mistakes instruct.
Humanity’s heroic goals generally have been sought through quick, spectacular action (“We will land a man on the Moon in this decade”) instead of a sustained accumulation of smaller, distributed efforts that might have overwhelming effect over time. The kinds of goals that can be reached quickly are rather limited, and work on them displaces attention and effort that might be spent on worthier, longer-term goals.
“There are problems that are impossible if you think about them in two-years terms—which everyone does—but they’re easy if you think in fifty-year terms.”
The learning theorist Seymour Papert tells of a group of friends eating lobsters at a Boston fish house. The question came up, “Can anyone eat lobster without making a mess?” Papert reports, “A brain surgeon at the table did it. It took him two hours—a completely eaten lobster with a perfect absence of mess. He took the time appropriate to the job, which he knew about. It wasn’t his skill. It was his patience.” Two hours was the difference between impossible and easy. For what tasks would two hundred years make that kind of difference?
Finite games, Carse points out, require fixed rules so that the winner and loser are determined fairly, but infinite games thrive on occasional changes in the rules—agreed to by the players—so that the game constantly improves. Finite players seek to control the future; infinite players arrange things so the future keeps providing surprises.
Another island, Visingsö, in the Swedish lake Vättern, has a gorgeous mature oak forest whose origin came to light in 01980 when the Swedish Navy received a letter from the Forestry Department reporting that the requested ship lumber was now ready. It turned out that in 01829 the Swedish Parliament, recognizing that it takes one hundred fifty years for oaks to mature and anticipating that there would be a shortage of timbers for its navy in the 01990s, ordered twenty thousand trees to be planted and protected for the navy.
Maturity is largely a combination of hard-earned savvy, the habit of thinking ahead, and the patience to see long-term projects through.