Tempus fugit

I was reading David Holmgren yet again over this last week. His monumental work is just so impressively  practical. Anyway, one particular thing caught my eye towards the end of the book, a small observation about time.
In the section on principles - he identifies small and slow solutions and then proceeds to discuss these in some detail. I was particularly struck by the observation of the value of persistence and taking a long term perspective. Holmgren observes 'as a middle aged person trying to explain why slow and steady are fundamental values in energy descent, I am relieved that Permaculture one is evidence that I had the same ideas when I was in my early twenties...' I connected well with this line of argument, whether for the same reasons Im not sure, in my case its more likely to be out of innate laziness - why do something twice if it can be done reasonably well once. So it led to consideration of decision making and contemporary society. The adolescent society (Holmgren's words) where people want without consequence seems closely aligned with our consumer model leading to the fast, the flashy, the transient, the throw away and then the endless appetite for the next, the newest, the dominance of the new and the decline in attraction of the old, the permanent and the evolved.
Contemporary public decision making struggles to get beyond a couple of years, parliamentary time frames of a maximum of five years dominates our public services, and correspondingly corrupts the imaginative possibility to think in longer time scales. Holmgren makes a fascinating observation - in 18th century Britain replanting oak trees to provide timber for shipbuilding required a 200 year plan. We still have many oaks around as a result of that strategic plan, and although they didn't find themselves needed because technology changed in the shipbuilding industry the world is a better place for them. Our implicit faith in technology as our only solution, through human ingenuity and brilliance seems to be reducing in its time frame from the cycles of the past to challenges such as Moors law - 18 month cycles of technological change which double processing power of computers and such like. In finding our feet in the new ecological literacy we have to find a way of making sense of the power of time that extends way beyond our own presence. In Incredible Edible a discussion is taking place about asset transfer, the point being to explore ways we might asset transfer resources into the programme on behalf of the town for a much longer time frame than the current short sighted 5 or so years that councils seem to operate within. For example, a child born today has the life expectancy to reach 2010, our intergenrational responsibilities need to be much more interested and engaged with this reality, and in so doing perhaps our perspective on our relative wealth might regain some sense of reasonable perspective against the global barometer.