Time and Language

As children, many of us were encouraged to persevere and be somehow comforted by the strange adage that “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never harm me.” Not exactly. Language does matter.

Power generated from the sun streaming down on the earth today is what we have come to call solar power. But what we forget at our peril is the fossil part of fossil fuels. Oil, gas and coal are also forms of solar power; the sun just created them a very long time ago.

When I mentioned this last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival to Marvin Odum, President of Shell Oil, he seemed bemused.

• Coal was formed some 300 – 400 million years ago as giant ferns and other plants died and were buried and then baked in swamps.
• Also fossilized remains from hundreds of millions of years ago--likely of plankton, diatoms and other microscopic sea organisms--oil too begins with the capacity of these organisms to convert solar rays into energy.
• And according to the Natural Gas Supply Association, “natural gas is a fossil fuel. Like oil and coal, this means that it is, essentially, the remains of plants and animals and microorganisms that lived millions and millions of years ago.”

As we go about the business of quickly releasing the carbon dioxide and methane that mother nature took hundreds of millions of years to carefully sequester, we would do well to remember that time, like geology, is a very powerful force. How we come to understand time and its many meanings has huge impact on how we see the world and the challenges we face. (And more on that in upcoming dispatches.)

For example, the Co-Founder of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, recast the seeming universality and permanence of today’s social media technologies at a fascinating session with Sherry Turkle (Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self) last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. His calm observation that the web is about 8,000 days old reframed the entire discussion.

What seems fixed today, is sure to change tomorrow. Unless of course we are talking about rocks or the deep underlying natural processes that support life on planet earth.