The Geographer: Long-Mindedness

Spring 02024

The magazine of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society

The Geographer

Long-Mindedness

And the Geography of Time

“We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

1788

•A Geologist’s View of Time

•4,000 Weeks and 4.6 Billion Years

•140 Years of RSGS

•Indigenous Perspectives

•The Need for LongTerm Thinking

•The 600-Year-Long Film

•Good Ancestors and Fantastic Forebears

•Deep Time and Datelines

•Around The World in 80 Days

•Royal Visit

• Reader Offer: The Long View

plus news, books, and more…

James Hutton, in a paper presented before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in

The Geographertime

Time is so fundamental to our lives, but is it something we give enough credence to? Some years ago, I read a wonderful book by Robert Levine, called The Geography of Time, which opened my eyes to the way time can be perceived culturally and practically around the world. It remained an ambition to explore it further, but it was only more recently, when I read William MacAskill’s What We Owe The Future, about the philosophy of longtermism, and then equally inspirationally Richard Fisher’s The Long View, that I realised how rich a topic this could be as the theme of our magazine.

Time is simultaneously both actual and perceived, it is both absolute and relative. It shapes our lives and our behaviours, yet it is also a tool. Geology helped define time. Geography can help explain time, and its many forms, but it is also wellequipped to embrace the challenge that different timescales can make to decision making and understanding. In the same way geography can synthesise knowledge and embrace different disciplines, it can also integrate and make sense of the many different perspectives of time. And this is important, because a failure to take account of time in decision making and policy setting can lead to real problems.

With the immediacy of social media and daily journalism, and the ever-decreasing timescales of our political and business cycles, it does feel like our society has developed an increasingly short-term horizon. It is important though that we don’t lose sight of the medium and longer term, and that we underline our collective responsibility to the future, and not just the present. With all this in mind, we set out to explore some of the different ways to perceive time, with the help of a number of leading authors and geographers. We hope you enjoy what they have to say.

Dr Mike Robinson OBE

, Chief Executive, RSGS

RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU

tel: 01738 455050

email: enquiries@rsgs.org www.rsgs.org

Charity registered in Scotland no SC015599

The views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the RSGS.

Cover image: All images from Shutterstock or © Mike Robinson.

Masthead: Ben Tirran, Glen Clova. © Mike Robinson

RSGS: a better way to see the world

New Year Honour

2024 began with a lovely surprise when our Chief Executive, Mike Robinson, was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours List for services to climate change education, in recognition of RSGS’s ongoing work and impact, and a welcome reinforcement of the importance of geography in policy and society in general. Mike and the team at RSGS are delighted to receive this recognition, and the public response has been heart-warming. We have received hundreds of messages of congratulation, including from the First Minister, Education Scotland, Ordnance Survey, Royal Geographical Society, Zero Waste Scotland, Balfour Beatty, civil servants, academics, teachers and business people, as well as several RSGS members, reflecting the diverse network of support that RSGS and geography enjoy. We wish to express our gratitude to all of those who have been in touch.

RSGS Chair Professor John Briggs commented, “I am sure that all members and supporters of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society will be delighted to learn that our Chief Executive, Mike Robinson, was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours List, and would wish to join me in congratulating him. The award reflects the wonderful work which Mike has undertaken over the last few years in driving RSGS forward and in raising the profile of RSGS not only nationally but also internationally. A thoroughly well-deserved recognition for all Mike’s work for the Society.”

Mark Evans, who worked with RSGS through his role at Outward Bound Oman, said, “Every now and then I meet people whose energy and unsung achievements leave me in awe, and inspire me to do more with my own life. One of those people is the incredible Mike Robinson. Fantastic to see Mike being recognised with an OBE. A thoroughly deserved recognition of a life well lived. Anyone who knows Mike will know how much he deserves this OBE.”

Members have widely welcomed the award as a fillip for both RSGS and geography more generally. Here is a small selection of the messages received:

“I am very conscious that the wider perception of the Society and its relevance to the world we live in have been greatly improved in recent years. Members are greatly indebted to you.” “Your tremendous leadership of the RSGS has always been known and I was so delighted that it has now been nationally recognised.”

“There is no professional geographer who has been more active and influential in climate change knowledge and understanding and policy. Well done.” “Not before time.” “Richly deserved by you for all of the work you do across many fora and great recognition of the work by RSGS.”

Fair Maid’s House

We are planning to open the Fair Maid’s House visitor centre in Perth from 12:30pm to 4:00pm every Thursday, Friday and Saturday from Thursday 2nd May until Saturday 28th September. Please come along and visit us – we look forward to welcoming you to the Geographical Heart of Scotland!

Opening Hours 2024 12:30pm to 4:00pm Thursday to Saturday

Professor Jean Malaurie (1922–2024)

On 15th November 2007, RSGS welcomed the distinguished French explorer Professor Jean Malaurie to Edinburgh, where he presented his document film The Last Kings of Thulé at a special event attended by over 300 RSGS members and guests. Awarded the Society’s Mungo Park Medal in 2006 for his distinguished contribution to the exploration and understanding of Arctic and subArctic regions, Professor Malaurie had carried out pioneering research work in those regions for more than half a century, earning in the process a truly international reputation.

On his visit to Edinburgh, Professor Malaurie spoke of the changes that were beginning to take place in Arctic regions as a result of global warming, and of the need to protect the Arctic environment and the cultural heritage of the people who live there. As a UNESCO Ambassador of Goodwill for the Arctic, he hoped to encourage nations to unite under the banner of UNESCO to create a charter for the Arctic.

Professor Malaurie died peacefully at home on 5th February 2024. A eulogy by President Emmanuel Macron was published on the website of the Élysée, at www.elysee.fr/emmanuelmacron/2024/02/05/deces-de-jean-malaurie

Long-view leadership

The Elders, a network of global leaders, have released an open letter about the need for long-view leadership. See, and sign, the letter at futureoflife.org/open-letter/long-viewleadership-on-existential-threats

State of the World’s Migratory Species

Migratory species include some of the most iconic species on the planet, from whales to the monarch butterfly. A report published by the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) in February made for grim reading. The conservation status of many CMS-listed species is deteriorating. One in five CMS species are threatened with extinction and 44% are undergoing population declines. CMS-listed fish are of particular concern, with 97% threatened with extinction. Levels of extinction risk are rising across CMS-listed species as a whole. Extinction risk is also escalating across the wider group of migratory species not listed in CMS.

Welcome to Deputy Chief Executive

We are delighted to introduce our new Deputy Chief Executive, Clare Hamilton, a specialist in international environmental law and policy with more than 20 years’ experience across private practice, the public and third sectors. She has worked as head of the Scottish Government’s decarbonisation division, as deputy head of the international team at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and on projects for the UN, the Belgian, UK and Scottish Governments, the House of Lords environment caucus, and the Energy Saving Trust. Clare lives in Perthshire and is chair of the Perthshire Nature Connections Partnership, which is developing landscape-scale restoration projects to create an ecological corridor between Scotland’s two national parks. She has been a tutor on RSGS’s Climate Solutions programme since 2021. She is also a volunteer fire-fighter.

Discovery Days!

6th April

This year, we plan to host four more of our popular and insightful Discovery Days at the Fair Maid’s House. Each day will focus on a theme close to our RSGS collections, and will consist of four parts, each led by an expert presenter. The first event, on Saturday 6th April, will bring a new understanding of the life and adventures of Sir Ernest Shackleton, providing an overview of his expedition life and his RSGS connections. We will be showcasing related RSGS maps and displaying personal artefacts belonging to Shackleton. See www.rsgs.org/events for details and to book your ticket.

Voices of the Earth

The fundraising appeal we held last year to support our Writer-in-Residence Jo Woolf in writing a followup to The Great Horizon had a great response, and we are very grateful to all those members and supporters who contributed. However, as we go to print, we are still c£1,000 short of the target to ensure this project can go ahead as planned. In December, we produced a special limited-edition Explorer’s Gin to help raise funds to bridge this funding gap; please consider buying a bottle, or you can donate directly at www.rsgs.org/Appeal/voices to help make this project a reality.

Farewell to Finance Officer

help us reach our target

The deteriorating status of migratory species is being driven by intense levels of anthropogenic pressure. Due to their mobility, their reliance on multiple habitats, and their dependence on connectivity between different sites, migratory species are exposed to a diverse range of threats caused by human activity. Given the breadth and scale of the pressures facing migratory species, coordinated international action is urgently needed to reverse population declines and preserve these species and their habitats.

See www.cms.int/en/publication/state-worlds-migratory-species for more information.

We were sorry to see our Finance Officer, Linda Davidson, leave us at Christmas, after more than nine years with RSGS. Linda has played a really important role in stabilising our financial reporting and helping keep staff and Board informed about progress. She also played a crucial role in keeping the office running efficiently, and was always brilliant at sniffing out a good deal. Many of you will know Linda, having spoken with her on the phone or when visiting the office, as she was often the first point of contact for members, and I’m sure she will be missed. Thank you for all the very kind messages. We wish her all the best, and will be looking to replace the role, albeit in a slightly revised form, in the near future.

Accessing archives

Staff at the Centre for Recreation and Tourism Research, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, have been researching how they can improve access to RSGS’s archives and generate more income for the Society. An Interface Standard Innovation voucher, a scheme that funds collaborations between Scottish organisations and academia, has allowed Dr Katie Murray and Kelly Morrison, who both have a background in heritage management, to explore ways of enhancing access to RSGS’s collections in a way that is sustainable and cost-effective. They are recommending a series of actions for consideration.

Meet the Experts

Launched in June 2021, our ‘Meet the Expert’ sessions were designed to provide support for graduates of the Climate Solutions courses, and for other individuals keen to improve their skills and confidence in addressing climate change within their respective spheres. Led by leading experts, these online sessions provide attendees with the opportunity to discover emerging topics. We believe that it is important to have these discussions and bridge the gap between climate experts and the individuals and organisations tasked with driving solutions for the future.

Our Meet the Expert sessions in November and December 2023, which focused on Climate Anxiety and the Role of Peatlands, were our most attended sessions on record, reaching 100 attendees. Sessions are continuing through 2024. The first, in February, focused on the pressing issue of Ecocide and the proposed Scottish Parliament Bill which, if passed, would make Scotland the first UK nation to declare ecocide as a crime. The second, on 9th April, will focus on Geothermal Energy and will be led by Iain Hutchison, CEO of Merlin Energy, and Marit Brommer, CEO of the International Geothermal Association.

Miss Ann Stewart BEM (1947–2023)

We were sorry to lose one of most loyal supporters in December. Ann was an enthusiastic member of RSGS: she never missed a talk at the Kirkcaldy Group, of which she was Treasurer for several years; she was a welcoming volunteer guide at our Fair Maid’s House visitor centre in Perth; and she was a keen promoter of RSGS publications, such as regularly popping into the office to pick up supplies for distribution around Kirkcaldy. Ann was awarded the British Empire Medal in 2017 for voluntary service to the arts, healthcare and steam railway preservation.

Setting the PACE

NASA has launched a new satellite, PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud and ocean Ecosystem), to study oceans and atmosphere from an orbit of 420 miles above the Earth for the next three years. It will take daily measurements with two of its instruments, whilst the third is focused on monthly assessment. NASA says the satellite will strengthen our understanding of how the ocean and atmosphere exchange carbon dioxide. In addition, it will reveal how aerosols might fuel phytoplankton growth in the surface ocean, and identify the extent and duration of harmful algal blooms.

Thank-you to our volunteers

In December, we were delighted to welcome many RSGS volunteers, from the Collections Team, Fair Maid’s House team and Local Groups, to the Fair Maid’s House in Perth, to thank them for the invaluable work they had done throughout 2023. For the day, we had a cake made that might appeal to Shackleton fans… it was designed to look like the three volumes of The Heart of the Antarctic, a collection which we recently completed by procuring Volume 3, The Antarctic Book for our archives. Thank you to everyone who came along on the day and again for all your hard work!

Managing Scotland’s Environment

The third edition of Managing Scotland’s Environment, by Dr Charles Warren and Dr Jayne Glass and with a Foreword by Mike Robinson, was published in February. Completely revised and updated to reflect the current debates in Scotland’s natural environment, this edition tackles deer management, the post-Brexit future of farming, land reform, rewilding versus repeopling, windfarms, and conflicts between game sport and conservation. It is a valuable text for those studying Scotland’s environment at an undergraduate or graduate level, or for anyone involved or interested in managing land and nature in Scotland.

Whales may smell

Baleen whales (a grouping that includes blue, humpback and right whales) feed on huge quantities of zooplankton. Their ability to accurately locate an abundance of zooplankton in the vast ocean has puzzled scientists, but a team led by Dr Conor Ryan of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) has found that they may be able to sniff out the best opportunities. When zooplankton are grazing on microscopic plant-like phytoplankton, dimethyl sulfide is released into the sea and then into the air. The scent from this chemical is already known to attract seabirds to a feeding frenzy. It may also be a signal to baleen whales.

Dr Ryan said, “Whales that have their nostrils wider apart are better equipped to smell ‘in stereo’ and could potentially locate feeding opportunities by homing-in on the source of a smell. If indeed whales do locate food by smelling dimethyl sulfide, there is a heightened risk of them eating plastic, because the fouling that grows on plastic floating at sea smells like plankton. Understanding whales’ ability to smell could help us figure out why some species are so prone to plastic ingestion.”

See www.sams.ac.uk/news/samsnews-whales-can-smell.html for more information.

A North Atlantic right whale exhaling at the surface in Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts, USA. Image by John Durban and Holly Fearnbach. Authorised by permit #17355 from the US National Marine Fisheries Service.

Curriculum design webinars

In December and January, we hosted the second and third in our series of webinars on aspects of educational reform emerging from recent Scottish Government reports. We focused on interdisciplinary learning, considering what interdisciplinary learning is, in principle and in practice. And then we focused on learning for sustainability, including what it is and how we can encourage its development. Reports from all of these webinars are available at www.rsgs.org/blog

Blog highlights

We continue to make weekly additions to our blog (www. rsgs.org/blog), covering a range of interesting topics and news about our work. Recent posts include:

J Norman Collie: from a chemistry lab to the Columbian Icefield. RSGS Writer-in-Residence Jo Woolf reflects on the life of climber and pioneering chemist J Norman Collie, who made the first neon display tubes.

Archibald Menzies and the tree that would puzzle a monkey Clad in fire-resistant bark, the monkey puzzle tree thrives on the volcanic slopes of the Andes. A C19th horticulturist commented that its strangely spiked branches were “enough to puzzle a monkey,” and the name stuck.

All 28 eggs in one COP basket. A global problem like climate change needs a global solution and global agreement. The COP process has always been glacially slow and to some degree flawed, but we have come to over-expect and over-rely on it.

Freya Stark, RSGS Mungo Park Medallist 1935. Freya Stark was only four years old when she ran away from home. With careful forethought, she packed a mackintosh, a toothbrush and a couple of pennies before setting off towards Plymouth.

Industrial pollution in corals

Pollutants from burning fossil fuels have been found embedded in corals, offering scientists a potential new tool to track the history of pollution. A study led by UCL researchers and published in the journal Science of the Total Environment identified carbon pollutants in the corals of Illa Grossa Bay, off the Columbretes Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. Lead author Dr Lucy Roberts (UCL Geography) said, “The discovery of these pollutants embedded in coral skeletons extend over decades and paint a clear picture of how extensive human influence is on the environment. It’s the first time we’ve been able to see this kind of contaminant in corals, and its appearance in these deposits parallel the historic rate of fossil fuel combustion in the region.”

Sell-out talk with Alice Roberts

In January, we were delighted to host Professor Alice Roberts, anatomist and biological anthropologist, author and broadcaster, and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, at a special event in Glasgow. The sell-out talk attracted an audience of around 400 people, and was held in conjunction with the University of Strathclyde, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary since receiving a Royal Charter. The evening was introduced by Professor Dame Anne Glover, President of RSGS and special advisor to the University. Professor Roberts spoke about her most recent book, Buried, and the stories being uncovered through modern genetic understandings of old skeletons at famous burial sites around Britain.

Curricular challenges

January saw RSGS – in the persons of Geographer Royal for Scotland Professor Jo Sharp, Education Committee Chair Alastair McConnell, and Chief Executive Mike Robinson – meeting with the Scottish Government’s Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, Jenny Gilruth MSP, herself a former teacher, to discuss concerns about the curriculum and promote the value of specialist teaching. RSGS reinforced the need to ensure there is more time to teach in the curriculum design, and the need to ensure subjects remain responsive and relevant. We were greatly encouraged by the positive discussion and hope we can continue to promote Geography at this national level. SAGT had a similar meeting in November, so it is great to see the subject getting a good hearing.

Seligman Crystal Award

The Seligman Crystal, the senior award of the International Glaciological Society, has been awarded to Doug Benn FRSGS, Professor of Environmental Change in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews. The Crystal is awarded annually to a glaciologist who has made an outstanding contribution to our understanding of glacier behaviour. Not least amongst Doug’s many accomplishments has been his work in reinterpreting the glacial landform record in the Scottish Highlands, in particular the origin and significance of ‘hummocky moraine’ and the recognition (reported in the Scottish Geographical Journal in 2021) that many of the last glaciers in Scotland exhibited surging behaviour about 12,000 years ago. As the citation to his award concludes, “his enthusiastic inquisitiveness, ability to see to the heart of a problem and willingness to identify and pursue unorthodox approaches has led to transformational innovations across multiple areas of glaciology.”

Professor Alice Roberts (L) and Professor Dame Anne Glover (R).

Doug Benn on Tunabreen, a glacier on Svalbard.

James Bluemel FRSGS

In November we presented RSGS Honorary Fellowship to acclaimed director James Bluemel, in recognition of his exceptional compelling storytelling and multi award-winning documentaries Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, Once Upon a Time in Iraq, Exodus: Our Journey to Europe, and Pandemic 2020. His keen sense of empathy, coupled with an amazing ability for storytelling, has allowed audiences to connect with the diverse and often challenging stories he chooses to tell. James received his Fellowship at an event at AK Bell Library in Perth, where he was interviewed by author, broadcaster and RSGS VicePresident Dr Vanessa Collingridge FRSGS.

Inspiring People

Optimising outreach

The past few months have seen RSGS involved in a range of outreach activities: giving many public talks, including for schools and university students; giving presentations at conferences on food, climate justice and climate action; and providing insights on careers, peatlands, agriculture and environmental protection. We ran workshops for Climate Solutions, with government, local authorities and enterprise companies; spoke at the SCVO gathering in Edinburgh; and helped Jojo Mehta FRSGS and Monica Lennon MSP launch the consultation for ecocide law in Scotland. Mike Robinson spoke at a dance and climate event at University of Stirling. Other talks involved VisitScotland, the Institute of Directors, Scottish Resources Conference, and Learning for Sustainability. It underlines the vitality of geography that there is such an interest in input from RSGS in such a range of critical topics, helping deliver our mission to inform and influence positive change.

suggest speakers

The 2023–24 Inspiring People programme of 90 face-to-face public talks across mainland Scotland allowed RSGS audiences to hear from some brilliant speakers. Highlights included filmmaker Mandi Stark taking us behind the scenes of filming natural history across the globe; TV presenter and author Cameron McNeish reflecting on four decades of chronicling Scotland’s majestic landscapes and outdoor communities; conservationist Sacha Dench considering where Scotland’s ospreys go on migration and the challenges they face; adventurer Louis Hall facing snowstorms, injury, untamed trails, and wolves while crossing the Ligurian Alps by horseback; and a host of others befitting the best national talks programme in Scotland.

We were delighted to see a greater attendance at talks across our Local Groups, and we hope this will continue until we return to pre-Covid numbers. Many thanks to everyone who attended this season. We look forward now to planning our 2024–25 programme; if you have suggestions or recommendations about possible speakers, please contact us at enquiries@rsgs.org

RSGS Explorer’s Gin

Our limited edition RSGS Explorer’s Gin, created in collaboration with Persie Distillery, is still available to order, via www.rsgs.org/gin, for home delivery or click-and-collect from Persie Distillery or RSGS HQ. Hand-crafted in Perthshire, the geographical heart of Scotland, this special edition has been created in small batches using natural botanicals, resulting in a quality that can’t be replicated at large scale.

639-year-long performance

In February, members of the public and media attended St Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, to witness a chord change in the performance of an iconic piece of experimental music: ORGAN2/ASLSP by American avantgarde composer John Cage. The score consists of eight pages of music to be played as slowly as possible. The performance began in 2001 and is set to play until 2640. This year’s chord change was the first in two years; the next is scheduled for August 2026. See page 42 for an article by the maker of a film about the musical performance.

Future Generations Fund

RSGS’s work is focused on capturing the excitement and relevance of geography: informing people about critical geographical issues, injecting science into decision making, influencing positive change, and inspiring people to make a difference in their own or other people’s lives. The Future Generations Fund is an ongoing scheme launched in 2022, to build a fund over the next five or more years which helps drive our existing and new work in this area.

We aim to support activities and encourage long-term policy which benefits young people. We plan to give them hope and (through our Young Geographers Committee) a budget to target some of the issues of most concern to young people and overcome the short-termism that can dominate decision making. It is low-level, as RSGS is not a large charity, but through leading by example we hope to inspire others to do similar. Please visit www.rsgs.org/Appeal/ future or get in touch to donate or find out more.

The Polar Bears of Perth

the

Last year, filmmakers Doug Allan and Libby Penman visited RSGS to do some filming with the Open University Art and Ecology project, to create a short documentary titled The Polar Bears of Perth which considers why polar bears are the face of climate change.The Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at the OU has released a trailer ahead of the full release of the 15-minute documentary. See www.youtube.com/@OU_FASS/videos

Royal Visit: Heart of Arabia in Scotland

On 16th January, RSGS was honoured to host a visit from Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal and His Royal Highness Prince Khalid bin Bandar al Saud, Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, for the launch of the Heart of Arabia Expedition in Scotland. The purpose of the special event at our headquarters in Perth was to share the story of the expedition which embarked on a 1,300km journey across Saudi Arabia, following the route of Harry St John Philby in 1917, as an inspiration to young people, believing that exploration is as relevant now as it has ever been. Guests in attendance included representatives from leading youth development and outdoor learning organisations in Scotland, including the Martin Moran Foundation, University of the Highlands and Islands, and The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. Members of the Philby family, Saudi Arabia representatives, the Heart of Arabia Expedition team, supporters of RSGS including Baillie Gifford and the Open University, members of Perth City Leadership Forum, RSGS Board and Vice-Presidents, RSGS Collections Team and Young Geographers Committee also attended the gathering. Following the visit, Mark Evans MBE FRSGS, Leader of the Heart of Arabia Expedition, presented a talk at Perth Concert Hall where HRH

The Princess Royal was greeted by student representatives from local schools: Bertha Park High School, Perth Grammar School, St John’s Academy and Perth High School.

The visit was a real celebration of all the extraordinary work that RSGS does as an organisation and as a community, and it was great to see so many people involved.

Princess Royal presents RSGS awards

During her visit to Perth in December, HRH The Princess Royal, a Vice-President of RSGS, conferred RSGS Honorary Fellowships on Elaine Blaxter, Thomas MacDonell, and Dr Vanessa Collingridge, and presented the RSGS Bartholomew Globe to Nick Millea.

Elaine Blaxter has been a Senior Librarian at the University of Strathclyde’s Andersonian Library for the past 30 years. Elaine has been a great friend to RSGS as our main point of contact over our collections at Strathclyde, whilst helping with displays, maintenance and restoration, and assisting with access and curation.

Thomas MacDonell is Director of Conservation for Wildland at Glenfeshie Estate in the Cairngorms, which was founded after the estate was purchased by Anders and Anne Holch Povlsen. Thomas headed a pioneering strategy to reduce the impacts of herbivores, mainly red deer, and revitalise the woodland to the point that the forest could naturally regenerate in the presence of deer without the need for fencing.

Dr Vanessa Collingridge is an awardwinning broadcaster, best-selling author, prize-winning academic and leadership coach. Vanessa has been an unwavering ally to RSGS for years.

As a former Board member and a current Vice-President, she has lent her invaluable skills and knowledge to several critical interviews and voice-overs for our Climate Solutions course, and has spoken and written for the Society on many occasions.

Nick Millea has been Map Librarian at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford for 31 years. He was the bibliographer for Imago Mundi, the international academic journal for historians and cartography, Trustee for the Historic Towns Trust, and Co-Convenor and organiser of the Oxford Seminars in Cartography. The Bartholomew Globe is awarded for excellence in the assembly, delivery or application of geographical information through cartography, GIS and related techniques.

Her Royal Highness with RSGS Collections Team volunteers.

Her Royal Highness with members of the Heart of Arabia Expedition team and the Philby family.

Her Royal Highness greeting local schoolchildren.

Her Royal Highness arriving at RSGS HQ.

Her Royal Highness with members of the RSGS Young Geographers Committee.

RSGS Honorary Fellows meet Her Royal Highness.

Why the geography of time matters

Mike Robinson, RSGS Chief Executive

As a ten-year-old child I was always taken by the obsessive way the adults around me seemed to view time. They would stare at their watches and get stressed about minor deviations, fret if they were likely to be more than a few minutes late or if their watch showed a different time to a public clock. Sometimes a power cut would wipe all the time devices in the house, causing untold panic, until we phoned the ‘speaking clock’ and reset everything to the correct time. But it all seemed very stressful and artificial to me. Time felt like a human construct even then, a servant which had become the master. I took off the watch that my grandad had not long bought me for my birthday, and have never worn one since.

Then, when I had children of my own, time took on a different perspective again. I am reminded of a quote by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, that “Time is a game played beautifully by children.” Children are a marker of the passing of time, in a way that I hadn’t noticed in my early adult years. I may be in the same job I was in in 2008, but I can’t pretend it was only yesterday, when meanwhile my children have grown from babies to fully fledged adults. Recently they have taken to laughing at me because some of my newer climbing

kit is actually older than they are, which does rather underline the passage of time and undermine my confidence that I’m still quite as young at heart as I am in my head. When they were kids, time also meant something different: journeys were measured in the number of songs to reach any given destination, and anticipated events in the number of sleeps I still tend to direct people around the Highlands in the time (or number of songs) it takes to drive and not the distance. Not that I don’t fret about time now myself, and realise the importance of punctuality and time to order our lives. I have also come to recognise that time speeds up as we get older; probably because every next hour is a slightly smaller proportion of our lived experience. I wonder if this slows down again when we become more forgetful? Or when we retire? But still I find it difficult to shake my healthy disregard for time, almost as a self defence against day-to-day stress. For something like time, which is apparently so defined, our view of time seems to be unique to each of us. Most of my friends have subtly different and distinct relationships with time, one of whom is so

“‘Time is a game played beautifully by children.’”

persistently late that we have all taken to telling him that any meeting starts an hour or more before the rest of us have actually agreed to meet. Some of our closest friends, who now live in Australia, have a standing joke that we can never remember when they are awake or not, so much so that our WhatsApp group is called what time is it? It is all very confusing.

Culturally too we have quite different relationships with time. Not just because, as Google will tell you, “the sun can’t rise in every part of the world at once, so time zones maintain logical order and regulate day and night across the globe.” Time zones remind us that, at its most fundamental, daylight is the ultimate arbiter of time. Anyone who has camped will know this. Out in the wilds, with only the wind and the stars for company, we quite naturally get tired when the sun goes down, and wake with the dawn. It’s why I hate camping in the summer, because in Scotland that dawn can be at 3am and I find myself wide awake and raring to go, whilst everyone around me is fast asleep.

Time can vary much more than we might imagine. It varies by where we live on the globe. In Nepal’s case, rather delightfully, by 15 minutes from India, simply to reinforce the fact that they aren’t India. It varies by our perspective: physicists after all first understood universal time, geologists first understood Earth time, and industrialists invented the nine-to-five.

Time can vary by culture: it seems more languid and relaxed in countries like Brazil, the Caribbean or Mediterranean than the frantic version of time we employ in the colder north. The same seems true for more rural locations rather than cities, or hotter places rather than cooler climates. Time then has a geography. It’s one of the ironies of modern life that people in more developed nations have far less leisure time than people in the less economically active countries.

Time has so many variables. It can also vary by our mood. When we are running late, everything around us is annoyingly slow, or takes longer than we want. Or if we are bored, it drags its feet and knuckles across the carpet and won’t hurry up. And the other aspect of time which has come to dominate modern society is the timeframe in which we think and operate. The rhythm of our working lives is less dictated to by the passing of the calendar year, or the seasons, but more by quarterly financial reporting cycles, and short-term demands. This has increasingly led to a rebellion – a popular and philosophical movement to become more ‘long-termist’. To become ‘long-minded’. To break this over-fixation on shortterm profit and the economic convenience of ‘discounting’ the future, where we borrow from the future of our planet’s resources, the future of the air and water and soil and health (and even money), by writing them off as inconsequential. A long-termist philosophy encourages us to consider our impact, not just today, but over the next few years and decades, a principle probably best known in native American beliefs through seventh generation thinking. To show more concern for the legacy we leave future generations and exhibit more responsibility in modern day-to-day decision making.

Professor William MacAskill’s book What We Owe The Future encourages us to imagine that we are at the beginning of human life on this planet and not, as every generation

seems to believe, the end. How would that affect our sense of responsibility to the future, and the billions of people not alive yet, who rely on some of the decisions we make today? He argues that there are many, many more people still to live on Earth than have ever lived. His work reinforces my belief that we need to learn to be truly sustainable, probably for the first time in human history. And there is a growing philosophical movement to demand that we take greater consideration of the future needs of humanity more generally. I sense that here in 2024, a major year for elections across the globe, and with the inevitable but narrow political focus on short-term cost-cutting, a better understanding of the geography and philosophy of time is more vital than ever. By most measures we are failing to hand over the world in a better state than we inherited it. We are witnessing existential crises in climate change, biodiversity, energy security and the cost of living, but these are in danger of being swept aside, painted as unaffordable luxuries and polarising issues, instead of being essential considerations and a rallying call for unifying people and building a better future.

It is this principle which has driven our determination to build a Future Generations Fund, the subject of our members’ appeal in 2022 (which is still ongoing): money to help support RSGS activities and longterm policy and which can be used to give young people hope, a voice and a budget, to target some of the issues they are most concerned about nationally. We hope it is an example which others will follow, even though we have only just started this process.

“Imagine that we are at the beginning of human life on this planet and not, as every generation seems to believe, the end.”

Albert Einstein said that time was an illusion. But it is such a fundamental lens through which to understand the world. Geologists and polymaths like Hutton first described Earth time. Geography can help explain and explore it, and the many different ways time is perceived and used.

© Mike Robinson

The importance of (deep) time

Professor Todd A Ehlers, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow

The concept of deep time is fundamental to the geological and cosmic sciences, and refers to the billions of years of history observable from rocks and our universe. Deep time is not an easy concept for humans to comprehend. Our day-today activities tune our brains to focus on significantly shorter timescales. However, for an Earth scientist trained in thinking over deep time, a thousand or even a million years is not very long relative to the time it took to form the rocks under our feet.

The concept of deep time (also referred to as geologic time) became mainstream in Western literature through the influential work of James Hutton in the late 1700s. Hutton’s observations at Siccar Point, Scotland, tickled the imagination of naturalists across Europe and supported the eventual recognition that the Earth was, in fact, very old. Given some of the current challenges that humanity faces, such as global warming and biodiversity loss, it is fair to ask if geoscience studies of deep time are still needed. Has this field of inquiry run its course? Is it time to move on and train our students to address more pressing, human-relevant, problems?

Deep-time studies can and should play a role in contemporary environmental geoscience and geography studies. Deep-time studies provide a window into alternative Earth states that were present in the past, are not observable today, and may occur again in the future. For example, future IPCC climate projections for high greenhouse gas emission scenarios estimate atmospheric carbon levels in the year 2100 will be at levels last present on Earth ~3.5 and ~14.5 million years ago. Geochemical, palaeontologic, and geologic studies of these past warm periods have provided valuable insights into what our future may look like. These (and other) deep-time studies have also made fundamental discoveries in how carbon and nutrients cycle between the biosphere, atmosphere, and solid earth in ways that could not be completely understood over human timescales alone. Deep-time studies also provide a valuable complement to physical geography and environmental geoscience research. The trade-off is that although investigations of environmental change in the geologic record provide insight into alternative Earth states, they commonly lack a high temporal fidelity and instead provide a time-integrated picture of Earth system processes. Given this limitation, deep-time studies are of the greatest use when coupled with geographical and environmental science investigations of similar processes (eg, climate change and carbon cycle dynamics). The immense amount of data that can be collected today from observatories and satellites is at high spatial and temporal fidelity (relative to deeptime studies) and enables a rigorous understanding of the physical, chemical, and biological processes that are more diffusely preserved from the geologic record. Taken together, deep time and physical geography investigations provide a powerful tool to address current challenges.

However, applications of deep-time research to contemporary issues face their challenges. One important issue stems from the complexity of how different Earth systems (eg, its biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, pedosphere) are coupled to each other. Interactions between these systems are non-linear, meaning that small perturbations in one system can lead to a large and often unpredictable response in another system. These non-linearities are particularly important for deep-time studies because the rates of global warming documented in the geologic record (such as in the previous examples of past warm periods) occurred over hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Since pre-industrial times (~1850), the Earth’s atmosphere has experienced similar magnitudes of global warming as recorded in the geologic record, but they are occurring today over significantly shorter timescales (ie, over hundreds of years). This means that the rate of change occurring today is significantly faster than in the geologic past. It remains poorly understood how the coupled Earth system responds to these vastly different rates of global warming, and what the limits are of deep-time investigations for predicting future environmental change. Lastly, anthropogenic disturbances are prevalent in contemporary observations, but not present in most of the geologic record. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing in that deep-time studies offer an opportunity to see how the Earth system behaves in the absence of humans, but a curse in that a comparison of deep-time and modern observations requires understanding the anthropogenic contribution to what we observe today. The previous challenges are difficult to address, but not insurmountable. They offer a timely opportunity for collaborative studies that integrate deep time and geographical research to build a holistic understanding of the Earth system.

“Deep-time studies provide a valuable complement to physical geography and environmental geoscience research.”

View of Siccar Point from the top of the cliff. The grey rocks on the right are the older rocks, which were tilted, uplifted and eroded before the second set of rocks, the Old Red Sandstone visible on the left, were deposited on top. © Angus Miller

Siccar Point and geological time

Angus Miller FRSGS, geologist

Siccar Point is probably the world’s most important site for the understanding of geological time. This beautiful rocky promontory, jutting into the North Sea just a few miles from Cockburnspath in the Scottish Borders, was discovered by James Hutton in 1788. Since then it has become known, and internationally celebrated, as ‘Hutton’s unconformity’. It is just one of several Scottish sites described by Hutton; at others such as Arran and Glen Tilt he explored the nature of granite, which contributed to his theory that rocks contained evidence of geological processes, operating over vast timespans. These have modified the Earth’s surface with “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

Big ideas, born in Scotland, that will be celebrated as we approach the tercentenary of James Hutton’s birth in 2026. For all its international significance, Siccar Point is easy to miss. It is not well known locally, and has a reputation for being remote and hard to access. In fact, the car park is only five minutes’ drive from the A1, and there are good walking routes along the few miles of clifftop from Cockburnspath. Siccar Point lies at the foot of a steep grassy slope. It can easily be viewed from the top, and there are plans to improve access as part of the Hutton tercentenary celebrations. What do you see at Siccar Point? Quite simply the passage of time. Hutton described the lower rocks (now known to be layers of greywacke sandstone of Silurian age, 435 million years old) in terms of sediment deposition in moving water “no other than that which we every day observe upon the sands of our own shore.” But he also recognised that later, after the sand had turned to rock, the layers had been “indurated, elevated, broken, and worn by attrition in water, before the secondary strata … had existed.” Hutton’s secondary strata, beautifully displayed at Siccar Point and

the cliffs of nearby Pease Bay, is the Old Red Sandstone (Devonian age, 370 million years old). The unconformity surface between the two sets of rocks represents a time gap of 65 million years. Hutton didn’t know the ages of the two sets of rocks, but he recognised that the junction between them represented the passage of time, and he could explain the natural processes that had occurred here to create this assemblage of rocks.

“What do you see at Siccar Point? Quite simply the passage of time.”

These days it is commonplace to talk of dinosaurs roaming the Earth millions of years ago without eliciting a gasp of astonishment. But when you stop and think about it, geological time, and what Hutton discovered, is astonishing and unfathomable. The number of human lifetimes, the number of sunrises and moonrises that the rocks of Siccar Point have endured is literally incredible. And what I love about rocks here, and many other places in Scotland, is the beautiful dichotomy they contain: yes, they are hundreds of millions of years old, but they often have evidence of being created in but an instant. Hutton observed signs of sand modified by moving water, some bright sunny morning on a deep seabed south of the equator. Other rocks tell of animals leaving footprints on sandy plains, of volcanic blasts and earthquakes: instants in time, preserved for eternity.

In my favourite passage of Hutton’s writing, he looks at everyday landscapes, imagining great changes that have been made, and foresees “a different state that must follow in time, from the continued operation of that which actually is in nature.” What will this landscape look like in a thousand years, a million years? And this leads me to think about what the geological evidence of me will be. A footprint? Probably not. But what is clear is that all of us alive today are creating a geological signal, a dirty stain of displaced materials, a concentration of radioactive elements, metals and plastic, and evidence of abrupt and probably lasting climate change. We now know that we are just halfway through the history of the Earth. There are still about five billion years to go. Plenty of time for you to visit Siccar Point, and reflect on the passage of time, and our place in the world.

Close-up view of the unconformity at Siccar Point, with pieces of older rock broken off and embedded in the accumulation of sand that formed the Old Red Sandstone. © Angus Miller

The topic of time

Richard Fisher, journalist and author

A few years ago, I was thinking about what book I should tackle. I was a science journalist and there were plenty of topics that popped up every day that I could dive into. But my wife said, “what’s always been there – what can you trace back through your life that you’ll still be interested in in five years’ time?” Because on book timescales you have to think like that.

I could trace back through the work I did at the BBC, and then back to my Geology degree, to having a rock collection when I was a kid. It’s only briefly mentioned in the book, but there’s a law called Lindy’s Law which says, if you want to know what lasts, look at what’s always been there; and I think you can apply that to book writing and interests. If you have a childhood fascination with geology it’s probably going to be a grandparent fascination with geology.

James Hutton opened people’s timescales significantly with deep time, but then there were other much longer timescales in Buddhist culture. The idea of things that last forever was around for a very long time, with eternal life in heaven centuries before, but I suppose the idea of a linear chronology on which you could plot events, and the idea that the world was different in the past and could in turn be different in the future. I think geologists did the past, but in terms of the far future, I think it took a bit longer to bed in. There are historians who have looked at that, like Thomas Moynihan, who argues that radioactivity really opened people’s horizons because people realised that there was

“James Hutton opened people’s timescales significantly with deep time.”

an engine within the Sun that would keep it going for a very long time, and that enabled the future horizon to extend. The way that geological features like Hutton’s Unconformity gave a sense of backwards, an everlasting Sun gave a sense of forwards. I went to Siccar Point to see the unconformity there, and I think that’s a historically very important location in terms of our understanding of time itself.

I remember in the book, reflecting on my daughter’s future and thinking about many of the problems that we face in the present. When I started thinking about climate change and the impacts of sea level rise, and all the ways that politics was trapped in the present rather than looking ahead, you could see all the incentives that discourage both politicians and business people. I wrote a BBC article called The Parallels of Short-Termism arguing that it was humanity’s greatest challenge of the 21st century – how we currently face all these long-term problems and yet it feels like we’ve never been so short-term in our outlook.

Short-termism has always been a problem. The cathedrals that were built in the medieval age were seen as a long-term activity because people would build cathedrals that would be finished by the person who came after them. But during that period there were also short-term building practices. There were people trying to make a quick buck and mistakes were made. So, we look at the cathedrals that survived and assume that’s the way it was always done; but the ones that collapsed and that were rubbish, they’re not around anymore.

So I suppose, it’s just a facet of human nature. There are cultural inventions that we’ve introduced over the past century or so – like quarterly reporting in business, that hasn’t always been there as a facet of capitalism, but over the past 50 years it’s really become bedded in and it’s changed the way that corporations report the market and what they’re incentivised by. And look at social media. Twitter is all about real time. It’s about what’s happening right now. I work in journalism, where the current incentives are to focus on what people are talking about on Google and social media right now. You can go back ten years and look at the front page of a website, or a newspaper in print, and see that many of the things that occupied people ten years ago don’t matter anymore.

into other cultures that think about time slightly differently, like as a circle or as a space which surrounds you or as a tree or as a cultural practice, then you can feel closer to past and future generations than you would do if you thought purely scientifically about time on a line.

“We’re passing the baton essentially between generations.”

As Edmund Burke wrote, society is a contract between those who are dead, those who are living, and those who are yet to be born. We’re passing the baton essentially between generations, and that again is another way of thinking about our place within time as a connection of webs, of networks, of people past, present and future.

We face all these long-term problems, but we’re kind of incentivised to think short-term. If you make the case that we’ve invented these cultural practices, then we don’t have to keep them. They’re facets of our psychology, and it makes sense that we would focus on the present. We inherited brains that we have from our ancestors who might want to have a meal rather than forward plan.

I would argue that you need both long-term and short-term thinking. You need present mindfulness, which is different than short-termism which is just a blind present focus. You need to switch appropriately between present mindfulness and long-term thinking.

I have a scientific geological view of time, and I was curious about whether there were other time views, different ways of thinking about past, present and future.

Part 3 of the book is an attempt to survey different ways of thinking about time. As well as religious time-views, I also looked at artistic and philosophical perspectives and the moral perspective of long-termism, because I believe that we need a plural approach to time. Scientifically, we still can’t get our finger on exactly what time is, but then on a cultural level there are also many different ways of interpreting it. The idea of a timeline was invented by Joseph Priestley, in terms of arranging information from left to right, putting in facts and events.

If you think about it in a linear way, time going from left to right extends off into deep time and into the far future. Eventually, the line disappears over the horizon and becomes too far away to visualise, and if long-term is very far away, it’s harder to feel personally connected to it. However, if you look

I think one of the more powerful practices I’ve seen emerge is the psychology and social science literature, that could loosely be called perspective taking. People are asked to step into the shoes of a future person and role play. So the best known one is a Japanese researcher called Tatsuyoshi Saijō who created a practice called ‘future design’. It is a bit like Citizens Assemblies, but with the dimension of time, where people are asked to come up with policies for their local town and step into the shoes of people living in, say, 2060 and advocate for their views. In climate change literature there’s an example where people were shown the future impacts of climate change and they were given statistics and big-picture views of what could happen. Another group in the study was shown the story of one woman who went outside and whose skin got burned swimming in the sea as it was polluted and she came out with a rash. That humanising of future people, rather than seeing them as a mass of future generations, is one of the more effective ways of generating empathy across time.

Richard Fisher is the author of The Long View, published by Wildfire in hardback and as an e-book, with a paperback version planned for 2024. See back page for details, and a special offer price for our readers.

Image from Shutterstock

On time

Hazel Marshall, storyteller and consultant

On 22nd October 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC, the world was divided for the first time into 24 distinct time zones. The Greenwich meridian was deemed the Prime Meridian of the world, establishing Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the international standard of time – at least until the arrival of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in 1974. Now time was constant across the world.

In past centuries time would have been dictated, not by a ticking clock or a time zone, but by the harvest, the seasons, the days of the week, annual, daily or monthly rituals. People would have been more in tune with the moon, the tides, the seasons and the weather. It would have been more physical and present, more tied to dark and light, night and day.

At one time villages would set their church clocks to midday according to when the sun was directly overhead. This meant that Bristol’s midday would have been different to York’s which would have been different from Perth’s. One village’s clock might be five minutes ahead of another village only 30 miles away. While public clocks became prevalent in the 14th century it wouldn’t be until the 19th century that they became standardised. The cause for this was the railways. People had to know when to catch their trains and so towns had to be connected by the same time. No longer would midday be measured when the sun was directly overhead but by what the clocks, and the railway timetable, said. How we measure time often reflects the societies we live in.

Standardisation of time gathered steam with the Industrial Revolution and an insatiable demand for workers to arrive for the morning shift at the same time. So along came the knocker-uppers – men or women paid to wake people from their slumbers with methods ranging from a long stick to a pea shooter. As time marched on, whistles and hooters and banging on windows determined when people would start and finish their day rather than the sun and moon.

Personal alarm clocks for the house became affordable and then people started to carry time with them in the form of watches. What had once been stationary became mobile and then became the thing against which everything was measured. Time, an artificial construct, began to rule people’s daily lives.

Time became a commodity – something which could be measured and compared. People talk about using time or wasting it or making the most of it. There are time and motion studies where every minute has to have a purpose. The concern with matching time solely to productivity is that doing something useful is often seen as the only use of time, whether that’s working in an office or cleaning the floor, whereas wasting time tends to refer to the more joyful or relaxing aspects of life. But resting or taking the time to look around or being fully in the moment or daydreaming is often where beauty lies and ideas form. And the truth is that time will pass whether you measure it or not.

Can we even truly measure time? How can we compare the one day that a mayfly lives with the 80 years of a human life, the 200-year-old whale whose world has filled with the sounds of ours, a redwood tree that has stood for a thousand years, the millions of years of a mountain and the billions of years of a star? Ten thousand years ago the Sahara was

green, and a collision from 50 million years ago is still giving the Himalayas growing pains. How can we make sense of these different expanses of time? It is magnificent and aweinspiring. It is arguably the fourth dimension that we can’t see but can only grasp as it goes flying by.

Time is now. It also lies the past where it is untouchable and in the future which may never come to pass. Time is ultimately made of moments just as our lives are. Time is what we make of it. We are all made of stardust that keeps forming and re-forming, making connections across time and space. We are time.

“How we measure time often reflects the societies we live in.”

Vitebsky Railway Station, St Petersburg. © Denis Vdovin from Unsplash

On (railway) time

David Spaven FRSGS, railway author and historian

Before Queen Victoria’s reign, “time was a local matter… measured in accordance with the twenty-four-hour rotation of the earth.” Early railways, opened in the 1820s and 30s, deferred to local time, and as Simon Bradley records in his seminal volume, The Railways: Nation, Network and People, “The first editions of Bradshaw [the national timetable] thus seem to show that trains were taking significantly longer to go from west to east than make the return journey, though in reality the duration was often the same. It was a confusing basis on which to plan and operate a railway timetable, doubly so once lines began to join up.”

Tackling this problem, an early adopter of standardised time (or ‘Greenwich Time’) was the Great Western Railway, whose main line from London (Paddington) to Plymouth opened in 1840. The route ran almost directly from east to west, resulting in a local time difference of 20 minutes. And as the network expanded, so more and more railway companies abandoned local time. Following a request from the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway (opened in 1842), the two cities adopted standard time on 29th January 1848. And Bradley notes that: “The clocks of Greenock, Perth and Stirling converted the same day. Thus did London time become Scottish national time.” In due course ‘London Time’ became a reminder of the growing power of the capital, after a period during which the original Greenwich Time had come to be referred to, in ordinary speech, as ‘Railway Time’.

Underlining the importance of standardised time, railway companies erected giant clocks at major stations, some raised up high in a clock tower at one end, as at St Pancras in London, and in Scotland at Dundee West (sadly, demolished in 1966 to make way for new roads) and Oban (demolished in 1987, to be replaced by a grimly utilitarian modern station building).

Time standardisation, driven by the railways, changed people’s perception of time across Britain, Bradley referring to “a revolution in the head, a sense of the forceful urgency of the present day, before which old customs and attitudes were doomed and impotent.”

Even on the country’s north-western periphery – “where older mentalities persisted” – recognition of standard time took hold before long. This was illustrated by a riot in 1883 at the west coast harbour of Strome Ferry, the then terminus of the railway from Inverness.

“Time standardisation, driven by the railways, changed people’s perception of time across Britain.”

Fishing vessels could not reach Strome with their Saturday catch, for Monday’s London market, until late that day or early on Sunday. The only way of getting to market on time was by forwarding the traffic by train on the Sabbath, but this fuelled resentment among the strict Sabbatarians in and around Strome. On Sunday 3rd June, 150 local protestors (some arriving by boat) took control of Strome pier and the adjacent station, preventing a special train being loaded with fish – and held their ground for the rest of the day, despite the arrival of police reinforcements. But: “On the stroke of twelve the demonstrators quietly withdrew, and their boats were soon swallowed in the darkness of the loch. It was Monday.”

That episode feels very distant now – and would have felt so even in 1965, when British Rail finally switched to the 24hour clock – yet it was way back in 1884 when the Canadian Pacific Railway had first adopted the system.

Soon the arguments for time standardisation throughout the fast-growing rail network became unanswerable – reinforced by the arrival of the electric telegraph (patented in its core future form in 1845), which enabled time signals to be transmitted simultaneously; and by the 1847 endorsement from the Railway Clearing House, a central hub which cleared and allotted payment to the different railway companies for through carriage of passengers and goods across company boundaries. And so by 1852, Greenwich Time was being used nationwide. Strangely, however, it would not be until 1880 that the government legislated on the establishment of a single standard time and a single time zone for Britain.

But no matter how you describe railway time – 24-hour clock or 12-hour clock – if your train is late, it’s late.

FURTHER READING

The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley (2015, Profile Books)

The Oxford Companion to British Railway History edited by Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle (2003, Oxford University Press)

The Skye Railway by John Thomas (1977, David & Charles)

A new paperback edition of David Spaven’s Scotland’s Lost Branch Lines: Where Beeching Got It Wrong is due to be published by Birlinn in June (birlinn.co.uk/product/scotlandslost-branch-lines-2).

The Good Ancestor

Roman Krznaric, author

The Tug of War for Time

The national liberation struggles of the twentieth century were fought with guns. The intergenerational liberation struggle of the twenty-first century is a battle of ideas, taking the form of a titanic tug of war for time. On one side, six drivers of short-termism threaten to drag us over the edge of civilisational breakdown. On the other, six ways to think long are drawing us towards a culture of longer time horizons and responsibility for the future of humankind.

The six ways to think long are the core cognitive skills for becoming a good ancestor: a set of fundamental attitudes, beliefs and ideals. They fall into three clusters. Imagining the future is grounded in Deep-Time Humility and developing a Transcendent Goal for humanity. Caring about the future requires a Legacy Mindset and a sense of Intergenerational Justice. Planning for the future beyond our own lifetimes is a skill emerging from Cathedral Thinking and Holistic Forecasting. None of them alone will be enough to create a long-term revolution of the human mind. But together –and when practised by a critical mass of people and organisations – a new age of long-term thinking could arise out of their synergy.

Although the drivers of short-termism, which appear throughout the book, are a formidable force, their victory in the tug of war for time is by no means guaranteed. Contrary to popular opinion, long-term thinking may be one of the greatest unsung talents of our species. We don’t just think fast and slow, as Daniel Kahneman has taught us – we also think short and long. The capacity to think and plan over long timespans is wired into our brains and has enabled monumental feats, such as the construction of London’s sewers after the Great Stink of 1858, the public investment of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the dedicated struggles of anti-slavery campaigners and advocates for women’s rights.

“Long-term thinking may be one of the greatest unsung talents of our species.”

As we will discover, it is the secret evolutionary ingredient that gives the six ways to think long their potential and power.

How can the imaginative

leap to long-term thinking be transformed into actions that reshape the contours of history? This question is the focus of Part Three, which tells the stories of a pioneering band of ‘time rebels’ who are struggling against the rampant shorttermism of the modern world and attempting to put the six ways into practice. They include the global climate strike movement led by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, as well as organisations such as Extinction Rebellion in the UK and Our Children’s Trust in the US. Other rebels can be found in the radical regenerative economics movement and among advocates for citizens’ assemblies, from Spain to Japan.

They are up against some formidable opponents, including those trying to hijack long-term thinking for self-serving ends, especially in the financial sector: as the former head of investment bank Goldman Sachs Gus Levy once proudly declared, “We’re greedy, but long-term greedy, not shortterm greedy.” Moreover, the time rebels must confront the stark reality that some of the fundamental ways we organise society, from nation states and representative democracy to consumer culture and capitalism itself, are no longer appropriate for the age we live in. They were invented centuries ago in the Holocene – the 10,000-year geological era of stable climate during which human civilisation thrived – at a time when our planet could largely absorb the ecological impact of material progress, the costs and risks of new technologies and the strains of population growth. That epoch has now passed as we move into the Anthropocene, the new era in which humans have created an unstable earth system threatened by ecological breakdown.

This is the classic QWERTY problem writ large: just as the layout of our inefficient QWERTY keyboards was actually designed in the 1860s to prevent mechanical typewriter keys jamming by placing commonly used letters far apart, so we are lumbered with institutions that were designed for the challenges of a different age. It is virtually impossible to escape the conclusion that if we want to create a world fit for both current and future generations, we will need to profoundly rethink and redesign core aspects of society –how our economies function, how our politics works, what our cities look like – and ensure they are underpinned by

new values and goals to secure the longterm thriving of humankind. And we have precious little time in which to do it. Is there an ideal time horizon to which we should aspire in the tug of war against short-termism? This book proposes a hundred years as a minimum threshold for long-term thinking. This is the current length of a long human lifespan, taking us beyond the ego boundary of our own mortality so we begin to imagine futures that we can influence yet not participate in ourselves. It extends much further than the maximum five or ten-year outlook found in corporations, towards the time horizon of actions like planting an oak tree, which will mature long after we have gone. We can also learn from those with a longer vision. The seventh-generation decision-making of many indigenous peoples encompasses a timespan of nearly two centuries. The Long Now Foundation in California is even more ambitious and sets the time horizon at 10,000 years, on the grounds that the first human civilisations emerged ten millennia ago at the end of the last Ice Age, so we should develop an equal perspective into the future. We need to be adventurous with our temporal imaginations. At the very least, when you aim to think ‘long-term’, take a deep breath and think ‘a hundred years and more’.

Humankind as an Eyeblink in Cosmic History

“This book proposes a hundred years as a minimum threshold for long-term thinking.”

Our species, at this moment in history, is suffering from an acute crisis of perspective. Our time horizons are rapidly shrinking towards a narrow window of seconds, hours and days, just when our survival depends on broadening our temporal vision. As we busily check our phones, existential threats ranging from bioterrorism to drone warfare may be lurking just over the horizon, while sea levels rise slowly and imperceptibly, threatening to engulf our coastal cities. How

can we extend our minds and gain a visceral sense of a longer now that helps divert our civilisational path from the perils of shorttermism?

An essential starting point is to develop a sense of deep-time humility, where we grasp the insignificance of our own transitory existence in relation to the vast time frame of cosmic history, freeing our minds to look both far into the past and beyond our lifetimes into a distant future. We must accept the reality that our personal stories from birth to death, and all the achievements and tragedies of human civilisation, will barely register in the annals of cosmological time.

Diverting our gaze from a funnelled focus on the present to embrace deep time requires an immense imaginative leap. This chapter explores the different ways, over the past two centuries, that humankind has risen to this challenge. Yet first we need to confront the major barrier standing in the way, which has been fuelling our culture of short-termism for more than half a millennium: the tyrannical rule of the clock since the Middle Ages.

This article is extracted with permission from The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World by Roman Krznaric, published in 2020 by WH Allen, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.

Image from Shutterstock

Life/times

Professor Helge Jordheim, Professor of Cultural History, University of Oslo

“The times they are a-changin’.” Bob Dylan sang about the whirlwind pace of changing political times, but today we start to recognise that humans insert themselves into all kinds of timescales. Recast as ‘geological agents’, humans enter into the millions of years of geological time, even giving name to a new geochronological epoch, the Anthropocene. At the same time, populations across the globe outlive the social and cultural structures put in place to care for much younger populations, whereas genetic engineering, quantum physics, and artificial intelligence envision multiple possible futures that are radically out of sync with existing sense and sensibilities.

For more than 250 years, ‘history’ has stood as the name for the predominant way of organising past, present, and future in Western, and from the mid-19th century onward increasingly in non-Western, societies. Collective social time has been conceived, by historians and others, as a movement from the past, through the present, and into an open and endless future, at which all our hopes and aspirations are directed. At present, however, indications abound that the all-pervasive temporal structure called ‘history’ is losing its purchase on the multiple forms of time that make up reality. Whereas history as the succession of events in causal or non-causal relationships continues to unfold, ‘history’ as a way of organising knowledge and experiences of past, present, and future – that is, as a way of organising time on a collective scale –might just have reached the end of the line. Historical time, encompassing around 6,000 years at the most, organised around periodisations like ‘Middle Ages’, ‘modernity’ or ‘post-war’, and temporal concepts like ‘growth’, ‘recession’ or ‘crisis’ cannot account for what it means to be a ‘geological agent’ or that mankind is growing incessantly older, on a global scale.

geological, even cosmological change, but it is also a claim about history – about the past, present, and future of human societies. The idea of mankind as the ‘sixth mass extinction event’ evokes spatio-temporal scales that radically disrupt ‘history’ as we know it: on the one hand, a scale of time that places mankind – us as humans – at sixth spot in a series of events that go back 540 million years; and on the other hand, a scale of life, from non-organic to organic to human, that aligns us with asteroids and volcanic eruptions, having similarly devastating effects on all Earth’s living species.

“We need a new way of thinking about the passing of time.”

In 2017, 15,364 scientists from 184 countries issued a warning (the second) that mankind has unleashed a ‘sixth mass extinction event’, wherein many current lifeforms could be annihilated by the end of this century. Large populations of vertebrates, invertebrates and plants are dying out. In the last 540 million years there have been five other such events. The fifth took place 66 million years ago and was caused by the impact of an asteroid; the third and biggest (a volcanic eruption) happened 251 million years ago and killed 96% of life on Earth. The ‘sixth mass extinction event’ is happening now and is caused by human overpopulation and overconsumption. This is a claim about biological,

In other words, we need a new way of thinking about the passing of time. An alternative theory of history will have to begin by fundamentally reconsidering the connection between history and life. In the examples above, climatic, demographic, and technoscientific changes are linked by the ways they disrupt and transform life – understood as a form of temporal duration. Life as time. While other species die out at an unprecedented pace, humans live longer, but are outlived by forms of technoscientific life that may last in eternity. To account for these changes in the temporal configuration of the present, we need to break the hold of ‘history’ as it has been developed and upheld from the late 18th century onward and introduce a new way of understanding pasts, presents, and futures in human societies, in the broader context of the geological, the biological, and the cosmological. Each order represents a nexus of time scales and life scales, which become entangled with each other as well as with social and political events, processes, and experiences to form temporal arrangements at work in the world. To understand these temporal arrangements, we can no longer content ourselves with a theory of history, but we need to proceed to a theory of life as time, lifetime, or in plural, lifetimes.

FURTHER READING

Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Times by Reinhart Koselleck (1989, MIT Press)

Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present by Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shyrock (2011, The University of California Press)

Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines by Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R Ehrlich and Rodolfo Dirzo (2017, PNAS 114 (30))

Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It

Oliver Burkeman, author

The average human lifespan is absurdly terrifyingly insultingly short. Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death. But you? Assuming you live to be 80 you’ll have had about 4,000 weeks.

Certainly, you might get lucky: make it to 90 and you’ll have had almost 4,700 weeks. You might get really lucky, like Jeanne Calment, the French woman who was thought to be 122 when she died in 1997, making her the oldest person on record. Calment claimed she could recall meeting Vincent van Gogh – she mainly remembered his reeking of alcohol –and she was still around for the birth of the first successfully cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, in 1996. Biologists predict that lifespans within striking distance of Calment’s could soon become commonplace. Yet even she got only about 6,400 weeks.

Expressing the matter in such startling terms makes it easy to see why philosophers from ancient Greece to the present day have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence. We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action. “This space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily, and so swiftly, that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live,” lamented Seneca, the Roman philosopher in a letter known today under the title On the Shortness of Life. When I first made the 4,000 weeks calculation, I felt queasy; but once I’d recovered, I started pestering my friends, asking them to guess – off the top of their heads without doing any mental arithmetic – how many weeks they thought the average person could expect to live. One named a number in the six figures. Yet as I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six figure number of weeks – 310,000 – is the approximate duration of all human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia. On almost any meaningful timescale, as the contemporary

philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, “we will all be dead any minute.”

It follows from this that time management, broadly defined, should be everyone’s chief concern. Arguably, time management is all life is. Yet the modern discipline known as time management – like its hipper cousin productivity –is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays. These things matter, to some extent, no doubt, but they’re hardly all that matters. The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder. The world also seems to be heading to hell in a handcart – our civic life has gone insane, a pandemic has paralysed society, and the planet is getting hotter and hotter – but good luck finding a time management system that makes any room for engaging productively with your fellow citizens, with current events, or with the fate of the environment. At the very least, you might have assumed there’d be a handful of productivity books that take seriously the stark facts about the shortness of life, instead of pretending that we can just ignore the subject.

“Philosophers have taken the brevity of life to be the defining problem of human existence.”

But you’d be wrong.

So this book is an attempt to help redress the balance – to see if we can’t discover, or recover, some ways of thinking about time that do justice to our real situation: to the outrageous, brevity and shimmering possibilities of our 4,000 weeks.

article is extracted with permission from

This

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, published in 2021 by Bodley Head.

The A-to-Z of ‘temporal windows’

Richard Fisher, journalist and author; Xander Balwit, writer and artist

We want to know - where are the world’s best places to feel a sense of deep time? We’ve compiled an A-Z of some we know, but we’d love to hear where you’d nominate. Email us at thelongviewbook@gmail.com!

Acropolis of Athens. This ancient citadel is one of the most recognisable archaeological sites representing Western antiquity. Still splendid millennia later, it stands as a reminder of both the fragility and grandeur of great civilisations.

Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site. This list would be incomplete without a site acknowledging humanity’s entrance into the atomic age. Used as a place to test A-bombs on naval vessels, this eerily beautiful lagoon holds traces of residual radioactivity whose effects will linger for generations to come.

Celilo Falls. Carved out by repeated floods following the melt of the world’s last global ice age, this horseshoe-shaped falls in Oregon is striking for not only its geologic history but also its socio-cultural one. A location of enormous significance for native populations, Celilo Falls has been at the centre of a battle between industrial and indigenous time-views for centuries.

Dingle Peninsula. The early Christian sites on the Dingle Peninsula jump out like strange stone beehives against the arid landscape. The most famous of these, the Gallarus Oratory, was built in 700CE. For millennia, peace-seeking monks pursued a tranquil and secluded existence there working as scholars and craftsmen.

Easter Island Moai. Located on Easter Island, in one of the most remote places on Earth, are nearly 1,000 statues of monolithic stone figures. Both the remoteness of the location and the anonymity behind the construction of the Moai have beguiled people since the Island’s discovery in 1722.

“If ever a place inspired an explosion of temporal history, it would be here.”

Herodotus Basin. Located between Cyprus, Crete and Egypt is an area of seafloor that scientists think is a remnant of the Tethys Ocean, which existed at the time of the Pangaea supercontinent. This area, known as the Herodotus Basin, is between 315 and 365 million years old. This ancient piece of oceanic crust is a stark reminder that while the Earth appears a static rock, it is actually continuously changing at rates imperceptible to us.

Ise Grand Shrine. In The Long View, you can read about how followers of the Shinto faith in Ise, Japan, have ritualistically rebuilt their grand shrine 66 times, in a practice that has lasted for 1,300 years. There are around 80,000 shrines around Japan, known as jinja, but the one at Ise is particularly important and marks the end of a pilgrimage route walked by foot.

Jodrell Bank Observatory. Located in northwest England, Jodrell Bank is one of the world’s leading radio astronomy observatories. If you contemplate deep time long enough, you will doubtlessly zoom out and consider the age of the Earth and perhaps even that of the entire Universe.

Knossos, Crete. After the Acropolis of Athens, the site of Knossos is Greece’s most popular tourist attraction. Said to contain a legendary labyrinth, the ancient palace of Knossos speaks to the potency of mythos in the comprehension of deep time. A place where archaeology meets lore, Knossos reflects a two-fold approach to interpreting our relationship to previous civilisations through stories and science.

Lake Baikal. Situated in the mountainous Russian region of Siberia, Lake Baikal is estimated to be between 25 and 30 million years old. It is not only the oldest lake in the world, but also the deepest, with a central basin going down to a depth of 1,642 metres. If that were not enough, Lake Baikal’s pristine waters are home to around 2,000 unique known species of animal that are not found anywhere else on Earth.

Millennium Seed Bank. The MSB is the world’s leading seed conservation programme, led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Containing 2.4 billion individual seeds representing a total of 40,020 different species of wild plants, the MSB is an extensive repository of genetic diversity and horticultural history. Should humanity ever face an existential global catastrophe, seed vaults such as this and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault may hold the secret to agricultural recovery.

Fleet Moss. Fleet Moss in North Yorkshire is a peat blanket bog that has been dated to the Neolithic period. As such, it is a material that bridges the ages. Galápagos Islands. It was his time visiting the Galápagos in 1835 that helped Charles Darwin formulate his theory of evolution by natural selection. This remote volcanic archipelago off the coast of Ecuador is the cradle of evolutionary history. Its flora and fauna are windows into deep time and common ancestry. If ever a place inspired an explosion of temporal history, it would be here.

Nyiragongo Volcano. There is nothing like a volcano to remind one of the volatility and animation of nature. Nyiragongo volcano, located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, contains the largest continuously active lava lake. One can imagine that staring into its 1.2km diameter summit caldera via satellite is akin to witnessing the violent bombardment that created the Earth.

Onkalo. Onkalo is a Finnish word for a cave or a hollow. Fittingly, it is the name for a giant tomb for Finland’s nuclear waste. While nuclear energy is incredibly efficient, it produces waste that remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Onkalo is a solution for storing this waste and protecting future people from its harm. A mausoleum for humanity’s malignant by-products, Onkalo is a place that will ask us to confront what kind of legacy we wish to leave for our descendants.

Pando. The Pando is an enormous and ancient organism. Much like the honey mushroom growing in the Malheur National Forest, the Pando is a living reminder that humans may more closely resemble the Ephemeroptera

Image by Simon Berger from Pixabay

Image by Eduart Bejko from Pixabay

Qin Shi Huang Mausoleum. The mausoleum holds China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died in 210BCE after conquering six warring states to create the first unified nation of China. Containing an army of lifelike terracotta warriors, this menagerie is an excellent example of the elaborate mortuary practices that speak to how we approach eternity and the afterlife. Breathtaking in its scope and detail, the mausoleum is an illustration of our yearning for posterity, a future that, if it does not contain us, contains our protectors.

Redwoods. Perhaps the most beautiful and famed forest in the world, the California redwoods are an old-growth forest of epic proportions. With trees that are descendants of a group of conifers (conebearing trees) that flourished more than 144 million years ago, to stand amongst them is to be transported back through time.

“To stand amongst them is to be transported back through time.”

Skara Brae. Another location from the archaeological canon, Skara Brae is a Neolithic Age site, consisting of ten stone structures, near the Bay of Skaill, Orkney. Likely inhabited around 3100–2500BCE, this site is remarkable for the glimpse it gives us of ancient domesticity. Rather than a labyrinth or citadel, Skara Brae is a collection of odd stone houses. Containing tools of daily life rather than weapons of warfare, Skara Brae erases the distance that we can feel when casting our minds across time. There, amongst the excavated buildings, it is not impossible to imagine the lives of distantly living people.

Tyrolean Alps. It was in the Tyrolean Alps, near the Tisenjoch pass, where the mummified body of Ötzi the ice man was found in 1991 by two German tourists. Ötzi, a well-preserved 5,000-year-old human corpse, is among the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century. Found with scattered bits of leather, plant fibre, animal hide, string, his axe, and an unfinished bow, Ötzi provides an unusually detailed peek into life in the Bronze Age. Much like how Skara Brae lets us look back into private life, the man sheathed in these glacial ridges lets us look back at ourselves.

Utrecht. Covering the many ways to expand one’s time-view, The Long View touches on participatory artworks and acts of continuation. One example can be found in the Dutch city of Utrecht. There, a poem is being written over many years, letter by letter, with different poets passing the baton between one another. Every Saturday at lunchtime, a stonemason in the city centre carves a new letter into a cubic block. Known as The Letters of Utrecht, the poem is currently about 100 metres long

Vitus Cathedral, Prague. This list would not be complete without a cathedral. In The Long View, Richard writes about how cathedral thinking is often held up as an example of our ancestors’ admirable long-term view. While ‘cathedralthinking’ speaks to a time of cyclical temporal imagining, wherein lives played out in a way that looked very similar across generations, the act of cathedral building is indeed an astonishing multi-generational feat. Founded in 1344, St Vitus Cathedral was constructed upon the site of the original

Romanesque rotunda and took nearly 600 years to complete. White Horse of Uffington. Also mentioned in The Long View is the White Horse of Uffington, a giant work of art created 3,000 years ago in Oxfordshire. Shaped like a horse and filled in with crushed chalk, the White Horse of Uffington is another long-term project that requires regular acts of maintenance that connect people through time. Every year, a group led by Chris Daniel of Long Now London returns to the horse to help ‘rechalk’ it.

Xochicalco Temple of the Feathered Serpent. In the ancient city of Xochicalco, Mexico, is a Mayan pyramid known as Xochicalco Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Replete with glyphs portraying jaguars and owls and stylistic elements of both Mayan and Teotihuacan civilisations, the temple is another archaeological site that strikes one as both profoundly familiar and distinctly archaic. While it may be challenging to imagine how these civilisations lived, their iconography is a symbolism all too familiar and resonant.

Yellowstone National Park. Another location striking for its geology is Yellowstone National Park. Comprising lakes, canyons, geysers, rivers and mountain ranges, the park contains such a diversity of physical topography that one cannot help but be overcome by the vastness and sublimity of the landscape.

Zeitpyramide. Begun in 1993, on the 1,200th anniversary of its host town Wemding, Germany, the Zeitpyramide is a work of public art intended to be a giant pyramid built from cubic concrete blocks that will take more than 1,000 years to be completed, in the year 3183. As of 2021, the first three of its 120 concrete blocks have been placed. While it may look simple now, the idea is that future generations will see it in its full form.

This article was extracted with permission from Richard Fisher’s blog, longviewer.substack.com.

Yellowstone National Park. Image by Adam Derewecki from Pixabay

Image by Suzy from Pixabay

Indigenous time

Professor Graham Harvey, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, The Open University

While there are thousands of Indigenous communities and cultures, many celebrate ‘Indigenous time’. This is not only a contrast with clock time; sometimes it is a contrast with calendar time. I once returned to an Indigenous culture centre on three consecutive days before the man who’d invited me to meet him was free of previous commitments. Perhaps this was a deliberate plan to give me time to get to know – and get to be known by – the land. Since land or country is a more important Indigenous organising concept than time, this seems possible. Certainly, however, it gave me time to begin thinking about Indigenous time knowledges.

Among the ramifications of time in Indigenous understandings, two seem particularly significant in Indigenous discourses and narratives. (I’m thinking here of all sorts of communicative media – from everyday conversations to ceremonial oratory, from initiatory teachings to Indigenous novels and future fiction, and more.) The first constellates ideas about tradition and origins. The second (which I’ll note more briefly) attends to futures.

learn from established and tested knowledge. Meanwhile, gesturing behind us to the future recognises that the future is slowly becoming visible as it emerges in each present moment.

Futures have a vital significance in Indigenous discourses. A pervasive theme among many Native Americans is that major decisions should take into account the wellbeing of the seventh future generation. What will be the impact of actions on future communities? Immediate gain alone cannot justify current actions.

Past and future thinking fuse in reflections on climate and species disasters. Many Indigenous communities have already survived disasters resulting from colonialism. Indigenous thinkers are therefore able to propose approaches that might aid resilience as their communities and all other existences face the challenges of a fast-emerging dangerous future.

“That seemingly innocent and obvious notion that the past is back behind us is not shared by all cultures.”

Indigenous cultures are often defined by reference to something called ‘tradition’. Too often this has been taken to mean ‘fixed, unchanging and unchangeable’ inherited rules, social structures and lifeways, matching a falsely imagined pre-colonial purity and reinforcing notions of static and “primitive inertia” (see Further Reading). However, although there are ceremonies, chants and stories that are supposed to be repeated precisely and ‘correctly’, tradition is better understood as a repository of protocols and processes to be applied adaptively in each new and emerging situation. It is generative of the kinds of creativity, adaptability and innovation that have enabled cultures and communities to survive and thrive. Tradition, therefore, is not to be located in the past but in the present and its openness to futures.

Another way to consider this is to play with the words ‘origins’ and ‘original’ – or ‘creation’ and ‘creative’. Indigenous communicators often deploy narratives about origins. What happened in earlier times, or in the earliest creation times, established good practices for all subsequent generations. Cosmic and terrestrial existences were given patterns or advice to follow. The sun, for instance, settled into the habit of journeying across the sky at a pace that allowed other beings to flourish. Animals, plants and humans were encouraged to learn appropriate etiquettes of respectful relationship. However, as powerful as origins stories and instructions are, they evolve over time because originality is expected. Creation is not fixed and past, but initiates creativity and originality.

Indigenous time, seen in this way, is not backwards looking. In fact, that seemingly innocent and obvious notion that the past is back behind us is not shared by all cultures. While I habitually gesture behind me when I mention the past, I have learnt among separate Indigenous communities that other people point forward to the past. The past is what we’ve experienced or been told about by historians and elders. It stretches out ahead of us to be surveyed when we want to

Much of Professor Harvey’s research focuses on the ‘new animism’ (or respectful relationality) among Indigenous people and environmentalist Pagans.

FURTHER READING

The death of Koro Paka: ‘Traditional’ Māori patriarchy by Brendan Hokowhitu (2008, The Contemporary Pacific Vol 20)

Indigeneity and performance by Stephanie N Teves (2018, Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies)

Totem Latamat at the Hidden Gardens, Glasgow during COP26. © John Cobb

Time travel in Taveuni

Kirsty Fisher, former RSGS Young Geographer project participant

Time is an interesting concept when sailing. On long passages, days tend to merge and hours are broken up by taking a watch, eating, fixing things and sleeping. Compared to day sailing – weaving your way along a coastline, tacking and gybing in close succession, and avoiding other boats –sailing on passages consists of many fewer manoeuvres. Often you can stay on the same tack for days instead of hours or minutes, and seeing other vessels becomes an exciting occasion. In this time, writing an hourly log is an important part of safety at sea, and without this, it would be easy to forget the hour at all!

In 2022, I was sailing around the world as Mate on a 72ft sailing yacht, taking part in a Cruising World Rally. Travelling between countries was as much part of the experience as actually getting there, and time seemed to slow down. Unlike taking a plane to the other side of the world and experiencing the acute effects of jetlag, time changes between countries were incremental. A good day’s tally on the log for us was around 180–200 nautical miles, equating to around one hour of time difference for every five days sailed.

“Crossing the Line essentially meant ‘time travelling’ into the following day.”

On passages, sunrise and sunset became very noticeable bookends of the day. As we stuck to a watch schedule, dinner was on the table roughly the same time each evening and we often noticed sunset creeping further away, enjoying being able to see what we were eating for a few extra minutes! Watching the sun rise and set are often overlooked in our busy lives at home or overshadowed by the streetlights in built-up areas, but at sea it became a ritual of everyday life to watch the sun go down.

One exception to this very gradual change of time was crossing the International Date Line on our way to Fiji from Bora Bora. The International Date Line runs through the mid Pacific Ocean, following roughly 180 degrees longitude, with the exception of curving around certain landmasses and political boundaries. It separates one calendar day from another, with countries on the west side of the Line being one calendar day ahead of those on the east. Sailing east to west as we were, crossing the Line essentially meant ‘time travelling’ into the following day.

On Monday 13th June, after nearly nine days at sea, we got close to the Fijian island of Taveuni and crossed the International Date Line. In a working week, you could say that having the ability to time travel forward and skip a Monday would be cause for celebration!

Celebrations are always welcome at sea, especially on a long passage, and crossing the International Date Line was no exception. We had very little wind and decided to stop the

boat and have a swim to cool down and celebrate. With a line out the back and at least one person on board (if you’ve seen Open Water 2 then you’ll know why I mention this!), we jumped into the Pacific with 5,000 metres of water below us. Our dip was followed by cake, tea and a toast to a Monday missed!

It was special to mark the occasion in this way, having been completely immersed in the routine of the passage. From our own everyday lives, it was a pertinent reminder of the geographical organisation of the world that always exists in the background, helping us make sense of it.

Thinking time

All images © Monika Deviat, Monika Deviat Photography, monikadeviatphotography.com

1. Powersurge. A close-up image of the powerful Helmcken Falls in Wells Gray Provincial Park. Mist from the falls is lit up by morning sunlight. | 2. Twilight Colours. Night-time recedes as the rising sun begins to lighten the sky and colour the faint clouds. Orion shines through the clouds above the Valley of Ten Peaks in Banff National Park. | 3. Fall Waterfall. Brilliant fall colours stand out against the burnt forests in Waterton Lakes National Park. The water was low in the river, creating small cascades over the rock steps. | 4. Another Midnight. The spring Milky Way rising over Ha Ling Mountain in Kananaskis. Light pollution from the town of Canmore lights up the side of the mountain. | 5. The Dance Over Banff. The Northern Lights dance over the town of Banff in the Canadian Rockies. | 6. Berg Lake Blues. During blue hour, low clouds float over Berg Lake and in front of Mount Robson, the tallest peak in the Canadian Rockies. | 7. Vermillion Rays. A combination of the right amount of clouds and the sun rising in a certain area behind Mount Rundle can create stunning light rays at sunrise. | 8. Space Time. A star trail shows the Earth’s rotation over time above a sandstone feature in Dinosaur Provincial Park. Polaris is in the centre of the concentric circles. | 9. Waterton Waves. Waterton Lakes National Park is known for wind, and the lakes often have white caps. The historic Prince of Wales Hotel stands on the hill in front of Bertha Peak. | 10. By the Wind. Wild winds blow snow across stacks of methane bubbles in ice at Abraham Lake. The strong winds are what allow visitors to see bubbles through the winter season, even after snowfalls.

A Bedouin world view

Professor John Briggs FRSGS, RSGS Chair

Over a 15-year period during the 1990s and early 2000s, I was involved in a multidisciplinary research programme in southern Egypt, along with colleagues from the University of Glasgow and Assiut University (Aswan Branch), now South Valley University in Aswan. The programme involved not only geographers, but also ecologists, botanists, environmental chemists and freshwater biologists, and its aim was to investigate the nature of a ‘new’ natural resource environment and how best to use it sustainably.

The ‘new’ natural resource base had been created by inundation of the Nile Valley after the construction of the High Dam at Aswan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The agricultural landscapes of the Nile Valley completely disappeared under water, and the Nubian inhabitants of the valley were relocated elsewhere in Egypt and Sudan. Water also inundated inland along the largely dry wadis of the Nile to the east of the former river channel, where water now reached up to 90km from the now inundated Nile Valley into what is hyperarid desert. Annually the water levels vary related to the inflow of water into Lake Nasser from Ethiopia and East Africa. As if from nowhere, the Bedouin communities of the Eastern Desert in Egypt found that they now had a new resource, water, available. This changed lives. The research programme was established to investigate the nature of this new resource base and its possible opportunities. The Government of Egypt was initially very interested in developing the Lake Nasser shorelands for agriculture, based largely on experience from the Nubian communities of the pre-inundation Nile Valley. But the new resource base was rather different, as it was subject to different flooding regimes from the valley, it had no build-up over millennia of Nile silt deposits which maintained the fertility of the soils in the Nile Valley, and the Nubian residents of the Nile Valley, with all their skills and experiences of settled

cultivation, had long gone. In their place were desert Bedouin communities, Ababda and Bishari, who now had a resource opportunity that they had never previously experienced. The research programme followed standard research and scientific methods, as we required a scientific rigour to what we were doing. However, as we increasingly engaged with the Bedouin communities of the region, and indeed got to know many of the Bedouin over the years, we started to find some of our western, scientific preconceptions being challenged in polite and interesting ways. We were increasingly being presented with alternative views of the environment, of geographic space, even of time –something one of my colleagues described as a Bedouin world view.

“We were increasingly being presented with alternative views of the environment, of geographic space, even of time.”

Initially, this started with discussions about how ownership, and especially ownership of scarce natural resources, worked. Given the environment, the main livelihood for Bedouin was herding camels, sheep and goats, and so access to grazing was of paramount concern. Ephemeral grazing of grasses was possible from time to time in the hills of the desert to the east after occasional short, sharp showers, and along the lake shore, but this resource was very unreliable. Hence, the main grazing resources came from trees. Around the shore of the inundating Lake Nasser, this was overwhelmingly tamarisk trees and bushes which, although high in salt content, provided a reliable source of feed, especially for camels. Away from Lake Nasser, the main sources of animal feed were desert varieties such as balanites trees and acacia trees of three varieties (Acacia nilotica, Acacia raddiana and Acacia ehrenbergiana). However, access to these resources was complex. The trees were not ‘owned’ by any individual or clan or tribe. They were seen rather as a gift from nature, but individuals were permitted to access the resources that the trees produced. But even this was not straightforward. On the same tree, one family or clan might have access to fallen leaves for their livestock; another family might have access only to shaken leaves; a third family might have access to any dead wood on the tree for fuel; and a fourth might have access to the resin produced by the tree and which has a small commercial value. Each family carefully respects these rights and would never transgress and take whatever is not theirs. If that happens, the offender

Wadi Rum. Image by Adri Marie from Pixabay

is subject to social, and therefore economic, ostracism from Bedouin society at large, which would make them extremely vulnerable in such a harsh environment. In such cases, the sheikh of the Ababda rules on the penalty. The whole system depends on trust, and breaking that trust is a serious matter. Interestingly, there were occasions when a family for whatever reasons fell on hard times, and there might be agreements among other families and clans to help them out by allowing that family access to resources which were not theirs. This was not a totally altruistic act, as there might be some point in the future when someone’s own family hit hard times, and so this arrangement was a kind of social security net. Things started to become more complicated when we began to talk about navigation and a sense of place in the desert. A significant part of our research programme was to understand how Bedouin managed their herds of camels and of sheep and goats in a resource-scarce environment, and how Bedouin found their way around what to our eyes seemed a relatively featureless landscape. Although there were many widely accepted geographic placenames in the desert shared by all Bedouin, many individual Bedouin also had their own specific geographies of space to inform their travels in the desert, giving names to locations often only with meaning to them and their immediate family or clan. Many of these locations were named after specific events related to their own experiences, which had no resonance with anyone outside their immediate families, for example ‘Place of Three Dead Camels’, ‘Hyena Place’, ‘Thornbush Problem’. There was one instance where the same location had three different names from three different families, none of which were apparently known to the others. Place and space, therefore, was very personalised, imbued with meanings specific to different families and clans.

location. The oldest of the Bedouin then asked us where we wanted to be, in Egypt or Sudan. Egypt of course was our reply. In that case, he said, you are in Egypt.

Early on in the research programme, we were interested in how Bedouin measured and understood distance. Most did not think in terms of kilometres but almost exclusively in terms of time taken to travel between two points. Nothing unusual here. However, we were not prepared for Bedouin talking about distance in terms of purpose of the journey, a concept that seemed quite alien to us researchers. An example given to us was that if someone wanted to check up routinely on some of his camels, he might take two hours to get there, perhaps using his donkey rather than a camel for transport. As it was a leisurely journey of no urgency, then he could take his time. If, on the other hand, someone else had passed his camels, identified by the brand on the neck, and noticed that two of them were unwell, then the journey was now urgent and he would travel by camel at speed. If there was ephemeral grazing suddenly available in the hills, then the sheep and goats would need to be taken there at speed. And so on. It was clear that the purpose of any journey was a key driver of distance in the minds of Bedouin.

“Most did not think in terms of kilometres but almost exclusively in terms of time taken to travel between two points.”

On one occasion, we followed the dry Wadi Allaqi upstream on fieldwork and we were eventually unsure exactly where we were. We knew that we were close to the Egypt–Sudan international border, but we did not know which side. There may be a distinctive straight line on a map to mark the border, but on the ground in the middle of the desert, there is nothing to indicate where Egypt ends and Sudan starts. For Bedouin, such borders are an absolute irrelevance. They do not even talk about ‘crossing the border’ – it simply does not exist in their world view. To us researchers, however, it very much does exist. Seeing some Bedouin in the distance, we went over and after going through the usual welcome rituals we asked whether we were in Egypt or Sudan at this

These experiences were without doubt fruitful but at times unnerving for all the researchers in the programme, both Egyptian and UK, to work with Ababda and Bishari Bedouin, and to have many of our preconceptions challenged. Western science has been a major driver of human advancement, but should also be humble enough to recognise that there are other ways of understanding and interpreting the world, not better or worse, but just different and just as valid in those particular geographic locations.

Image by Herbert Bieser from Pixabay

‘Weathering Extremes’ at Caerlaverock: reconstructing climate

Dr Richard Tipping and Dr Eileen Tisdall, University of Stirling; Morvern French and Stefan Sagrott, Historic Environment Scotland (HES)

‘Weathering Extremes’ was a research project jointly funded by HES and the Castle Studies Trust, in which we explored the impacts of huge storm surges on the landscape and the Medieval castles at Caerlaverock.

There are two Medieval castles at Caerlaverock, on the north shore of the Solway Firth, eight kilometres south of Dumfries. One was constructed in 1229–30; the other, inland, was begun in 1277. Today they are separated from the firth by 800 metres of salt marsh and, at low tide, by two kilometres of intertidal sand.

The rural setting and isolation give the castles a tranquil feel, and Caerlaverock is one of the most-visited HES properties. When they were built, the older castle stood right on the coast, only a few metres above the contemporary sea level; it had a ‘harbour’. The castles looked across the firth to the ‘auld enemy’ across the water in Cumbria. Indeed, the younger castle was besieged in 1300 by the ‘hammer of the Scots’, Edward I, described in rich detail at the time and brought to life in the interpretation centre at Caerlaverock. But Caerlaverock also faced an older, more implacable enemy – the sea itself.

In updating what was known about Caerlaverock for visitors, we revisited work we did 20 years ago. Then, we tentatively suggested that the older castle had been hit by storm surges, and that maybe this was why the younger castle was built (Brann 2004). But we never fully got to grips with what was happening on the coast itself, the old coastline being concealed beneath Castle Wood. New LiDAR images, detailed maps of the coastline, showed us what we’d only glimpsed before.

“Storm beaches are only created by very large storm surges.”

From the LiDAR images we identified a coastal landform known as a strandplain made up of a succession of storm beach ridges some 200m wide in total. The ridges are enormous, each traceable east–west for several hundred metres parallel to a low cliff, and each 10–20 metres wide. Some have preserved lowerlying lagoonal basins by trapping them during the surge, filled with redeposited mud. Ridges stand proud of these by some two metres; it’s still quite an effort to climb up one or two of these. The beaches are made of sand and gravel. Storm beaches are only created by very large storm surges; nothing like these form in the Solway today. They are unambiguous indicators of major storms, or perhaps a series of storms over a few weeks. They are invariably a result of a storm coinciding with a very high tide. A rough and minimal guide to the size of the surges comes from the altitudes of the lagoonal sediments: some of these exceeded contemporary high tides by 3–4 metres. At least one surge topped the cliff, eroded archaeological features,

and threw gravel 20 or so metres shoreward. It looked at first as if there’d been maybe six or seven such surges, but when we recorded the different rock types represented in the gravel we realised that ridges in the west were formed of different rock types to those in the east, and that we actually had two separate strandplains, side by side, formed at different times. We have evidence of at least 16 storm surges. Beaches in the west were older than those in the east. They formed as spits, extending eastward. Then at least one storm surge partially destroyed these earlier ridges, ripping into the Permian bedrock underlying these and lowering it by a metre and a half. Then the second strandplain had formed, the gravel composed of this bedrock to the virtual exclusion of rock types found in the earlier ridges. And this second strandplain formed, not as a series of spits, but from waves heading straight at the cliff – and the older castle. We hadn’t expected such wonderful preservation of these coastal features: as well as concealing the evidence, the centuries-old woodland had also protected it. We, with additional support from HES, dated the sediments in the oldest and youngest lagoons; we’re currently seeking funding to date all the events recorded. We used optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating because all the sediment is inorganic, working with Tim Kinnaird and Aayush Srivastava at the University of St Andrews. The earliest event is late Iron Age in date, formed around 200BC; the youngest formed around AD1560 as a final spit to seaward wrapped round both strandplains. But we think we have two clusters of storms, separated at present by an unknown interval. They both represent prolonged periods, when Atlantic westerly winds were much more vigorous than they are now, generated by a complex network of relationships between solar irradiance, the vigour of Atlantic Ocean circulation, the extent of Arctic sea-ice and atmospheric circulation. Workers have for decades sought to define such storm-rich periods along the Atlantic coast; recent syntheses of Medieval evidence include those by Brown (2015) and Griffiths (2015). Chronologies of dune sand construction are most frequently cited, but there is real uncertainty whether wind-blown sand is always a reliable indicator of climate change. This is just one reason why strandplains and storm beaches are so valuable; they are unambiguous.

But what of the Caerlaverock castles, facing the storms? We cored the sediments filling the moat and a network of negative features around the older castle. We found organic mud only in the quadrant furthest from the sea and sparingly elsewhere; silt and sand filled everywhere else. Jason Jordan and Busie Gisanrin at Coventry University undertook diatom analyses of the sediments; diatom species are sensitive to

Richard Tipping extracting a core in the moat of the ‘old’ castle.

© Stefan Sagrott

change and its impacts

different salinities. Radiocarbon dated and Bayesian-modelled sediment and diatom analyses combined to show that the surroundings of the older castle had been impacted on at least five occasions, around 1300, 1350, (tentatively) 1400, 1475 and 1545. These dates make us think that the second cluster of storm beaches formed south of the older castle began in the high Middle Ages. We still cannot say whether these surges forced abandonment of the older castle. They are later than construction of the new castle in 1277, but because the earliest recorded storm surge to impact the older castle inevitably post-dated construction of the moat in 1229–30, this may not have been the earliest impact. In a previously overlooked rectangular man-made basin west of the ‘bailey’, the earliest storm surge sediment signature was deposited soon after a radiocarbon date of cal AD1158–1265. Storm surges may even have reached the younger castle, inland but not significantly higher.

And the ‘harbour’ south of the older castle? This remains an enigma. We think from OSL dating that it was constructed at the same time as the older castle, but it can’t have been a harbour because its floor is higher than even spring tides reached then. It may never have been open to the sea because

FURTHER READING

“We hadn’t expected such wonderful preservation of these coastal features.”

sediment analyses showed that still-water sediment accumulated in it when, all around, storms raged.

What do we do with all these interpretations? For one, the palaeo-environmental data we have collected provides completely unsuspected insights into the vulnerability of this coast to past climatic impacts. Fairly diligent searching of the literature failed to detect this succession of events. Caerlaverock was home to the Maxwell family, very powerful magnates with rich documentation, yet no one seems to have noticed or mentioned what we found. When we can date all the storm surge events, we will have the most securely dated unambiguous record for Britain’s west coast and will be able to embed the events in an increasingly well-understood North Atlantic palaeo-climatic context. But perhaps more important, we can show visitors to Caerlaverock the physical evidence, encourage them to explore and reflect on what they can each do to limit what might be coming in the near-future.

Excavations at Caerlaverock Old Castle, Dumfries and Galloway, 1998-9 by M Brann (2004, Dumfries and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society)

Coasts of catastrophe? The incidence and impact of aeolian sand on British medieval coastal communities by PJ Brown (2015, European Journal of Post Classical Archaeologies Vol 5)

Medieval coastal sand inundation in Britain and Ireland by D Griffiths (2015, Medieval Archaeology Vol 59/1)

Weathering Extremes: Medieval Climate Change at Caerlaverock Castle: Final Report by R Tipping, E Tisdall et al (2022, www. castlestudiestrust.org/Caerlaverock-Castle.html)

Side-by-side of aerial photograph and visualisation of the LiDAR data with vegetation removed (Digital Terrain Model). © HES

A race against time: around the world in 80 days

Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence

“There is a bizarre announcement halfway through the evening meal: ‘You are reminded that it will be Monday again tomorrow.’”

It’s 21st November 1988, and Michael Palin and his TV film crew are on board the Neptune Garnet, a container ship bound for Los Angeles. They have just crossed the International Date Line: the transition from the eastern to the western hemisphere had to be watched on a satellite navigation screen, because, as Michael observed rather wistfully, no international corporation had yet thought to sponsor a row of Date Line marker buoys running down the length of the Pacific Ocean. The momentous event was over all too quickly: “At 8.20 precisely, longitude 180.00 E flashes for a second, then remorselessly moves onto 00.01 W.”

Next morning it is indeed Monday again. Michael is given a day off by his film director, and tries to while away the time in the library. But there’s a distinct lack of enthusiasm: “It’s as if no one has any confidence in a day we’ve had already.”

Michael’s mission, of course, is to emulate the journey described by Jules Verne in his 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Verne’s hero, Phileas Fogg, impulsively accepts a wager that he can’t circumnavigate the globe in under 80 days, and strides out of The Reform Club in London’s Pall Mall with his trusty manservant, Passepartout, and a portmanteau stuffed with twenty thousand pounds in cash.

had to admit defeat when he got to Singapore to find his ship, quite literally, had sailed, which resulted in a dash by motorboat to catch up with it at three in the morning. But by strange coincidence, it was only when Michael got back to Britain on the 79th day that he felt real disaster staring him in the face. On a tube train in central London, a suspicious package had triggered a bomb scare. For a few minutes, everyone’s lives, let alone their journey, hung in the balance. His relief on reaching The Reform Club could not have been less than Fogg’s own.

But Michael was by no means the first person to set off in Fogg’s footsteps. In 1888, Elizabeth Jane Cochran, an American journalist working for The New York World, was racking her brains for a new article when a crazy idea occurred to her. She needed a vacation: why not take a trip around the world, and beat the fictional record of Phileas Fogg? Her editor, Joseph Pulitzer, was discouraging:

“‘It is impossible for you to do it,’ was the terrible verdict. ‘In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone, you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes. Besides, you speak nothing but English, so there is no use talking about it; no one but a man can do this.’

‘Very well,’ I said angrily. ‘Start the man, and I’ll start the same day for another newspaper and beat him.’”

“Next morning it is indeed Monday again.”

Respectful of the fact that air travel was non-existent in the late 1800s, Michael Palin has restricted himself to transport by road, rail and sea. Despite this, his progress is so fast that about half-way through his Pacific voyage he notes that he is suffering from ‘ship lag’; he has put his watch forward 14 times since crossing into France exactly 60 days ago.

By contrast, in Jules Verne’s story, the International Date Line is still a thing of the future, and putting his watch forward is something that Passepartout steadfastly refuses to do. At Suez he encounters Fix, an undercover detective who suspects Fogg of being a thief, and they disagree about the time:

“‘I see how it is,’ said Fix. ‘You have kept London time, which is two hours behind that of Suez. You ought to regulate your watch at noon in each country.’

‘I regulate my watch? Never!’

‘Well then, it will not agree with the sun.’

‘So much the worse for the sun, monsieur. The sun will be wrong, then!’”

As a result, when Fogg arrives back in London, he believes that he has been travelling for 81 days and has lost his bet. But by travelling eastwards, he has gained four minutes for every one of the Earth’s 360 degrees of longitude: in other words, an entire day. A madcap rush to The Reform Club gets him there in the nick of time, just as those members who had bet heavily on his failure are planning how to spend their winnings.

No such confusion for Michael Palin, although he nearly

It was another year before Elizabeth, travelling under her chosen alias of Nellie Bly, was suddenly given permission to go. She had less than a day to prepare, and her packing was frugal: when she departed New York on 14th November 1889 she took only one dress and one coat, which she wore; all other essentials, including an ink stand and writing paper, had been squashed into a hand satchel. She was instructed to send regular telegrams back to her editor, and assured that her travel expenses would be paid for. Arriving in London via steamship and train, Nellie learned that her journey had come to the attention of Jules Verne himself, and that he wished to meet her when she reached his home town of Amiens. By a crackling fire in the author’s sitting room, with a white Angora cat rubbing around her knees, she asked him where he got the idea for his novel.

“‘I got it from a newspaper,’ was his reply. ‘I took up a copy of Le Siècle one morning, and found in it a discussion and some calculations showing that the journey around the world might be done in eighty days. The idea pleased me, and while thinking it over it struck me that in their calculations they had not called into account the difference in the meridians and I thought what a dénouement such a thing would make in a novel, so I went to work to write one.’”

Contemporary board game inspired by Nellie Bly’s travels.

Michael Palin boarding the Venice-Simplon Orient Express at Victoria Station. Image from themichaelpalin.com

Verne allowed Nellie to see the manuscript that he was currently working on; she admired the neatness of his writing, and the simplicity of the study in which he worked. Then he showed her a wall map on which he had planned Fogg’s route; he took out a pencil and drew in the places where Nellie’s own route differed. “If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands,” he assured her.

Despite the detour to visit Jules Verne, so much of Nellie’s journey went exactly to plan that she found herself yearning for a little more excitement.

Shivering beneath a single blanket on a draughty sleeper train through Europe, she wished she had been passing that way a week before: “Just in the very same place that we were traveling through, Italian bandits had attacked the train and I thought, with regretful envy, if the passengers then felt the scarcity of blankets they at least had some excitement to make their blood circulate.” On a ship in the Malacca Strait, boredom struck again:

“There were many stories told about the straits being once infested with pirates, and I regretted to hear that they had ceased to exist, I so longed for some new experience.”

In Hong Kong, however, such thoughts evaporated. At the P&O shipping office, the agent told Nellie some news that made her heart sink:

“‘You are going to lose it,’ he said with an air of conviction.

‘Lose it? I don’t understand. What do you mean?’ I demanded, beginning to think he was mad.

‘Aren’t you having a race around the world?’ he asked, as if he thought I was not Nellie Bly.

‘Yes; quite right. I am running a race with Time,’ I replied.

‘Time? I don’t think that’s her name.’”

boarded the SS Oceanic, she found that all was not lost: the captain had taken her cause to heart, and told her he would bet every cent he had in the bank that he would return her to American soil ahead of time. The ship’s engineer even chalked a motto onto the engines:

“For Nellie Bly, We’ll win or die.”

With horror, Nellie learned that she had a rival. Another journalist, Elizabeth Bisland, had been sent by Cosmopolitan magazine on a similar race around the world. She had set off at the same time as Nellie, but was travelling west. Their paths had probably crossed a few days ago. While Elizabeth was believed to be making good time, Nellie knew that she herself would be delayed in Japan for five days until a ship arrived to take her across the Pacific.

But Nellie was philosophical. She sailed to Yokohama, and for five days immersed herself in the beauty of Japan’s flowers, forests, temples and tea-houses. She admired the clothes and customs of the local people, and regretted only that she had no camera with which to photograph them. When she

“Nellie learned that her journey had come to the attention of Jules Verne himself.”

Despite several days of storms, the Oceanic anchored in San Francisco a day earlier than scheduled. Then, poised to disembark, Nellie learned that the doctor on board, whose duty it was to produce a clean bill of health for the passengers, had left the official document behind in Yokohama. Until it arrived via another ship, which would take two weeks, no one could leave. Nellie’s desperation provoked another search of the vessel, and the paper was found.

With success almost guaranteed, Nellie found that she was a new celebrity and the last leg of her race turned into a joyful homecoming. A fast train had been chartered by The New York World, and she was whisked across the breadth of North America in record time. On 25th January 1890, when she jumped onto the platform in Jersey City, a joyful roar went up from a throng of spectators and the boom of cannons could be heard from New York Harbour.

It was 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes since Nellie had set out on her journey. A telegram of congratulations had already arrived from Jules Verne. Her rival, Elizabeth Bisland, had missed a connection and was still at sea; she would arrive four days later. Nellie was euphoric: “I took off my cap and wanted to yell with the crowd, not because I had gone around the world in seventy-two days, but because I was home again.”

FURTHER READING

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne (1873)

Around the World in Seventy-two Days by Nellie Bly (1890)

Around the World in 80 Days by Michael Palin (1989)

Jules Verne, by Étienne Carjat.

Illustration of Nellie Bly’s reception in Jersey City, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News (1890).

Nellie Bly. Image from US Library of Congress.

The Long View

Richard Fisher, journalist and author

Future generations

“By embracing the long view, we can learn to navigate through the challenges we face this century.”

When my daughter Grace was born, it occurred to me that she could live to see the 22nd century. She’ll be 86, which is not improbable with advances in healthcare and longevity. Sometimes, I imagine her on New Year’s Eve, welcoming 2100 with her own family as the fireworks explode in the sky, loved ones embrace, and Auld Lang Syne is sung. But what kind of world will she be welcoming? Throughout my career as a journalist, I have encountered this date – 2100 – within various news stories, reports or forecasts, but they are rarely celebratory:

• Rising seas and wild weather threaten to drown cities by 2100

• Humanity has a one in six chance of extinction by the end of the century

• Nearly half the planet’s species could be wiped out by 2100

• Automation will leave humans jobless by the 22nd century

A worsening world?

The year 2100 is so often depicted as a milestone within a worsening world – embroiled in climate catastrophe, biodiversity collapse and technological disruption. Meanwhile, we face a litany of invisible short-termist incentives and deterrents that have come to influence business strategy, political policies, media coverage and even the choices we make as individuals.

A long view can help humanity

However, I do not believe that this should be cause for helplessness or resignation. By embracing the long view, we can learn to navigate through the challenges we face this century, as well as recognise and overcome the temporal stresses that trap us in the moment. With a more ‘longminded’ perspective, we can approach the future as a place filled with autonomy and choice, a place of branching possibilities.

During the course of writing The Long View, I encountered a growing number of long-minded individuals, organisations, academics, foundations and politicians who are converging on the belief that it’s possible to unlock a longer-term perspective.

From long-standing participatory rituals to academic movements created out of fear of looming existential catastrophe, myriad ‘long views’ have emerged independently in various cultures, practices and faiths around the world. While they differ in their approaches, they share the goal of extending the mind across time: asking that we think beyond ourselves and consider the plight of future generations. Some approaches to long-mindedness are rooted in

abstract philosophical calculations, like the ‘long-termists’ concerned over the sheer scale of the unborn. Quantitatively minded thinkers such as these tend to urge that we take a view of the long-term future wherein we try to maximise the wellbeing of the people living there. It is a view rooted in trade-offs, economic principles and thought experiments.

We can learn from our predecessors

While this approach promises a novel way of seeing our ethical priorities, it does not represent the only way to think long-term. Long-mindedness, to me, is broader than a calculation about the hypothetical unborn, and should be grounded in the relationships we hold today and with our predecessors. This belief is echoed by many other approaches to long-mindedness, such as the ones you find in various spiritual practices. In Zoroastrianism, practitioners keep their faith alive by protecting an everlasting flame; and in the Shinto faith, followers rebuild their grand Jingu shrine in a practice that has lasted for over 1,300 years. Other more secular traditions exist as well, from the chalking of the White Horse of Uffington to a poem being written in the streets of Utrecht one letter at a time every Saturday at lunchtime.

Ultimately, long-mindedness has many expressions, but the ones that typically move us the most are those that can help us see our connection with people across time. By considering our chain of ancestry stretching forward and backward in time, future generations cease to be strangers.

This personal relationship with time is a thread that runs throughout The Long View. Through our generational ties –past, present and future – it is possible to extend one’s perspective far beyond the moment, even beyond one’s own lifespan. It is my belief that we can use this extended perspective for the betterment of future generations.

This article was extracted with permission from The Long View by Richard Fisher, published in 2023 by Wildfire in hardback and as an e-book, with a paperback version planned for 2024.

Inspired by research during a fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, Richard aimed to understand the roots of the world’s short-termist predicament, the history and psychology of how we think about time and the future, and the philosophy and ethics of the long term. But it was also a book inspired by more personal experiences.

Image from Shutterstock

41% forestry cut will torpedo net zero

George Anderson, PR & Communications Officer, Woodland Trust Scotland

The Scottish Government recognises we need more trees and sets ambitious woodland creation targets. Yet it is proposing to slash £32M from the public money that drives the forestry sector, scuppering any chance of meeting those targets.

Society cannot suddenly stop all greenhouse gas emissions. Countries are not signing up to zero emission targets, they are signing up for net zero targets. We need to produce fewer greenhouse gases while also capturing some already in the atmosphere.

Trees are expected to do much of the heavy lifting. They are the ultimate carbon capture and storage machines. Woods and forests absorb atmospheric carbon and lock it up for centuries. The entire ecosystem plays a role, including the living wood, roots, leaves, deadwood, surrounding soils and associated vegetation.

It makes absolute sense then that the Scottish Government has increased its woodland creation targets annually as a key element of Scotland’s commitment to be net zero by 2045. Unfortunately, the amount of new woodland created has fallen over each of the last five years. The proposed cut will only serve to make the gap between targets and delivery ever wider.

It takes a very long time for a tree to grow to maturity, so forestry does not fit the mould of most other business, investment or commercial lending models. The bulk of costs come right at the start of the cycle – in ground preparation, fencing and management of grazing animals – several decades before any payday can be expected. As a result, public money is needed as a catalyst before large-scale woodland creation happens. This has been the case for over a century since Britain’s lack of trees was identified as a problem after WWI. Whether it is a commercial spruce plantation, a native woodland for nature conservation or a shelter belt on a farm or croft, this public money comes to land managers in Scotland today via the Forestry Grant Scheme.

The Forestry Grant Scheme is pivotal in driving the woodland creation the Government says it wants, as well as maintenance of existing woods. The announcement in December that it faces a 41% cut was a shock.

Scotland has better tree cover than the rest of the UK but is poorly wooded compared to most of Europe. Around 18% of Scotland has tree cover compared to a European average of

37%. We import forest products on a massive scale. Even before the climate and nature emergencies are factored in, it would be a good thing to have more trees. With them factored in, it becomes an urgent necessity.

Net zero will only be possible if we ramp up the nation’s tree cover. We are already failing to create more woodland fast enough. Cutting the money available to stimulate woodland creation is totally at odds with a net zero ambition.

The cut will also cause chaos in the forestry supply chain. Nurseries must anticipate how many saplings will be needed for planting at least two or three years ahead. A cut of the scale proposed will lead to an unexpected collapse in demand and the destruction of millions of young trees. Jobs will be lost in fragile rural areas and a blow will be struck to the confidence of the sector. Forestry will be in a weaker position to play its part in the climate fightback even if the grant pot is restored in future.

It is possible potential applicants may become fatigued by a grant system that becomes a game of roulette. Applications take time and resources, so it is discouraging to be rejected not because your scheme lacks merit but because the grant pot is empty.

“Warm

words, bold targets and admirable ambitions will not stop climate change unless followed by appropriate investment.”

Scotland’s forestry sector, from commercial timber producers through to native woodland conservationists, stands ready to meet the challenges of the climate and nature emergencies. Government needs to step up to play its part. Warm words, bold targets and admirable ambitions will not stop climate change unless followed by appropriate investment.

The Scottish Government has stated its ambition is to create 18,000 hectares of new woodland in the 2024–25 financial year. It is budgeting for a grant pot that will support half of that. It will fall short of its woodland creation target next year and be on a trajectory to fall far short of its target to achieve 21% woodland cover by 2032. Net zero by 2045 becomes little more than a fantastical dream.

Oak sapling. © EA Janes | WTML

Glen Devon Wood, Glen Quey. © Niall Benvie | WTML

Volcanic ash, the geography of time, and lessons from the completed

Professor Andy Dugmore, School of Geosciences; Dr Rowan Jackson, Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Systems; Dr Anthony Newton

With global environmental change gathering pace, we face a particularly uncertain future. Fortunately, we can use geographical patterns to understand environmental processes and how they change through time, and learn important lessons for society from the completed experiments of the past.

One approach to environmental research is to use space-fortime substitutions where studies of contemporary spatial variation and ecological gradients can be used to infer the likely consequences of climate change. If we want to know what Scotland’s ecology could look like in a warmer world, we can study hotter modern environments further south. This has become a common practice in studies of global change, with examples ranging from modelled human exposure to extreme heat, to the likely impacts of climate change on the extent of wine growing regions. However, there are limits to how far we can push contemporary space-for-time substitutions, and, though the method is widely applied, key assumptions are untested.

To complement modern space-fortime substitutions we can study past environments under different climatic conditions at the same moments in time. This can be done by applying a range of dating techniques to individual parts of the environmental record. For example, we can establish the age of organic remains such as pieces of wood, seeds, nuts, clothing or bone using radiocarbon dating. In environments with pronounced seasonal changes where suitable wood has been preserved, the growth rings of trees (dendrochronology) can provide outstanding dating control. The time span represented by individual pieces of wood can be tied to master chronologies, and by studying many wooden remains, very accurate and precise time controls can be established, dating events to a particular year, or indeed season.

can form both visible and hidden (crypto) tephra horizons. Each extensive tephra layer defines a brief period of time, hours or days after it was erupted, and we can use these to connect different environmental records with great precision. This helps us to create a detailed picture of the past at a particular moment: ‘snapshots’ connecting natural and cultural landscapes, climate and archaeological sites, past societies and the environment that can be uniquely detailed –but only where tephra layers are found.

“We can draw lessons from the past that can hold stark warnings for today.”

For both radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology, if we want to reconstruct past geographies we need a lot of individual dates. We can also use them to date marker horizons of a particular age. Layers of volcanic ash (tephra) can provide us with particularly useful marker horizons, a way to identify specific times in the past across very large areas, and so define past geographies (tephrochronology). Besides radiocarbon dates and growth ring chronologies from trees killed by the ash fall, specific dates for tephra layers can also come from written sources of eruptions or from annually layered ice core records that contain traces of tephra. Geochemical analyses of tephra grains can be used to correlate separate parts of a layer formed by a single eruption, which may spread ash clouds over continental scales, dusting the landscape with fine grained deposits that

Utilising a range of dating techniques, we can examine the past to gain a better understanding both of environmental changes and of the consequences of choices made by different societies in response to those changes. Through time, different groups of people with different beliefs, values, and world views, different economic practices and social structures have experienced different types of environmental challenges, and we can work out what happened next, for good or ill. This presents us with a range of ‘completed experiments’ that we can assess. Although we are not medieval farmers, fishers or hunters, we, like them, will face climate shocks. In the late medieval period, between the mid-13th and mid-15th centuries, communities around the world faced unprecedented episodes of climate change, and we can assess the consequences of these events under different circumstances, such as levels of food insecurity, degrees of social inequality, or the strength of attachment to particular identities or places. In doing so, we can draw lessons from the past that can hold stark warnings for today. Archaeological sites and remains dated with tephra layers in Iceland can be correlated to those from the same periods of time using radiocarbon dating in Greenland and dendrochronology in the American southwest. With a firm understanding of chronology, we can see that episodes of abrupt climate change were followed by different social outcomes across the North Atlantic islands and amongst the Ancestral Pueblo communities of the pre-Hispanic American southwest. Norse communities of Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, who depended on animal husbandry and marine resources, faced episodes of cold, wet and stormy conditions, whereas Ancestral Pueblo communities, who lacked iron tools and were dependent on cultivating maize and hunting in the semi-arid lands of the southwestern USA, faced drought. Two very different cultures, each with a diversity of different communities and different circumstances, saw different outcomes in terms of continuity and change. When faced with climate shocks those communities with the greatest food insecurity experienced the greatest social transformations. The Mesa Verde cliff dwellings of southern Colorado

Dr Jim Woollett of Université Laval in a deep midden deposit in North Iceland rich in archaeofauna and dated with tephra layers of known age.

completed experiments of the past

Newton, School of Geosciences; all University of Edinburgh

were abandoned by the Ancestral Puebloans and the Norse settlements of southwestern Greenland came to an end. Elsewhere, such as in Iceland, despite challenging environmental, social and economic conditions, communities coped with significant climate changes to flourish in the present day. These experiments from history have direct implications for today, holding lessons for policy makers. For example, the greater the degrees of food insecurity in a community, the greater are the chances of abrupt (and traumatic) social transformations in the aftermath of a climate shock. Geographical variations today and in the past can be studied to help us understand both the nature of environmental change and the likely societal consequences of climate changes across a great range of different circumstances. We can explore the likely effects of issues such as inequality that cut across different societies. A key challenge for researchers today is to use the outcomes of completed experiments in the past, studied with the aid of the tight time control offered by features such as tephra layers, to formulate recommendations for policy makers. For funders the challenge is to make the support available for this work to happen.

A modern reconstruction of an old Norse family church in Iceland.

Mesa verde.

Addressing the geospatial skills shortage

Bruce Gittings FRSGS, University of Edinburgh, and AGI Scotland; Tom Janes, University of Edinburgh; Dr Ashley Stewart, Optimat,

Geospatial (GIS) analysis, data and technology provides accessible and well-paid job opportunities within geography. Never before have geographers had such an obvious career path, and the use of geospatial in government and industry is flourishing, with growing interest across a range of sectors. Geospatial is said to be the UK’s fourth fastest growing sector, with 10.6% annual growth to reach £9 billion by 2027. But can we meet the future demand for skilled professionals?

“Employers in the sector have struggled both to grow their workforce and to retain existing staff.”

Location Data Scotland, the University of Edinburgh and the Association for Geographic Information in Scotland (AGI, the umbrella body for the geospatial profession) have been working in partnership to explore the Scottish geospatial skills landscape to assess whether there is a geospatial skills shortage, and if so, how it could be addressed.

Jointly supported by the Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise and the Geospatial Commission, Location Data Scotland was established to connect, inform and facilitate collaboration between industry, academia, public and third sectors, and to drive innovation, unlock skills and enable economic growth through the better use of location data.

level, is a risk for employers; narrowing the pool of available applicants and excluding sections of society we would wish to welcome into our profession. Higher education is not for everyone, and there are significant barriers to access, not least cost. Many students attending our universities do not see their future in the UK; for example, a significant proportion of those taking the GIS Masters at Edinburgh in 2023 are from overseas and can’t or won’t remain in the UK. Equally, many geospatial roles do not need the level of educational attainment that four or five years at university provides.

We would propose the broadening of educational provision to colleges (where there is currently no such provision in Scotland) and schools (where provision is at best patchy). We would also argue the need for work-based apprenticeships which, while developing, are very limited and rarely focused on geospatial.

For some years it has been suggested amongst geospatial practitioners that employers in the sector have struggled both to grow their workforce and to retain existing staff, given the large number of positions available and the limited availability of graduates. We felt these anecdotal suggestions needed to be explored, given the Scottish Government’s ambition to ensure Scotland is recognised as an international hub for the geospatial industry, with a skilled workforce that is necessary to support this aspiration.

A survey was designed and circulated amongst companies and individuals working in the sector, and this confirmed these concerns and demonstrated a developing geospatial skills gap in Scotland:

• 70% of the community have experienced skills-related challenges;

• 52% of the community have been unable to recruit the staff they need;

• 81% of the community are unable to retain staff;

• 53% of the community don’t believe they will be able to meet future staffing needs.

While much is being done in teaching geospatial and its use in research at Scottish universities, the concentration of skills development in higher education, particularly at Masters

The goal being to increase awareness of geospatial and ultimately the skills base for the geospatial industry in Scotland.

We have undertaken research specifically on the current provision,

needs and aspirations within schools. We looked at the curriculum, teachers’ attitudes towards geospatial skills, and opportunities to extend current teaching. Documented experience reveals the benefits of using geospatial skills in the classroom are well established, and embedding these into schools are consistent with aspirations of the Scottish Government’s Digital Strategy and school curriculum. However, the development of geospatial skills in Scottish schools is falling behind other countries, with a survey revealing their teaching is largely informal and piecemeal. Some course content encourages teachers to consider it as a teaching tool, but a lack of curricular guidance, assessed work and resources present barriers.

However, Geography teachers are generally positive towards the use and teaching of geospatial skills. This leads to three main conclusions:

• Scotland is falling behind in teaching geospatial skills in schools, and this is inconsistent with the curriculum and the Government’s digital strategy;

• teachers are willing to teach geospatial skills, but reluctant to devote time and resources to them at the expense of teaching assessed work;

• proposed education reforms present an opportunity to improve geospatial skills development in schools, hopefully narrowing the skills gap.

Image by Mojca-Peter from Pixabay

However, the ubiquitous nature of geospatial and the parlous position of Geography in Scottish schools (Geography is often forsaken for History or Modern Studies, and is unfortunately not seen as a STEM subject) suggest success is founded on geospatial being embraced well beyond the Geography curriculum. Surely geospatial should be central to data science skills within the curriculum? Geospatial thinking could also inform History; cartography could be introduced in Art and Design; GIS used for ecological surveys in Biology; and routing, location, altitude and simple spatial analysis can be applied in a sports science theme within Physical Education. This requires Geography teachers to serve as geospatial evangelists, and careers teachers to be aware of the number of lucrative roles available in our profession. Given that geospatial and geography are inexplicably linked, our profession can undoubtedly enhance the position of school Geography and give Geography teachers a reinvigorated raison d’être.

A series of roundtables were also hosted, which saw a meeting of minds between industry, Government, academia and research, to consider these findings and explore the geospatial skills gap in Scotland. A number of key themes emerged from these discussions:

• Awareness – there is a need in the geospatial sector to develop an online resource that provides information for anyone looking for a career in the field of geospatial. This will significantly increase the awareness of geospatial and ultimately the skills base for geospatial in Scotland. The importance of language and terminology cannot be underestimated when developing resources and communicating with target audiences.

• Consistency – the geospatial profession needs a clear and consistent message for pupils, teachers and careers advisors. Current approaches are piecemeal and confused.

• Collaboration – there is a need for greater collaboration between geospatial professionals and broader information technology and data scientists; thus, improving awareness and understanding of the applications of geospatial. For example, improved links between Geography and ICT departments with education.

• Participation –expose children to maps and geospatial thinking; whet their appetite and showcase the fun side of it; let them play with data. There is also a need to improve the routes to participation, for example introduce it via school, college or university courses, apprenticeships and jobs.

These themes, alongside the survey and research findings, have informed the development of a Geospatial Skills Roadmap which sets out a work plan of Engagement, Communication and Practical short, medium and longterm actions that are believed to address the identified challenges and ensure a pipeline of talent coming into the geospatial industry in the future. We wish to work alongside schools, colleges, the wider profession and government to ensure geospatial is recognised as a career and a range of opportunities are available to learners of all ages. We raised these issues at the RSGS ‘Future Vision’ education conference earlier this year, and we hope engaging with Geography teachers will strengthen the position of Geography, but equally the message has to get out to careers advisors, parents and pupils.

“We would propose the broadening of educational provision to colleges and schools.”

Additionally, our work has created awareness-raising resources and practical materials which can be used in schools, and has recognised and will signpost significant existing material that will contribute to the study of GIS. Our work has shown there is a skills shortage, and this will most likely get worse. Social diversification will not just benefit employers but will provide future entrants into higher education. As the geospatial industry continues to grow, so the problem will become magnified, damaging the prospects for new innovative start-ups and the ability to attract inward investment. The problem is significant, requiring better awareness of the career possibilities within our industry, professional ambassadors, curricular buy-in at schools and colleges, and the goodwill and support of private industry and government. By working with a range of partners and a coordinated approach, solutions are possible.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

notes from the classroom

Geography: future studies

Alastair McConnell FRSGS, Chair, RSGS Education Committee

Many would consider that in schools the subject of Geography is more focused on spatial analysis than temporal analysis, the where rather than the when. However, change is a central element to what we teach, and whether it is urban landscapes, physical features or soil formation, time is an essential factor fXor any change.

“Time is an essential element of any geographical study.”

In the formation of physical features, young geographers are able to grasp processes of erosion and weathering, but the rate of change is less well understood. Does a meander turn into an ox-bow lake over months, years, decades or centuries? Is it a continuous process (uniformitarianism) or a sudden event during a time of flood (catastrophism)? There are now enough historical satellite images to see some of these changes take place, but timescales are not something that is generally included in exam answers on this topic.

Time is an essential element of any geographical study, but often one that is difficult to adequately incorporate when completing fieldwork with geographers in a school context. Urban studies can incorporate changes throughout the day, but asking young learners to measure these changes over a suitable period of time is often impractical. Instead, many studies look at changes across an urban area, but time can then be a limiting factor as sites cannot be simultaneously assessed.

Physical geography is even more challenging. Erosional processes do not usually show measurable change across the timescale of one fieldtrip, and inevitably any study at this level will show a snapshot in time and the rate of change is therefore difficult to quantify. Even studies focused on the weather can be difficult to set up, as fieldtrips need to be planned in advance and particular weather conditions are notoriously difficult to predict.

The unique selling point (USP) for History is that we must learn from the past so that we do not repeat the same mistakes. Geography has more of a focus on the future, with many topics looking at the social, economic and environmental impacts of human activity. The subject is perhaps the only one with this focus on the future. The USP for Geography could be to understand the impacts on the future so that we can influence the present. This holds true for many topics such as rural land use, population studies and tourism, but with the climate change topic many of the future impacts we have been teaching about are already present for all to see.

For Geography in school, time is an essential but challenging aspect of any topic. The past, present and future are essential components of any case study, and the potential impact of any activity provides a USP for our subject – Geography: future studies

Geographers in Scotland:

what do the numbers tell us?

Ian Selmes, RSGS Education Committee

The health of a subject might be deduced from the numbers of pupils in schools and students in universities studying the subject, and the number of people training to teach it. A few years ago, there was concern that Geography in Scotland was in poor health.

“There is much to be positive about.”

The RSGS Geography of Geographical Education in Scotland (GoGES) project was created by the Education Committee to investigate who studied Geography in Scottish schools and universities from 2016 to 2021, and why they chose to study the subject or not. It reported in the Scottish Geographical Journal in 2022 and 2023. The data has now been updated and there is much to be positive about.

In schools a nadir was reached in academic years 2018–19 or 2019–20. SQA annual statistical reports show that, since then, the numbers of entries to public examinations in Geography have risen markedly. For N5 there has been a 6.3% growth in the four years 2020–23, reaching 10,315 candidates in 2023. At Higher there has been a 15.3%

entry growth in 2020–23, rising to 7,425 pupils in 2023. At Advanced Higher the number of entries has sprinted 38.4% in 2019–23, reaching 980 in 2023. At N5 and Higher the annual growth was faster in 2022–23 than previous years. Advanced Higher Geography entries 2021–22 had exploded by 45% before settling back slightly in the past year.

The Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) annual reports demonstrate that the low point in registrations for undergraduate geographers in Scottish universities was in 2017, and the low point for postgraduates was in 2016. The way in which university courses are classified as ‘geography’ changed in the meantime, and 2023 data has been delayed. Nonetheless the registrations for undergraduate geography courses in Scotland have almost doubled, to 3,905 in 2022. For postgraduate geographers the growth has been even greater, to 2,505 in 2022.

A fuller version of this article is available at www.rsgs.org/blogs/view-point

Improving Lewis

Chris Fleet FRSGS, Map Curator, National Library of Scotland

The concept of time is integral to understanding maps, not just because all maps show a place at a particular point in time, but also because they inevitably reflect that particular point in time too, through their content, style, and production processes. Many maps too deliberately look back to earlier time periods (depicting Roman or Medieval geographies, for example), whilst others deliberately project time forward, often promoting future possibilities.

This map was drafted by Marcel Hardy and Arthur Geddes, to plan and promote new possibilities for land use in Lewis just after the First World War. Hardy had trained in botany and geography under Patrick Geddes, graduating from Edinburgh University in 1903, and he initiated the Botanical Survey of Scotland in 1906. Hardy’s aims behind the survey were not simply to record plant distribution, but also to encourage repopulation of the countryside and reduce urban squalor. In 1919, soon after William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, had acquired the islands of Lewis and Harris, he employed Hardy with Patrick Geddes’ son, Arthur, to undertake a detailed agricultural and vegetation survey of Lewis and Harris.

The initial survey by Hardy and Geddes divided the land into eight vegetation categories: cultivation, sandy pastures, sedge and cotton grass, marshy grass moors, hill and fair pasture, woods, rocky pastures, and heaths. These were hand-coloured onto Ordnance Survey one-inch to the mile base mapping as part of a detailed written report to Leverhulme. The insets at the top left (‘Leovigis Rediviva’ or ‘Lewis Renewed’) show a cross-section of Lewis from south-west to north-east, showing the potential impact of reclaimed moorland, local afforestation, osier beds, and green crops. Although it promoted over-optimistic possibilities, which were never realised in practice (Leverhulme’s other grand

plans for Lewis also largely failed and he sold the island in 1923) the map itself is a rare early example of vegetation and land use mapping in Scotland, and an interesting insight into a brief moment in time in Lewis.

“The map is a rare early example of vegetation and land use mapping in Scotland.”

Marcel Hardy and Patrick Geddes, Lewis and Harris: main aspects of the vegetation (1919). Image courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. View online at maps.nls.uk/view/216442533

Predictions for 2024

Ordnance Survey (OS)

The impact of climate change, sustainability, and AI

John Kimmance, Managing Director of National Mapping Services, OS

What I think is going to be new in 2024

The role of location in supporting solutions for sustainability is becoming increasingly critical as the planet tries to understand the ongoing impact of climate change. At one level, we have the Supply Chain Data Partnership, of which OS was a founding member, looking to improve transparency in the supply chain globally, and then in Britain we have examples of how OS is working with public sector customers on national and local sustainability projects.

One of the most significant impacts of climate change is flooding, with a greater risk to communities in coastal and lower lying areas. Accurate location data is vital for the prevention, planning, response and recovery of these incidents, and OS has a long history of supporting local authorities and emergencies in this.

Another focus for OS is health and wellbeing. I think the concept of the 20-minute neighbourhood will become part of a louder conversation as we recognise that transport contributes to around 26% of greenhouse gas pollution. For a number of years, we have been researching and piloting AI and Machine Learning within OS, centred on our data capture operations and how we can use the technology to deliver richer specification and more timely data to support our customers. This year will see AI further embedded, playing a significant role in the creation of some of our new products.

What I would like to see change in 2024

All businesses and organisations, whether private or public sector, need to continually change and embrace new technologies. In recent years OS has transformed how our data is stored, accessed and used by our customers.

I would also like to see greater recognition of the importance of location in large infrastructure projects. It is often considered far too late in the process. We believe location data can enable more effective planning and delivery, from optimising the location of assets, to understanding population and movement of citizens. Trusted location data should be an essential tool in any planning process. Understanding what is where, and therefore what is needed, is crucial.

“I’d love to see people take a little bit more pride in the fabulous spaces that we have got here in GB.”

Personalisation, the power of community, and sustainability

Nick Giles, Managing Director, OS Leisure

What I think is going to be new in 2024

Personalisation is a trend that will continue to grow. Especially in terms of how people want to hold onto memories. Remembering those special times is important to us all, so we think maps on walls and personalised maps will be popular.

“I think the concept of the 20-minute neighbourhood will become part of a louder conversation.”

Also, personalisation through AI and machine learning (making machines understand you and make relevant suggestions) will be a continuing trend. For example, at OS it could be using machine learning algorithms to present to you ‘these are the walking routes you like’, then turning that into ‘these are the walking routes you may like’.

Elsewhere, because of the squeeze on consumer spending, people will look for cheap family entertainment which will stem from people not necessarily wanting to travel. They will be thinking about ‘where can I go from my front door?’

I think the power of community is a big thing. People will more happily take recommendations from other like-minded people in their community. Talking to like-minded people helps with decision making and with social connection, which is so important to our mental wellbeing. It means people are encouraged to explore from their own doorstep, and then from a broader community aspect it will help people take a little bit more pride in their local areas.

What I would like to see change in 2024

The big one I’d like to see change is around respect for the outdoors and people leaving the place better than they found it. Accessing the countryside is a right but it is also a privilege. The amount of litter and waste that you see across the trails and across the outdoors is worrying. So I’d love to see people take a little bit more pride in the fabulous spaces that we have got here in GB. Take a bag with you and a litter picker and leave the trails better than you found them.

Another key thing I’d like to see improve is Britain’s sustainability. The outdoor sector leads the world from a sustainability perspective and can be held up as a shining example of how to tackle sustainability issues. But now I think the steps the outdoor sector has taken to improve its sustainability are starting to become understood and acknowledged at an industry level, and there is an opportunity for the impact of that to start penetrating other industries as well. I do believe that thinking more creatively on how to tackle sustainability challenges in a way that is not greenwashing (or perceived as such) is needed.

Communication, collaboration, and call to action

Donna Lyndsay, Strategic Market Lead for Sustainability, OS OS has been working and innovating hard in the sustainability arena, which was reflected in our participation at COP28 at the end of 2023. I was able to demonstrate our new monitoring and verification service OS VeriEarth®, which is currently accurately mapping and monitoring the health of peatlands in South Yorkshire and will be able to inform and target the future restoration of the site. I was also able to update delegates on the progress made by the Supply Chain Data Partnership, which has reached a proof of concept for a trusted location insights platform. This was followed by the announcement of a new larger coalition, Rewired Earth (www. rewired.earth) which will be a game-changer in transforming markets into the most protective force on the planet. Accurate and trusted location data is key to all of these initiatives; they cannot translate into action without understanding exactly where something has happened. OS has a huge amount of expertise in this area and continues to be a key player in helping to solve some of the sustainability challenges we are facing.

What I think is going to be new in 2024

Validation and verification processes are going to grow in significance for companies as they wrangle new regulations and disclosures that affect their corporate reporting. These regulations are increasing focus on sustainable practice, emissions, environmental impact and climate risk. We need to have trusted monitoring, reporting and verification systems in place, which must be objective and transparent. Confidence must be restored in the accuracy of claims made in the voluntary carbon credits market, by combining monitoring capabilities from space (Earth Observation), air and ground data collection. OS VeriEarth®, which was launched last year, combines satellite and ground-based data with location intelligence to create and visualise a baseline of a habitat in a target location.

We may also see greater citizen engagement as technology enables companies to understand individual values through digital fingerprinting and AI capabilities, in turn leading to a greater need to protect individuals’ data from being harvested. AI will enable mass efficiency savings in the processing of data to enable patterns to be identified faster for predictive and preventative measures, such as to ensure appropriate use of land and the reductions of harms.

Encouraged by the successes of last year’s COP28, we will see greater global corporate collaboration in the move forward to drive systematic change and to help the markets become a protective force. There will be significant battle lines drawn, from those who resist the transition to those who see great opportunity and the need to change. The winners will be responsible for our planet’s future.

“What is clear is the urgent need and want to collaborate on a scale never seen before.”

What I would like to see change in 2024

There are some key things I learnt from COP28 and would like to see actioned in 2024 to meet the climate challenge we will all face. There are a lot of Cs in COP; climate, carbon, even conflict of opinion. But the three Cs I’d like to take forward in 2024 are:

Collaboration. COP is an unusual environment, but it is an amazing place to meet new and old friends from totally different sectors and disciplines around the world who have a common interest in driving the change to ensure we all have a fighting chance to save nature and humanity. What is clear is the urgent need and want to collaborate on a scale never seen before, breaking silos down to ensure we can mobilise the skills and technologies needed.

Communication. It also became clear that many of us have been shouting in our own echo chambers – not sharing the intelligence needed by others widely enough. We really need to find a way to communicate what we do far better to those outside our industry.

Call to action Beyond talking, we must now move forward faster than ever before, and that will take effort and funding. Frustration was often heard from those with either transformative technologies or on-the-ground projects delivering results, many of which seem to be unable to move beyond proof of concept or grant funding to scale fast. They cited a corporate investment need for high returns as a barrier to early investment. I met several who need to scale fast; so if organisations want to really put their money where their mouth is and truly make a difference, then get in touch –I know some companies and organisations who really need help.

So, I move on from 2023 into 2024 with hope that the people I met have the will, the want, and the capacity to drive forward. I just hope we can do it fast enough.

A pocketful of travel: Ella Christie’s journeys to the Far East

Nicola Dibley, Education and Outreach Officer, The Japanese Garden at Cowden, Dollar

There is a story in The Japanese Garden at Cowden that a conifer growing on the Isle of Hõrai (the ‘Isle of Perpetual Youth’, which sits in the middle of the pond) is dedicated to the life of the maid, Prudence Humphries, who travelled with Ella Christie on her journeys to the Far East. It is even said that Ella herself may have brought the seeds back from the journey and planted them on the island as it was created.

The tale is perhaps particularly poignant as not only was ‘Humphries’ (as books referred to her) the only travelling companion Ella spoke of on those long journeys, but it recalls the incident that occurred when the pair arrived in what was then Port Arthur (now Lushan) on mainland China in 1907. The incident (about which more in a moment) is just one opportunity to gain a glimpse into the nature of travel in the early 1900s, and to consider the historical context in which Ella found herself at that time. As always with Ella’s accounts, her matter-of-fact descriptions belie the unique sights and sounds she must have experienced.

In 1907 Ella Christie – or Isabella Robertson Christie to give her full name – was in the middle of a decade’s worth of long-distance travel that would take her through the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia and the Far East. These travels, often off the beaten track (certainly for European women), brought her recognition from RSGS in particular, and she was made a Fellow and eventually a Vice-President of the Society in 1934.

“It is the 1907 journey that inspired her greatest legacy Sha Raku En.”

For The Japanese Garden at Cowden, the estate she called home for most of her life, it is the 1907 journey that inspired her greatest legacy – Sha Raku En (the ‘Garden of Pleasure and Delight’) which when established in 1908 became her treasured space, a place to walk with guests and to entertain them with tales from her many travels.

Although Sha Raku En is fully acknowledged as an authentic Japanese garden, and contains the classically Japanese acers and azaleas, bridges, islands and stones so associated with

this garden type, there lie within several hints to other travel adventures she had along the way.

So this then draws us back to Ella and Humphries visiting Port Arthur in April 1907. The trip had already seen the pair in Hong Kong and China, where they explored towns and cities via river and rail, travelling to Shanghai and Beijing and visiting the Great Wall.

Ella stepped into a moment in history with her arrival in Port Arthur. This deep natural harbour had been a strategic stronghold for the Russians, and in 1904 it was the site of a battle for dominance with the Japanese, which the Japanese won. Ella reported that in 1907 it was still in a bit of a state with many signs of battle still evident. But she was well looked after, especially as they were met at the train station by a Japanese military official expecting to welcome a British general! Apparently, a message sent through by the British Consulate of Ella’s arrival had been slightly distorted, so she received a full military welcome and a tour of battlefields!

It was as Ella and Humphries travelled through the remains of Port Arthur that the incident occurred: Humphries fell straight out of their carriage onto her head! She survived but was severely concussed. Ella took her immediately to a Red Cross hospital run by the Japanese, who provided brandy and red wine on arrival which made Humphries immediately sick! Conventional tables were turned as Ella had to tend to her maid now, bringing in food for her and securing her treatment. They decided to move on to a French-run hospital in Seoul, but the trip was arduous, with a three-day voyage by train and boat where they survived on “a net of hard-boiled eggs, blinis (pancakes with a savoury filling), rusks and a tin of condensed milk” supplied by a kind gentleman they had met on the way.

Humphries must have recovered enough for the pair to continue on their journey to their next destination of Kyoto, Japan, where fortuitously Ella fell in love with Japanese gardens, and decided before she left that she would create one of her own back in Cowden. Although she continued to travel back to Europe with Ella, arriving in Paris in June 1907 via Vladivostok and Moscow, Humphries then retired from Ella’s service, her incident perhaps leaving her with life-changing injuries. We assume that Ella looked after her on her return to the UK, but more than that we cannot say. The story though of the conifer dedicated to her maid has been passed down from Ella to her great-nephew Bobby, and reminds us today of the adventures the pair had so far from home, relying on each other in ways they never imagined.

Ella Christie in her garden at Cowden. © The Japanese Garden at Cowden

A film 600 years in the making

Patrick Shen, filmmaker

In Halberstadt, Germany, a timeless symphony unfolds within the walls of a medieval church, echoing since the dawn of 2001. John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP, composed for the piano in 1985 and later reborn for the organ, is a testament to the enduring spirit of Halberstadt’s musical history. With instructions to play “as slow as possible,” this melodic odyssey will stretch across an awe-inspiring 639 years, a nod to the town’s genesis as the home of the first modern organ in 1361. Yet, it’s more than a nod; it’s a wager on the future. To sustain the performance until 2640, successive human generations must cradle both the instrument and the arts in their tender care.

As a filmmaker I’ve not shied away from difficult subjects. From mortality to silence, I’ve spent many years exploring perplexing topics in hopes that my work will help others to ask better questions about how we are to navigate this world in a just and meaningful way. Looking upon my life’s trajectory, I suppose I should have seen this coming. I first experienced the performance of ORGAN2/ASLSP in June of 2018 while traveling through Europe promoting my film In Pursuit of Silence. The unceasing, almost eerie chord within St Burchardi Church transcends conventional musical boundaries, filling both space and thoughts. While some may find it suffocating, those willing to shed their modern sensibilities embark on a magical journey. The organ’s reverberations seep into consciousness, birthing a new silence for thoughts and sensations to dance upon. It becomes a sacred encounter, allowing the listener to lose themselves in memories, fantasies, and reveries. The allure of this trans-epochal performance stirred something within me – something both tantalizing and ineffable. Much like the echoes of the bell in David Whyte’s poem The Bell and the Blackbird, the organ’s tones beckoned me to profound depths, urging the listener inward.

Like a photograph freezes a moment in time, ORGAN2/ ASLSP offers a softer definition of time, time as a construct with a fluid nature, rather than time as the unyielding force behind the false urgency of many of our modern-day fixations. The ancient stonework of St Burchardi Church, the immediacy of the organ’s tones filling the space, and the distant culmination of the performance produces a profound convergence of past, present, and future. The concept of now expands to encompass what has been, what is before us, and what is to come

Soon after my encounter with ORGAN2/ASLSP back in 2018, I began to consider what a film unravelling all the nuances of those initial stirrings would look like. That journey has since taken me back to Halberstadt four times and introduced me to a host of global stories exploring slowness, long-term thinking, and our complicated relationship with time. What

has emerged from all this is the most ambitious project I’ll likely ever be a part of. In fact, if all goes as planned, I’ll be at it for another six centuries.

Film1/ASAP: As Slow As Possible, of which the narrative heartbeat will be anchored in the performance of ORGAN2/ ASLSP as it unfolds over the span of six years, will mark the inception (indicated by the 1 in the title) of an anthology and will premiere sometime in 2026. The concluding chapter will debut following the culmination of the performance of ORGAN2/ASLSP in 2640.

In the realm of documentary filmmaking, we typically anticipate a three to five-year timeline. Over the last 20 years, I’ve desperately endeavoured to shorten that timeline. So, why this shift, you might wonder? How did I arrive at the notion of a film series spanning 620 years?

In part, it’s an act of resistance.

In our current age of the 24/7 news cycle and Amazon, speed and short-term thinking dominate every aspect of our lives.

A ‘move fast and break things’ ethos prevails, oblivious to the wreckage left in its wake. The standards of the machine dictate the pace at which we engage with the world, a pace that often outstrips our own biological rhythms.

The global phenomenon of ORGAN2/ASLSP draws crowds and media outlets with each chord change, summoning onlookers to Halberstadt for a communal meditation on slowness and long-term thinking. On 5th February 2022, a low g# pipe was ceremoniously removed, marking a subtle shift in the air. It wasn’t just the chord change that captivated us as filmmakers; it was the spectacle. Amidst the clash of old and new, slowness collided with urgency.

“I’ve spent many years exploring perplexing topics.”

News crews descended upon Halberstadt, battling with modern technology to feed the 24/7 news cycle, only to depart as swiftly as they arrived. With the long term in mind, each scene unfolded as a time capsule of a distracted world, seeking to encapsulate stories in hurried messages.

From a clock designed to keep time on the scale of trees to the unhurried movements of glaciers, the narratives within Film1/ASAP address some of humanity’s greatest threats: short-termism and the relentless demands of an accelerating technological world. Sustaining this conversation across centuries is paramount. I envision Film1/ASAP as a foundation for future storytellers to build upon, preserving crucial ideas as each generation navigates unique challenges in their lives.

The organ at St Burchardi Church. Photo by Transcendental Media.

1884 – 2024 – 2164

Mike Robinson, RSGS Chief Executive; Hazel Marshall, storyteller and consultant

2024 marks the 140th anniversary of the RSGS, so, in keeping with the theme of this edition of The Geographer, we thought it would be interesting to look forward 140 years as well as back.

140 years ago this year, in 1884, John George Bartholomew, a member of the famous map-making Bartholomew family, first mooted the idea of a geographical society to Agnes Livingstone Bruce, daughter of David Livingstone. A few months later, the RSGS was born with the key missions of exploration, scientific discovery and education. We still have these core missions, but having been established around the beginning of the heroic era for polar exploration and discovery, how might this have changed?

It would be almost another three decades until Roald Amundsen’s successful mission to the South Pole, just beating the doomed venture of Robert Scott by five weeks. And it would be more than another decade until Amundsen made the first scientifically verified attempt at the North Pole.

These days, whilst the poles remain a challenge, the melting glaciers now signal a changing climate. So what might we expect in 140 years’ time? We’ve grown up with globes where the top and bottom are covered in white, but by 2164 the North Pole may just be ocean. Rather than arduous treks over ice, future teams may be swimming or rowing across an endless blue. The ice may only be a memory, a mythical place, the Atlantis of a future generation. And while Antarctica may hold on to its glaciers for longer, depending on whether and by how much we address climate change, they will probably be much smaller and sea levels significantly higher. In the future, the polar exploration of the early 20th century may look like something that took place on another planet.

A popular reference for our past is our Visitors Book. Our first runs from 1884 to 2009, but in 2009 we acquired a Visitors Book which should last for much of the next 140 years. What signatures from today will stand out then? What stories will our archive be able to reveal? Many of our collections and maps will no doubt look out of date by 2164. This isn’t without precedent. Many countries today have different borders and names than the ones they had in 1884. Throughout history, shifting borders, formed by human drawn lines and wars, have caused countries to disappear, merge, break up or reappear. Today’s countries have an additional risk in the form of a changing climate with desertification and a rise in sea levels being among the main arbiters of change. Will the Antarctic still be held together by a single ice sheet (however small) or will we have lost all the ice and revealed those islands that lie underneath?

Where will future explorers go? Long gone are the ages of discovery and conquest. We like to think we are currently in the age of solutions. So what ‘age’ will people live through in 2164? Will expeditions into space or the deep ocean become the

22nd-century equivalent of polar and mountain exploration? Or will everyone be an explorer from their own home, with virtual reality and AI taking them wherever they want to go?

“The future often suffers from short-term planning, so it is good to take a moment to consider the longer view.”

RSGS, like geography, is very current and future-focused, and part of our remit is to inform and influence positive change. We have been involved in discussions about National Parks since the 1920s, a debate that still rages today. Will this still be a concern in another 140 years? We will be on our 624th Geographer magazine. Our Climate Solutions course will hopefully be utterly obsolete, but what other educational priorities will we be working on then? And we would like to think that our Future Generations Fund, launched only last year and still very modest, might have grown to become a substantial £1M (equivalent) fund, driving our core activities as a charity for many years to come; and we hope have inspired others to set up similar funds.

But of course, there are many projects outwith RSGS that are considering a long future. How will these have fared? Will the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst, the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, or the Frozen Ark project, still be necessary? The future often suffers from short-term planning, so it is good to take a moment to consider the longer view. The ancient Haudenosaunee philosophy asks that decisions made now should still be sustainable in seven generations. What fresh ways of thinking might that bring? If we consider a generation to be 20 years, then the next 140 years makes up the next seven generations.

If the world continues on as it is, what do you think the next 140 years will look like, for your descendants, for RSGS, for the world? What would you want it to look like? And what could you (or we) do differently to help make that happen?

Celebrating 140 years in 14 quotes: part one

Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence

To help celebrate the 140th anniversary of RSGS in 2024, I’ve chosen quotes by 14 of the fascinating people connected with RSGS from 1884 to the present day. Their words tell us something unique: they might encapsulate a moment in time, or convey a vision for the future, or describe an epic journey. They might also touch on key events in the wider context of world history. Just as importantly, they reveal something precious about the individuality of the person who spoke them.

Here we have the first seven quotes. The second seven will be published in the summer 2024 edition of The Geographer

John George Bartholomew

“It was at North Berwick on a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1884 that the project of forming a Scottish Geographical Society was proposed to Mrs Bruce.”

The moment is enshrined in the annals of RSGS. In July 1884, while strolling on the beach at North Berwick with his good friend, Agnes Livingstone Bruce, cartographer John George Bartholomew suggested that Scotland should have its own geographical society. Agnes replied that it was a brilliant idea, one that would surely have pleased her late father, the explorer David Livingstone.

This is how the Scottish Geographical Society came into being, and a few months later the explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley was signing the new Visitors Book in our first offices at 80A Princes Street, Edinburgh. Branches were soon opened in Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen; Queen Victoria conferred Royal status three years later, in 1887.

Isabella Bird

“This magnificent animal, the pride of the Tibetan Highlands, with his huge apparent size, his thick curved horns, his fierce eyes glaring from under a mass of shaggy curls, his long hair hanging to his fetlocks, and his huge bushy tail, an emblem of dignity in temples and oriental courts, deigns to be led by a rope through his nostrils, and I rode him on my own saddle… We attained the summit, 17,930 feet, in a snowstorm.”

Born in 1831, Isabella tore up the rule book of the censorious Victorian era by travelling solo into regions that had seen few European visitors, from North America’s Rocky Mountains to western China and Korea. In the 1890s she learned how to use a plate camera and became an early travel photographer, developing her images under dark skies in the Far East.

Sir Ernest Shackleton

“We brought with us the log book, carpenter’s adze, and cooker. That was all we brought out of the Antarctic in tangible things, but we had seen the heart of man under the worst circumstances.”

After the sinking of the Endurance in the Weddell Sea in 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton embarked on what must be the most iconic of all polar journeys in order to save the lives of his men. Having sailed 800 miles in a lifeboat to South Georgia, he and two companions – Tom Crean and Frank Worsley – struggled across the island’s mountainous interior to reach the whaling station at Stromness. A rescue mission was then mounted to get the remaining crew off Elephant Island.

Isabella Bird (also known by her married name, Mrs Bishop) was the first woman to receive Honorary Fellowship of RSGS, and she could not have been more deserving. Her extraordinary feat of riding a yak over the Digar La Pass in Kashmir is typical of her many journeys through Central Asia, where she faced conditions that would daunt the hardiest of travellers even today.

In Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee, audiences packed into RSGS lecture theatres to hear Shackleton speak about his expedition. He was returning to familiar faces and old haunts from his former employment as RSGS Secretary, and few people would have been unmoved by the epic story he had to tell.

Frederick Marshman Bailey

“About October I managed to get engaged in a branch of the Bolshevik secret service.”

Frederick Marshman Bailey was the kind of person you’d like to see a movie about. Between 1918 and 1920, as a British agent operating under a succession of obscure disguises in Bolshevik-occupied Tashkent, he evaded arrest and inevitable execution, and then coolly got himself hired by the very people who wanted him dead: the Cheka or secret police. Immediately, he was sent to track down a particularly notorious spy named Frederick Marshman Bailey. After fabricating a convincing story about his own whereabouts, he escaped into Persia, taking a party of fugitives with him. His Bolshevik employers were so annoyed that they declared him dead and staged a mock funeral. As a guest speaker at RSGS, Bailey was constrained by two things: the Official Secrets Act, and a natural tendency to downplay his own exploits. Even the quote above reads like a throwaway line. Nevertheless, his story is extraordinary: it isn’t hard to see why his army colleagues called him ‘Hatter’ Bailey. He was awarded the Livingstone Medal in 1921.

John George Bartholomew by Edward Arthur Walton (c1911).

Isabella Bird from The Life of Isabella Bird by Anna M Stoddart (1906).

Freya Stark

“I had been told so often before leaving Baghdad that women who travel alone in Iran are an unmitigated nuisance to the authorities…”

“I know in my heart of hearts that it is a most excellent reason to do things merely because one likes the doing of them.”

I’m allowing Freya Stark two quotes, because they reveal so much about the spirit of this remarkable woman who travelled solo in the Middle East. On her first visit to Damascus in 1927, she fell in love with the desert and took herself on long, meandering journeys across modern-day Iran, Iraq and Syria, defying the warnings of friends and figures in authority and defusing potentially hostile situations with her comprehensive grasp of language and culture. Like many women travellers of her time, she fully understood the risks involved and went anyway because it brought her joy. Her books are still revered as classics of travel writing. Freya delivered her first lecture to RSGS, entitled The Elbruz Mountains and the Valley of the Assassins, in 1936. At the same time, she received the Mungo Park Medal.

Eric Shipton

“If this game of mountaineering means anything at all, it is in the doing of the thing.”

In a few simple words, Eric Shipton answered the eternal question that is posed to mountaineers. Maybe subconsciously, he was echoing George Mallory’s near-fabled line, “Because it’s there”, on being asked why he wished to climb Everest. On this occasion, Shipton, who had led Britain’s Everest Reconnaissance expedition of 1951, was referring to the forthcoming bid on Everest by a team of Swiss climbers. Among European nations, there was perceived to be an attitude of urgent competition to be first on the summit, but Shipton took a more philosophical view: to him, the climb was more important than the ‘conquest’.

but he is remembered as an intuitive climber who travelled light and was happiest when he was exploring uncharted landscapes. He was awarded the Livingstone Medal in 1952.

Myrtle Simpson

“We were 90 miles then from the Pole, we’d got a good bite out of our distance, and we got out of the tent and it was daylight. The sun had come back… We weren’t alive really, until after the first two weeks of our journey, struggling in the pitch darkness. You feel it first, and then as you watch the sun [return]… you feel the life coming back into you.”

In the company of her husband, Hugh, Myrtle Simpson has enjoyed a lifetime of adventures that have taken her to the Arctic and to the summits of some of the world’s highest mountains. In 1965, she became the first woman to ski across Greenland unsupported, following the tracks of Fridtjof Nansen who completed the same crossing in 1888. An attempt to ski to the North Pole in 1969 was thwarted by the failure of a generator.

By taking her children to the Arctic and allowing them to experience life with Inuit people, Myrtle challenged contemporary perceptions about the roles of a wife and mother. She and Hugh received the Mungo Park Medal in 1969, and more recently Myrtle was interviewed for the RSGS Inspiring People talks in 2021.

SOURCES

Most of these quotes come from lectures and interviews hosted by RSGS, or papers published in the Scottish Geographical Magazine (SGM) which were presented by the lecturers in person at RSGS meetings.

J G Bartholomew: Mrs Livingstone Bruce and the Scottish Geographical Society (1912, SGM)

Mrs I L Bishop FRSGS: A Journey Through Lesser Tibet (1892, SGM)

Sir Ernest Shackleton: lecture to RSGS in Aberdeen (13th January 1920, reported in The Scotsman)

Major F M Bailey: In Russian Turkestan under the Bolsheviks (1921, SGM)

A year later, RSGS was welcoming Sir Edmund Hillary and Sir John Hunt from the successful British Everest expedition. Shipton’s own achievements, which include the first ascent (with Frank Smythe) of Kamet in 1931, are less well-known,

Freya Stark: The Valley of the Assassins to the Caspian Sea (1937, SGM) and The Valleys of the Assassins (1934)

Eric Shipton: lecture to RSGS in Edinburgh (13th March 1952, reported in The Scotsman)

Myrtle Simpson: interview for RSGS Inspiring People talks programme (2021)

Freya Stark by Herbert Olivier. © National Portrait Gallery

What We Owe The Future

A Million-Year View

William MacAskill (Oneworld Publications, September 2022)

The challenges we face are enormous. But we can still secure a positive future for our planet, and for everyone on it. Philosopher William MacAskill persuasively argues for long-termism, the idea that positively influencing the distant future is a moral priority of our time. It isn’t enough

Ancestors

The Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials

Alice Roberts (Simon & Schuster UK, February 2022)

Archaeologist, broadcaster and academic Professor Alice Roberts explores what we can learn about the very earliest Britons, from burial sites and by using new technology to analyse ancient DNA. This ground-breaking prehistory teaches us more about ourselves and our history. It explores forgotten journeys and memories of migrations long ago, written into genes and preserved in the ground for thousands of years. It explores our interconnected global ancestry. It’s about reaching back in time, to find ourselves, and our place in the world.

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The Long View Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time

Richard Fisher (Wildfire, March 2023)

Humans are unique in our ability to understand time, able to comprehend the past and future like no other species. Yet modernday technology and capitalism have supercharged our shorttermist tendencies and trapped us in the present, at the mercy of reactive politics, quarterly business targets and 24-hour news cycles. Richard Fisher examines the psychological biases that discourage the long view, and talks to the growing number of people from the worlds of philosophy, technology, science and the arts who are exploring smart ways to overcome them.

to mitigate climate change or avert the next pandemic. We can ensure that civilisation would rebound if it collapsed, cultivate value pluralism, and prepare for a planet where the most sophisticated beings are digital and not human.

When the Dust Settles

Searching for Hope After Disaster

Lucy Easthope (Hodder Paperbacks, March 2023)

Readers of The Geographer can buy The Long View in hardback for only £18.75 (RRP £25.00) or in paperback for only £8.24 (RRP £10.99). To order, please visit store. headline.co.uk/products/the-long-view and quote discount code ‘THELONGVIEW25’ at the checkout.

A world-leading authority on recovering from disaster, Lucy Easthope holds governments to account, supports survivors and helps communities to rebuild. She has been at the centre of seismic events, advising on everything from the 2004 tsunami and the 7/7 bombings to the Grenfell fire and the war in Ukraine. She takes us behind the police tape to scenes of chaos, and into government briefing rooms where confusion can reign. She looks back on her life and career, and tells us how we can all build back after disaster.

A Geography of Time On Tempo, Culture and the Pace of Life

Robert Levine (Oneworld Publications, March 2006)

Social psychologist Robert Levine explores our experience of time, taking us on an enchanting tour through the ages and around the world. From the sundials of ancient Greece to the origins of ‘clock time’ in the Industrial Revolution, he asks, how do we use our time? Are we ruled by the clock? What does this do to our cities, our bodies? Perhaps, he argues, time as a human construct has come to define and constrain cultures, while instead we ought to function ‘multi-temporally’, each of us charting our own geography of time.

Maps of Time

An Introduction to Big History

David Christian (University of California Press, September 2011)

Cosmology, geology, archaeology, and population and environmental studies all figure in this ambitious overview of the emerging field of ‘Big History’. Opening with the origins of the universe, stars and galaxies, sun and solar system, David Christian conducts readers through the evolution of the planet before human habitation. He surveys the development of human society from the Palaeolithic era through the transition to agriculture, the emergence of cities and states, and the birth of the modern, industrial period right up to intimations of possible futures.