By Melisa Luymes

When I was young, I liked to go back to the woodlot because it was a machinery graveyard. Rusted and nearly unrecognizable, as a mower or swather, trees had grown up through them. My siblings and I picked through old bottles, boards and bones like archaeologists, imagining the story of the man who had left his stuff there and died so long ago. One hundred years! I thought that was forever; back then I couldn’t wrap my head around time. 
But now I know that 100 years will just fly by. I’ve spoken with many older farmers who remember using mowers and swathers like that, remember bringing all the crops into the barn to thresh and remembering when the first tractor came to their farm. They are amazed at how far the technology has come just in their lifetime: precision soil mapping, variable rate seeding, time-release fertilizer and real-time yield mapping, just to name a few. 
And where will we be in the next 100 years? How many people will we need to feed? Will we be farming with robots, growing different foods, growing more indoors? Will we still be growing food to power automobiles?
Over the last years, my fascination with the past has been superseded by a vision for the future … and reflecting on the nature of time itself. 
Einstein explained that time is the fourth dimension. To locate an object in space, you need to know its 3D coordinates – X (east-west), Y (north-south) and Z (elevation) – along with the exact date and minute and second it was there, so that is why time is termed the fourth dimension. He also, famously, explained that time was relative, and that the gravity of a large object would impact how quickly time passes. I don’t believe he figured out how years go by faster as we get older.
While humans can travel up and down, back and forth through the first three dimensions with relative ease, it is a bit more difficult to travel through time, except at the rate and direction we are already going, that is. While I can easily hit the backspace or undo button while writing this article, I can’t undo knocking my favourite vase to the ground, like I did the other day. I can’t un-smash-it-into-twenty-pieces. We are stuck in linear time, of cause and effect. 
It means that what we do matters, and it matters for the rest of time. 
I’ve been doing some reflecting on “long time” after my conversation with the incredible people at Philosopher’s Wool Co. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about final disposal solutions for spent nuclear fuel. Read this month’s article and you’ll see why.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the major isotopes will remain radioactive for millions of years, but only at dangerous levels for the first tens of thousands. Finland has led the world for a Deep Geological Repository (DGR) in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island. ONKALO® began in 2004, is half a kilometre underground and will have 40 kilometres of excavated tunnels when it is completed. It has been tested to keep canisters of nuclear waste safely stored for tens of thousands of years. 
And I thought 100  years was hard to wrap my head around! 
I’ve also been listening to the Long Time Academy podcast, and they have some time-bending exercises to help us get out of the short-term thinking, individualism and instant gratification embedded in Western culture and our current political and economic systems. It features an Indigenous elder that talks about Seven Generation thinking and the love that she has for our descendants that are not yet born. 
The podcast challenges us to think of the rights of future generations as equal to our own, to become good ancestors. It has us consider that if short-term thinking got us into the dilemmas we are in today, then maybe long-term thinking is what we need to get us out of them. 
The Long Time Project also features artist Katie Paterson, who has created Future Library. In 2014, 1,000 trees were planted on the outskirts of Oslo, Norway to be cut down in 100 years and made into books. Each year, an author is asked to submit a manuscript in a handover ceremony at the forest location. The manuscript won’t be printed or read by anyone until 2114, and the first author to submit was Canada’s own Margaret Atwood. 
It is deeply humbling to know that I will not be able to read Atwood’s (or anyone’s) contribution to Future Library. Maybe my youngest niece will be able to read it at the age of 92, but what future will she be living into? Will she walk through a forest near the end of her life and see a tree growing up through an 8R tractor? Oh goodness, I hope it at least gets recycled! 
Well, at some level, we know what her future will be like. It will be the future that we are shaping today, it will be where we are investing our time and resources now. It is about time we asked some tough questions.◊