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Back in the 20th century, Russia showed what happens when the differing paces of change are not honored. The Soviet Revolution of 1917 transformed governance at fashion pace, and then everything was run at infrastructure pace--Five-Year Plans. Commerce was slowed to a crawl, and fashion came to what seemed like a dead stop. Deep-seated culture was forced to pretend that it was changing at the pace of the plans, and nature dropped right out of the picture. When the system inevitably broke, there was little robustness left in the culture, scant adaptivity left in commerce, and the Russian environment was a poisoned wreck.
A sound environmentalism doesn't try to slow commerce, but it must act to prevent commerce from violating the pace of nature (or, for that matter, of culture). The destruction of the cod fishery in the northwestern Atlantic was the work of commerce unfettered by intelligent governance. Governments like Canada's kept trying to protect the jobs of fishermen without listening to what was well known at a cultural level in the fishing communities--that the size of the fish and the catch was shrinking steadily. The alarmed environmental scientists on the scene were ignored. Next time perhaps they won't be. The demise of the fishery was an economic disaster.
Science, along with such technology as Earth satellites, gave us the necessary long-term perspective on the harmful environmental trends under way. Goaded by environmental organizations, the various bodies of governance are gradually learning how to respond--with sustained, alert, patient action.
Future historians may note that in the same period that technology acceleration was driving the world to operate on fleeting "Internet time," environmentalists were teaching the world the long-term foresight and long-term responsibility of biosphere time. Just when technology was busy making us smarter, environmental awareness began to make us wiser.
Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and author of The Clock of the Long Now, is president of a foundation building a 10,000-year clock and library www.longnow.org