Philosophy
Deep time is not just a geological idea; it is an ethical lens that asks humans to think beyond their own lifetime.
Deep Time Ethics
When we learn to see in deep time, something happens to our sense of our own importance. Not in a diminishing way, not the cold comfort of insignificance, but in a clarifying way. The questions that seemed urgent at the scale of a human life reveal themselves as parochial. What does this do for me becomes almost incoherent. The relevant questions shift: what does this do for the system? What does this do for duration itself?
But here is what McPhee, working in the Western scientific tradition, perhaps did not fully see: deep time was not his discovery. It was a rediscovery. Several traditions had always known it. The Hindu cosmological imagination operates in units that make geological time look modest. A single kalpa, one day in the life of Brahma, is 4.32 billion years. A mahayuga is 4.32 million years. Human history, in this frame, is not even a rounding error. It is a flicker inside a flicker. The Jain concept of anantakāla, infinite time, without beginning or end, goes further still: time is not a river with a source but an ocean without shores.
These are not merely cosmological curiosities. They are ethical orientations. If you genuinely internalise that you are a brief brightness in an unimaginable duration, your relationship to your own choices changes. You stop asking what I will get and start asking what will remain. You stop thinking about your lifetime and start thinking about the web of interconnections, ṛta that persists across lifetimes. Deep time ethics is the name for what emerges when you calibrate your moral life to this scale. Not abstractly, not in renunciation of the present, but concretely: in how you treat the soil, the river, the seed, the child, the institution, the story you are part of. It asks: Am I acting in a way that is worthy of the duration I am briefly part of?
Several communities in this subcontinent have been practising deep time ethics for centuries, without needing the phrase.
Communities That Already Know This
There is a grove of trees in the Bishnoi belt of Rajasthan that is older than anyone’s grandfather’s grandfather. The Bishnoi do not regard it as theirs. They regard themselves as its custodians, which is a different thing entirely. Custodianship implies obligation without ownership, care without claim, a relationship that extends backwards to those who planted and forward to those who will tend after you are gone. The twenty-nine principles that give the community its name include explicit prohibitions on cutting green trees and harming animals. These are not environmental policies in the modern sense. They are deep time commitments, ethical stances that recognise the grove as operating on a different temporal scale than a human life, and that subordinate the human scale to the longer one. When Amrita Devi embraced a tree in 1730 and gave her life rather than allow it to be felled, she was not being irrational. She was being correctly calibrated to deep time. The tree would outlive any argument for cutting it.
In 1972, Ghanshyam Raturi — poet and activist of the Chipko movement — wrote the words that would name and carry an entire struggle:
Embrace the trees and Save them from being felled The property of our hills Save them from being looted
Two years later, on 25 March 1974, in Reni village in the Chamoli district, the men had been tricked away by officials. Gaura Devi, head of the Mahila Mangal Dal, gathered the women and walked to the forest. When the loggers threatened them with guns, she stood her ground and said:
“Brothers! This forest is the source of our livelihood. If you destroy it, the mountain will come tumbling down onto our village. This forest nurtures us like a mother; you will only be able to use your axes on it if you shoot me first.”
Notice what Gaura Devi does not say. She does not say: This forest is mine. She does not say: I have a right to it. She says: This forest nurtures us like a mother. She speaks in the grammar of receiving – of something given, of care that precedes ownership, of a web of sustenance she has inherited and refuses to sever. She is speaking, without knowing the philosophical vocabulary, the language of ṛta. And she is speaking it forward for the mountain, for the village, for the generations who will need the water that the roots hold.
The Koli fisherfolk of the Konkan coast still observe seasonal fishing bans that predate the Maharashtra Marine Fishing Regulation Act by generations. The ban is not enforced by the state. It is enforced by collective memory and the understanding that the sea has a logic older than any fishing economy, and that you ignore it at the cost of everything that comes after you. The fish they do not catch this season are the fish that future fisherfolk will find. This is not a sacrifice in the sense of deprivation. It is an ethics of sufficiency — taking what you need, no more, because what you leave is also a gift, given into deep time, to a receiver you will never meet.
What Raturi’s poem, Gaura Devi’s words, and the Koli fishing ban share is not a philosophy arrived at by argument. It is a practice arrived at by living close enough to the consequences of short-termism to understand, bodily, what it costs. Deep time ethics is not an academic position for these communities. It is survival knowledge that became wisdom that became culture.
We are their students here, not the other way around.
Credits: TCA, LLC.