The Big Here and the Long Now

For thousands of years, humanity's story was one of diversification. Across centuries and continents our species proliferated new approaches to family and community life; to agriculture, economics, religion, artistic expression and self-understanding. Today, this process is in reverse. 

Culturally and ecologically, we are witnessing an almost universal drive towards homogeneity and the loss of diversity. The global forces of capitalism have created a world riddled with overlapping crises, with any alternatives pushed into the margins, narrowing the scope for action just when we need it most. And yet its logic is never totalising: contrary to Margaret Thatcher's famous mantra, there are many alternatives. 

The Big Here and the Long Now begins with the story of how our world of efficiency, standardisation and development optimism first came into being; and how promises of progress, growth and prosperity have, in recent years, acquired a nasty aftertaste. The book concludes with hope, and an exploration of creolisation and hybridity. With biocultural diversity already being revived by activists and indigenous communities, from Manhattan to Micronesia, there are plenty of green shoots. Now they must be cultivated and nurtured.

Introduction: The Big Here and the Long Now

Part I. A Global History of Standardisation

1. Stories of Loss

2. Everything Was Not Better Before

3. The World after 1492

4. The Global Bulldozers: State and Market

5. Scale Collisions

6. The Loss of Flexibility 

Part II. Overheating in the 21st Century

7. The World after 1991

8. The Homogenocene

9. The Smartphone and the Container Ship

10. The Botanical Garden - and the Zoological One

11. Concrete

12. Soil

13. Invasions

14. Language

15. Food

16. The Sensory System

17. Modules in a Customised World

18. Good Standardisation

Part III. Miracles of Creolisation

19. David and Goliath

20. Cracks in the Concrete

21. Desensitisation

22. Boundary Crossings

23. Creole Conviviality

24. The Miracles of Creolisation

25. TAMA

Afterword and Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Index