A nice way to begin a critical inquiry into the present moment is to set up a timeline. All it takes is a piece of paper and marker and voilà, the investigator is ready to go. Important dates are duly noted and major events arranged in chronological order. As more information gathers on the timeline, trends start to emerge. Some of those trends can be reassuring, others not so much. But the researcher presses on, determined to better understand what some theorists call “the direction of the present.”
In her book on the transition to democracy in post-Pinochet Chile, anthropologist Julia Paley describes the effectiveness of timelines as a political tool. The residents of one of Santiago’s poorer neighborhood gathered to plot major events in Chile’s political history. September 11, 1973 was a big date; the day President Allende was overthrown by the military and General Pinochet came to power. But there were other dates: When squatters first settled in the abandoned field of a hacienda, when the government promised to set up a clinic and a school, when a park was approved by the neighborhood council, when the national government abandoned public services in favor of structural adjustment programs. As the timeline became more detailed, the residents began to see how, over time, they had come to expect less and less of their government. They also saw how many times the government had reneged on promises. The timeline became an important tool to mobilize the neighborhood.
But not all visual aids inspire political action. There is a type of graph, one that plots exponential growth, that can take most of the oxygen out of the room. A first cousin to the timeline, environmentalists call this type of graph, “hockey stick,” referring to the shape of the line itself. Map global population from 1800 to 2012 and you’ll get a hockey stick lying on its side. From 1800 to 1950, the line runs pretty flat. Then in the mid-1950s, the number of people on earth rushes skyward, from 2 billion to over 7 billion in fifty years. If you map the number of species going extinct over time, you’ll get another hockey stick to the noggin.
Which is exactly what these graphs do; they bang us over the head with a direction of the present that seems way too fast and way too big to deal with. With human population rising at a tremendous rate and biodiversity disappearing almost as fast, it’s hard to find the energy to do anything. “I guess we’re f___’ed,” is how one audience member described it, after a lecture at Marlboro’s Graduate Center a few years back. He had just been hockey struck.
Besides global population and species extinction, another hockey stick is incarceration rates for African-American men without high school degrees. In the 18-34-age category, we see a big spike in the incarceration rate beginning in the 1980’s. At that time, less than ten percent of that population was behind bars. Now it hovers around 40 percent.
But here’s an interesting twist: show an audience the population and extinction graphs and they’ll just want to go home and cry. Show an audience the incarceration rates and chances are good some will want to mobilize around prison reform. In other words, some graphs provoke, and some just numb.
Interestingly enough, timelines have the advantage of generating more political energy because they require more work to read. Members of the Santiago neighborhood looked hard at the information plotted along their x-axis and then hypothesized about possible trends. The timeline provided the stuff of political narratives, suggesting plot lines where bravery wins briefly against corruption and considers future opportunities for resistance. Graphs, on the other hand, control the story. “Look where that line is going!” we say to ourselves, as if we were not involved.
I’m thinking about this because on Wednesday evening I’ll be speaking at Landmark College about species extinction and population growth and I don’t want to take the oxygen out of the room. The hockey sticks are there, floating above my timeline like celestial visitors, playing the role of Fate and Fortune. In this new 21st century, the direction of the present is haunted by their undeniable facts. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have choices in how we go forward.
For instance, population growth may not be as horrible as some Vermonters dread. The second time we walked across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, it was a holy year. The saint’s day fell on a Sunday, making the indulgences we received for our blisters worth far more in papal heaven. With greater value came bigger crowds, particularly for the last hundred kilometers of the journey. The refugios were full and used toilet paper littered the fields just outside the villages. “Look at all the people!” I said to a schoolteacher from Madrid, thinking she would share my distress. “Sí,” she said, with tears in her eyes, “Es muy emocionante.”
For those of you who don’t speak Spanish, my Madrileña guide was teaching me that life is more exciting when there are more people to share it with. Where I saw toilet paper, she saw the pulsating energy of pilgrims.
Almost 8 billion of us are on pilgrimage now, filling up all available beds, in prison and out, scattering our waste across the planet’s fields. Our collective timeline reminds us of promises that were broken and plans we still cherish. What ever happened to that park by the river? Why does so much public money go towards prisons instead of playgrounds? How did we inherit these choices? With more people participating, the timeline is rich with details, the trends more obvious. Oh right, we tell ourselves, that’s what we wanted back then.
This is our story, made step by step, even with blisters, even with fewer species by our side.
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