Deep Time Walk

For the very 1st time in Aotearoa NZ, 10 willing participants journeyed through the 4.6 billion years of our planet’s history to the present day, learning about key evolutionary events as they walked round the Hatea Loop in Whangarei on 25th September.

The Hatea Loop is the perfect length with 1m being equal to 1 million years. Starting in the Town Basin we walked 4.6km through 4.6 billion years of Earth history. At 24 pre-determined stops we heard about key events from Earth’s evolution and experienced an extremely powerful moment towards the end when our place in time is thrown into perspective. Without giving too much away… it was down to a ruler measurement at the end….

The Deep Time Walk is a very poignant reminder of just how incredible our existence is and provides an essential context to our current human induced climate crisis.

The walk puts into context humanity’s rich ancestral heritage and gives an insight into the inter-connectedness of life. It helps us comprehend Deep Time – the vast age of our Earth – and explores the destructive impact our species is having on the integral functioning of our living world. Deep Time provides “a radical perspective, provoking action not apathy … [it] is the catalysing context of intergenerational justice; it is what frames the inspiring activism of Greta Thunberg and the school climate-strikers, and the Sunrise campaigners pushing for a Green New Deal in America.”

A deep-time perspective requires us to consider not only how we will imagine the future, but how the future will imagine us.

It provokes me to ask the question: “What sort of future are you living into being…?”