Growing and Tending Thousand-Year-Old Trees
Long Now Foundation, Ignite 2024
In May 2024, I had the fortune of presenting at the Long Now Foundation’s 2024 Ignite Talks in San Francisco about our efforts to grow 1000 thousand-year-old trees throughout Edmonton. You can find all of the Long Now Foundation Ignite Talks on YouTube
2024 Ignite Talk Transcripts
Dustin Bajer, Cultivate the Millennium,
[00:00:00.10] – The Future Could Be Greener
It’s the future. You’re walking down a dark street when you turn a corner, and you come across an ancient tree that was planted there a thousand years ago, in 2024.
[00:00:13.21] – Tending The Future
What would it be like to live in a future that tends to thousand-year-old trees? What would be their relationship to time and their sense of responsibility to the future? It seems that a lot of our cultural narrative has turned dystopian over the last few years, and I’ve come to believe that to cultivate better futures, we need to be able to imagine them.
[00:00:41.01] – The Secret LongTree Society
My name is Dustin Bajer, and I belong to a group in the city of Edmonton that is trying to foster long-term thinking and responsibility by propagating, distributing, and tending a thousand thousand-year-old trees. We call ourselves the Secret Longtree Society, though that’s a bit cheeky. We’re pretty open with what we’re trying to do, and in fact, we’d love to invite you to be a part of it. We spend a lot of time hanging out and having conversations around the philosophy of planting a thousand-year-old trees and how we might be able to do it practically. It’s a pretty interesting thought experiment that we’re trying to make.
[00:01:29.29] – Edmonton
For a little bit of context, we’re in Edmonton, the most northern city of a million on the continent. Our pretty extreme climate ranges from minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter to plus 40 degrees Celsius in the summer, which somewhat limits the species that can live for a thousand years here. We’ve been looking at Ginko biloba and the Rocky Mountain Bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata).
[00:01:57.18] – Propagting Possabilities
In my hand, I’m holding 1,500 bristle cone pine seeds, each capable of living for more than a thousand years. So, if my math is correct, that represents about 1.5 million years of growth. We’ve been putting together different kinds of resources to support this project, including step-by-step propagation videos. We distribute our seeds locally and get folks to grow them out. Their names are attached to those trees as the propagators.
[00:02:31.07] – Where to Plant a Thousand-Year-Old Tree
A big question, obviously, is where to plant a thousand-year-old tree. One strategy might be to find spaces in the city that are likely to go untouched. But we’re also interested in finding locations that are expected to see lots of change throughout the city. Perhaps these trees could act as anchor points to remind us of the bigger picture.
[00:02:56.23] – Trees As Stories
This is a photograph from this morning. When we look at many of the trees that we love here in Edmonton, we realize that most of them are attached to specific people, places, or events. In short, the trees we love have stories, and they reflect the people who plant them and the people who tend them. An interesting question for us is, what story are we telling ourselves with the trees we’re planting?
[00:03:31.27] – A Thousand-Year-Birthday Party
I love a long-term project like this. I love a project that I’m never going to see the end of, which alleviates a lot of pressures in some ways, but also allows you to do some really interesting things. We’ve been playing around with the idea of hosting a thousand-year birthday party for some of our trees. To do that, we’re thinking about handing out tickets as people get their thousand-year-old seedling. If you show up in a thousand years with your ticket, you’re in. Or what if we could donate a couple of dollars for each tree and put that into an endowment fund and let that accrue interest for a thousand years? How could that support the trees? How could that support long-term thinking projects? In the future.
[00:04:17.00] – Long-Term Thinking vs Long-Term Planning
Stuart Brand has this great saying that long-term thinking is the opposite of long-term planning. It’s true that we’re planning on planting a thousand, thousand-year-old trees, but the further into this we go, the more we’ve realized that it’s less about the trees and it’s more about cultivating the kinds of conversations and the culture that is necessary to propagate better futures. And so I encourage you to think about the future you’d like to propagate and start something ambitious, quirky, and weird that is beyond what you’re capable of doing now because it’s worth it.
