Last Friday (12th Sept), Pins Brown and Sam Jarman led a Deep Time Walk for The STEPS Collective around Devil’s Dyke on the South Downs near Brighton.
A Deep Time Walk is a 4.6km walk through 4.6bn years. Each one metre step, therefore, represents a million years. Thanks to the UK weather, it certainly felt that we were walking through the extreme conditions that shaped the earth over the millennia.
What a joy it was, to think together about the many compounded flukes and one-in-a-billion chances that led to life on earth; how lucky and precious it is that we are here at all.
Perhaps the thing that stuck with me most, as we walked through the millennia in which previous great extinctions played out, was that nature comes back. No disaster is unrecoverable on unreversible, if you think in long enough time scales. It just needs the space in which to emerge.
It reminded me of recent scenes from the Sussex Bay Project, after trawling was banned along the coast in 2021. Fish that haven’t been seen in decades, the sea bed covered in life again in only four years. And in a very small way, it is also like what we’ve been doing here on our neighbourhood estate, as our ongoing rewilding project has helped make space for hedgehogs to live around and among our gardens again this summer.
And, finally, from the World Design Congress last week. It occurred to me during a great panel on ‘Cultivating Community Champions’ that the panellists all talked not about the championing specific people, but on using their skills to create the spaces in which champions for communities could emerge.
Maybe of the best design is just about making a space.
Then working with whoever, and whatever, shows up in that space.
The Deep Time Walk method was originally created in 2007, by Dr. Stephan Harding in co-ordination with geologist Sergio Maraschin, and both Pins and Sam are accredited Deep Time Walk facilitators.
Find out more about Deep Time Walks here, and sign up here to The STEPS Collective for news of future explorations.
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