By All Measures
January 13, 2026 at 03:31PM
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B. R. Cohen | Longreads | January 15, 2026 | 23 minutes (5,613 words)
“The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock,
But of wisdom: no clock can measure.”
–William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell”
I don’t have long to live. As I write, it may be just 20 years until I pass on. Thirty feels like a stretch. You can’t know, I can’t know. Life is short, life comes at you fast, gather ye rosebuds while ye may. All I have are aphorisms and clichés.
I never knew my father’s father. He died of a heart attack in his 40s, before I was born. My father had a heart attack in his 40s. (He survived.) I grew up with the expectation that I would have a heart attack in my 40s. I’m in my 50s now and it seems, as they say, like a matter of time.
Clichés again. Parents say the days are long but the years are short. Sophocles says time eases all things. Thoreau says time is but the stream we go a-fishing in. Einstein tells us time is an illusion. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. All of them are right.
A human life can be 70, 80, maybe 90 years. The tuataras, a New Zealand reptile, can live to be 100, as can a crocodile. A Seychelles giant tortoise can live close to 200 years. Sea animals have us all beat. Bowhead whales can live past 200 years. For some sea urchin species, it’s 300. The ocean quahog clam can live past 500. On the other end are insects. An adult dragonfly might live a week. Shadflies, also called mayflies or fishflies, live just a day or two.
Geological time has an entirely different range of long and short. My friend studies ice cores from millions of years ago, examining glacial variation to better understand how climates change. The Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene. These are epochs, an official scientific term for a measure of time—less than a period, more than an age. Epochs span millions of years. They put our biological lifespans to shame. We are shadflies to the sandstone sediment of the Miocene.
Our current epoch, scientists argue, is called the Anthropocene. It’s new. The term comes from Paul J. Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who wrote that “human activities are exerting increasing impacts on the environment on all scales”—impacts so profound that we created an entirely new stamp on the timeline. The Anthropocene is a commentary on our scales of time as well as space. It isn’t just how old things are or how long they take, but how big they are and how vast their dimensions are.
I’ll admit a little hesitancy for the concept. It’s an audacious move, to declare the dawn of a new epoch from within; I’m not sure if there’s a bit too much modern exceptionalism at work. But I also can’t say the full scientific validity matters for me. Say what you will about the Anthropocene, but I nod to it for trying to gauge what’s so strange and difficult about our moment. It is the relationship between biological generations and geological epochs, between the scope of mortal activity and that of global planetary activity. It is all scales everywhere all at once.
Hopelessness comes from the scalar mismatch between we individuals, who are wee individuals, and the problems of an 8,000-mile-diameter earth.
Understanding the significance of our own lives requires some understanding of scale. “Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences,” Marcia Bjornerud, a geologist, writes. The Anthropocene, she suggests, is a fine time to “adopt a geologic respect for time and its capacity to transfigure, destroy, renew, amplify, erode, propagate, entwine, innovate, and exterminate.” We need to know how to navigate our epoch: to recognize our profusion of scales and strive to understand, amidst their collisions, not just how to care for the world beyond us but how a person can be, what it means to stand as a morally vested individual.
And yet we humans are still not particularly good at seeing ourselves in time or space. I’m certainly not. So here we are. Not only has our age come face to face with an emergency of scalar challenges—brashly called a global climate crisis—but we have produced a daunting sense of distance from addressing it. The problems are physically too far away, too large, too vast; the psychological distance we feel from addressing them is too great. It’s a double-distancing. Hopelessness comes from the scalar mismatch between we individuals, who are wee individuals, and the problems of an 8,000-mile-diameter earth.
All of this was on my mind when I first met Robert Socolow, an 88-year-old physicist who, over the course of his life, turned to environmental science and technology to help humanity respond to our most complex challenges of scale. One of those efforts has been with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where Socolow helps with their Doomsday Clock. That’s the device that, since 1947, tracks humanity’s proximity to self-destruction. The clock is a metaphor, presuming to measure Blake’s hours of folly by minute and second hand; the hands are set by “nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies, and biosecurity,” among other concerns. They’ve changed positions 26 times in the decades since they began metaphorically ticking. Since 2010, the clock’s hands have only moved closer to midnight.
In 2025, Socolow himself revealed the face of the clock at a press conference in Washington, DC. It was January and he was at the US Institute of Peace in Foggy Bottom. With a crowd of reporters looking on, cameras flashing and shutters digitally clicking, Socolow stood by a modernist wooden stand and spun a turntable to reveal the clock hands at a small, acute angle against midnight. A world of scalar challenges fell into an urgent sort of order. The end was 89 seconds away.
Most of us are daunted, every day, by the vastness of planetary activity and the proximity of our personal choices. We look at the clock, unsure how to balance clashing scopes of time and space. But if I’m unsettled, I want proximity to settle me. I want to be close, I want to feel part of the world I inhabit and see and feel, I want to hold those I love near to me. So what should we do? When I met Socolow, I wanted to close the physical and psychological distances in my own life before time ran out.
Socolow is a kind of Ivy League Forrest Gump. He’s been at the top of his fields for 60-odd years. It’s been a life threaded through with friends and colleagues and mentors who became presidential science advisors, Nobel Prize winners, and MacArthur geniuses. As a high school camp counselor in the Hudson Valley in the 1950s, he moved Pete Seeger’s refrigerator for him, because Seeger lived near the camp. He was on a fellowship year traveling Southeast Asia in 1960 when United Press International noticed he was Russian-conversant and then recruited him to help translate Nikita Khrushchev’s state visit to Indonesia. He was at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in 1964 when Mario Savio was dragged from the stage at the start of the Free Speech Movement. Later, he cofounded Princeton University’s environmental center and came to know John McPhee. Once, in the early ’70s, Socolow invited the writer and rogue environmental provocateur Edward Abbey to town for a lecture, during which an audience member got mad at Abbey for a story about killing a rabbit. Words were exchanged. Feelings were felt. Socolow was there.
We met because Socolow’s granddaughter is a student where I teach. I bumped into Socolow’s son at a campus reception and, after some easy chitchat, I realized I knew who his father was.
I didn’t know the Doomsday Clock connection yet, but I knew Socolow’s work in climate science. More specifically, his name was familiar because of work on something called stabilization wedges. In a widely cited 2004 paper in Science, he and his coauthor Stephen Pacala had taken the scale of climate problems and marked them into smaller divisions. Like geologists dividing the Quaternary period into a Pleistocene and a Holocene, and now, possibly, an Anthropocene.
The wedges, Socolow has said, are a way to “simplify the presentation of global carbon management.” Think of a wedge, say, of vehicle fuel efficiency; there’s a wedge of wind power; you’ve got a wedge that represents the avoidance of deforestation. Rather than tackling all carbon, in all places, for all time, the idea was to scale solutions to sectors, and to pin it to a half-century horizon—“the length of a career, the lifetime of a power plant, and an interval whose technology is close enough to envision,” as Socolow put it. Just about my current lifespan, as I think of it. Longer than my grandfather’s heart lasted.
The wedge paper has been cited thousands of times. It’s spawned classroom games and lesson plans. Al Gore, whom Socolow met and worked with, name-checked it in An Inconvenient Truth. It has its own Wikipedia page.
I didn’t say all of this when I met his son on campus, but I did say, “Oh, that Socolow.” After I bumped into him, Socolow’s son told him I was interested in a meeting.
Socolow stopped by my apartment the next time he came to town. It was in late fall, for a football game. He got there mid-morning. I knew he was stopping by but still somehow lost track of time. After a barely heard door knock, I raced to get coffee going and scones on a plate, excited to meet a kind of academic celebrity in my environmental subfield but also unsure what we’d talk about beyond pleasantries. Pausing before the door handle, I felt briefly ridiculous for how little beyond this age I’d imagined my life would amount to, while, on the other side of the door, was a global scientist who accomplished so much before and after his 50s. I also worked hard to check my self-involved fear of impending death while I sat with a thoughtful, very lively octogenarian.
When you talk about climate policy, how fast is fast? How soon is soon? What can we hope to do in one small human life? What is our measure?
We sat in my living room, between a low shelf of books and a hodgepodge of scuffed 1970s-era LPs. He sat on the couch and I sat in a chair; behind me, a wall of houseplants stretched for more light. We chatted easily about the specifics of individual lives, the kind of cocktail party banter that shapes first meetings—which people we might both know, what places we’ve both been to—before moving into overly lofty questions about the problems of the world. Questions about scale quickly piled up. When you talk about climate policy, how fast is fast? How soon is soon? What can we hope to do in one small human life? What is our measure?
Socolow, pensive about it all, pinched a corner of cranberry scone.
“When did we discover the global?” he asked me. It was a curious question—not “When was the Age of Exploration,” or “When did imperialism stitch together a global polity.” Socolow was after something else: When did regular people first become aware that our actions are connected to those on the other side of the same world?
For him, the answer was 1957. It was the International Geophysical Year, a project involving scientists from 67 countries who wanted to overcome Cold War disruptions in global coordination. The scientists discovered the Van Allen belts, which radiate energized particles in two rings around the earth. They kind of figured out what El Niño weather patterns are. They had recently set up the Mauna Loa Observatory, then used it to get us the first measures of atmospheric carbon dioxide and tracked the increased rate of emissions—the data that brought us into the Anthropocene.
Socolow was a 19-year-old Harvard undergraduate that year. He was educated at the mid-century high-water mark of atomic physics, and trained in laboratory science. When the Soviets launched Sputnik that fall, he rushed to stand on a bridge over the Charles River, looking overhead for the tiny tin satellite. The Doomsday Clock had been ticking for a decade at that point.
The doom represented by the clock loomed over Socolow’s early career. He worked in physics after 1957, but the wave of 1960s unrest washed over him too. He tells me he was a full-on moderate at the time—“the right edge of the left.” He wore suits to marches, protesting proudly astride the scruffy-bearded set. With his fellow physicists, he published a letter in The New York Times demanding a stop to bombing in North Vietnam, channeling the kind of scientist engagement that raised alarm bells during the Manhattan Project. By the end of the decade, he also had a new baby, the son whose daughter now studies at my college.
As a younger man, Socolow had read Albert Schweitzer’s autobiography. Schweitzer, a theologian and physician, won the Nobel Peace Prize for a philosophy he called “reverence for life.” In his book, Schweitzer wrote that he spent several years as principal of a seminary, only to decide that his theological field, while providing inward happiness, did not feel socially useful. Once he came to this realization, he committed to the service of humanity as a physician.
Socolow remembered Schweitzer’s decree and made his own dramatic move, from the insular world of academic physics to environmental problem-solving. By the early 1970s, a decade into life as a physicist, he was at Princeton, immersed in addressing environmental issues and global climate studies. He had changed the scale of his personal engagement.
“You scaled up,” I said, meaning from the microscopic to the planetary. I was excited, hearing about this huge transition for him and the world. I shifted in my seat and spilled a little coffee down the side of my mug into the napkin in my hand.
Socolow corrected me. “I scaled down,” he said. The way he saw it, he had moved from a universe of microscopic particles to something more manageable—just the one planet.
I’m asking around about how to collapse distances and feel closer to a meaningful life. A lot of that is macro: I’m an environmental writer, navigating concepts like epochs, hopes, fears, and scale in my day job as a way to understand how to make a difference. But just as much is micro: my kids are out of the house, I’m an empty nester, my parents are aging, I’m soon a caretaker. How can I hold them all close? Proximity is holding love near. I jumped at the chance to meet Socolow in part as a way to arrange contentment. I’m not a religious man, but I still feel part of some search for the ineffable, scaleless soul, whatever holds me on earth. It’s a search beyond aphorisms and clichés.
I also have this feeling that scales are like people; they only have identity as gauged against another. A long time only takes on meaning in comparison to something lesser. When Augustine turned this predicament over in the fifth century, he decided that what we measure when we measure time is in the memory. The idea of an idea—time is not a thing; it is an idea in our mind—has its own temporal history.
Scale is from the Latin scala, meaning ladder, step, stairs. Move up. Or down. Escalate. Scale is measuring things, providing a range, of how far we’ve come, of how much we have. Scale, v.—to ascend or descend. Scale, n.—a measurement, or a thing. Music has scales. Gyms and doctor’s offices have scales. Fahrenheit made a scale. Richter did, too. Geologists, farmers, teachers, and artists all work with scale. Actors might work for scale.
But I also know the confusing emotional register when you run up and down a scalar ladder. The confusion is over how to be a person, how to be an individual in our modern world with a global conscience. Things are escalating.
The confusion may come from what the writer Timothy Clark calls “derangements of scale.” Our experiences as modern global humans, Clark writes, are like being “lost in a small town” and then handed a map of the entire earth for locating yourself and finding your way. In the Anthropocene, he writes, “we have a map, [and] its scale includes the whole earth, but when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics, or specific interpretations of history, culture, literature, etc., the map is often almost mockingly useless.” Our scales are too imbalanced; we are unable to think the unthinkable. It goes without saying that it can be paralyzing, demoralizing, to be an individual acting as part of the collective, globe-sized world.
That radical shift in scale can accomplish the power of perspective to humble us as humans. It also reminds me just how tiny my little feet are, standing on the razor-thin surface of that wispy-clouded globe.
Tolstoy dealt with this in A Confession. He wasn’t worried over nature so much as his singular sense of place in the universe, and how to measure it. He explained his trouble with a fable. A beast chases a man down a waterless well. At the bottom is a dragon. The man catches a branch halfway down. He looks up to see his final fate in the beast if he tries to climb out. He looks down to see his final fate in the dragon’s mouth if he falls. He is caught between, contemplating his station. A small drop of honey, one of his pleasures in life, rolls down the branch. He tastes it but, for the first time, it’s no longer sweet to him. He is trapped in a middle space, a scale between all there is and nothing. “What meaning has my finite existence,” he writes, “in this infinite world?”
Faith, he decided, was the reason to believe in the life between finitude and infinity. God is the bridge between the two scales; that’s how they can be reconciled. It was theology for him. Most people dwell in ignorance by happenstance or by design, or else they become listless. This is what happens when we feel the clash of our mismatched scales.
When Camus dealt with this in the 1940s, he wasn’t sitting inside Christian theology, though he was similarly after the listless. His atheist appeal was to a life that matters inside a world that doesn’t care about him. It led him a different way for some salvation from, as he put it, a “measureless universe.” Camus didn’t have God to fall back on. For him, it’s the doing that matters, the revolt against meaninglessness—the recognition of the chasm between himself and the world, and the decision to take it on.
We all remember the image of Sisyphus, pushing his rock eternally up a hill. It’s an absurd act, maybe deranged. When I read The Myth of Sisyphus in college, a professor explained that for Camus, it isn’t a punishment, but an acceptance that the joke is on all of us, Sisyphus knows it, and we should get on with things already. To a universe that stays silent in response to our best designs, Sisyphus gives the middle finger. If Camus were the commencement speaker at my college, he would tell my students to tell the world to fuck off, and then to get to work.
What I hear people trying to capture with the Anthropocene is yet another way to show that individual humans are part of scales of change much larger than them alone. I don’t think of Tolstoy or Camus too regularly, to be honest, but I often think of the children’s tale about the princess who insisted her father, the king, bring her the moon. It isn’t until the court jester comes by that anyone realizes the moon is the size of a thumbnail to the girl. Her perspective of scale is unblinkered by a full life of contemplating distance and proximity, the vast and the tiny.
But we are blinkered, we do contemplate distance and proximity. We aren’t children.
How do we come to see ourselves as part of greater scales of change? Around the time Socolow transitioned from particles to planets, William Anders, an astronaut aboard the Apollo 8 mission, photographed Earth from lunar orbit. The image, Anders later said, empowered the global environmentalist movement, changed our scalar understanding of global conflict, and “really undercut my religious beliefs.” It touched off a raft of think pieces and works of art about the challenge of personal significance amidst the vastness of space.
I wish all that mulling helped me, but I’m still confused by it. Earthrise, the famous picture, can make the world seem small, floating so softly in the Milky Way like a marbled mushroom cap. Oh right, our planet is so embarrassingly small in the universe. Thank you for the image, astronauts. That radical shift in scale can accomplish the power of perspective to humble us as humans. It also reminds me just how tiny my little feet are, standing on the razor-thin surface of that wispy-clouded globe. I don’t know if I should feel stupid or humbled for gauging my place in a grand historical trajectory, where others see God and beasts and innocence and galaxies, and I pause in a chasm between the holy and my mortal body. I am forever in the middle, between the infinite expanse beyond and the limited number of heartbeats inside. And so are you.
The search to collapse distances has me on a meandering path between philosophers and scientists, writers and astronauts, wedges and clocks. To the moon and back, thumb-sized or not.
I’m stuck on the psychological distance, in particular, when I ask Socolow how he felt during his career change a half century ago. For him, the visibility of scalar changes gave him and his colleagues a sustained sense of hope and urgency. They had come upon global awareness; it was a call to arms. For me, the challenge has been squaring the work I’ve done inside my community with the scope of the issues pressing down on us from outside. In 50 years, we’ve flipped from urgency to paralysis. I’m working with students and colleagues and neighbors to overcome hopelessness.
When I talk to Socolow about this, we keep circling around the view that the goal isn’t to confront every scale, as the deranged Anthropocene may suggest, but to think to the next scale. The wedges were doing this. They aren’t about solving climate change in one fell swoop, but about recognizing the pieces that add up over time. Socolow wrote a paper in 2015 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that was similarly minded, asking policymakers to look at the differences between 50-year solutions and 500-year ones. It’s not an argument that we can stop global climate change in 50 years, but that we can adjust our energy demands, improve our generosity toward our descendants, and secure healthy habitats as preconditions for advancing the 50 years after that.
Some things happen each season, some each year, some take five or ten years. Some will take a generation, if not seven.
A few years back, I worked with a class on a project to estimate the vulnerability of different neighborhoods in our town to increased temperatures by 2075. Fifty years from now. I didn’t know Socolow’s paper at the time, but we were apparently in line with it. Students built GIS maps using floodplain datasets, and calculated something called the albedo effect, which measures the amount of light a surface can reflect, a factor in planetary temperatures. Forecasting a half century out seemed like a compromise between a long time and not-so-long after all. Many of our conversations were about whether a 50-year window was fast or slow, near or far. To get students thinking about that scalar dynamic, my colleague and I asked them to walk the streets to get a feel for the terrain, the tree canopy, the elevations. They could do all of that online, but we wanted them to feel the scale and pace of a neighborhood, not just skim it digitally.
The vulnerability assessment was based on the view that environmental action would take scalar coordination. It was spurred by a group called the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, whose mission involves creating networks of change that can then move up to the next scale: going city by city (over 12,000 of them) and then region by region. My Lehigh Valley is part of Pennsylvania, part of the mid-Atlantic, part of the eastern seaboard, part of the nation. Actions in our neighborhood consider the globe but are made in reference to the next scale up, the next town over. They also consider plausible timescales, one after the other. Some things happen each season, some each year, some take five or ten years. Some will take a generation, if not seven.
I’d pushed one of my favorite books on the class, Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. I knew it wouldn’t help them calculate heat island effect or floodplain hazards, as the assessment called for, but I thought it could ground them in a sense of place. The book isn’t merely about walking; it’s about what we bump into when we look for a world outside ourselves. It’s about the size of our bodies inside the size of our habitats. Solnit reflects on bodies moving across space at the specific pace scoped to the dimension of each person. Walking, she writes, “shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.”
Solnit wasn’t just helpful for the project, but for my own efforts to escape Tolstoy’s well. Our sense of belonging, our sense of identity, comes from our sense of perimeters and boundaries, of how far is too far away, of where home is. When we travel, if we travel, it can take just a few days to start feeling like you know a place if you walk it. Walking to the market for groceries in a small town just two or three times will get you familiar with streets, paths, corners, hills, foot traffic. It is possible to know a place by foot better than any other way because that knowledge is scaled to the metrics of your own body, of your feet and legs.
I thought about the vulnerability assessment when I talked to Socolow, because it felt like it combined several axes of scale at once. There was the spatial scope of a walkable neighborhood, a measurable city, an accessible region; there was the temporal scope of soon and far, of slow and fast. It’s the collision of the axes that’s vexing. The clash between them is where we try to make a life that matters.
Clark captured something central to the collision of scales that sits in the middle of the Anthropocene when he called it a derangement of scale. The absurdity of slogans is telling. As he puts it, “A poster in many workplaces depicts the whole earth as a giant thermostat dial, with the absurd but intelligible caption, ‘You control climate change.’ A motorist buying a slightly less destructive make of car is now ‘saving the planet.’” By this rationale, turning your lights off when you leave the room is not just smart, but demonstrates how you fight global warming. Really?
I recently came upon a conversation some students were having about generative AI. They understand the energy and water demands of those computing systems quite well, the churning data centers and algorithmic crunching put on its way when they clack their keyboard search query or tap their phone app. They didn’t need me to mock up a quick lecture about the environmental context of computing. In the face of scalar mismatch, though, they could only joke. One told another, with pride, that they had just saved an aquifer in Texas because they wrote a paragraph themselves instead of relying on the chatbot.
I take the hour-ish backroads drive to Socolow’s house in Princeton on a Monday morning so we can chat some more and I can get back in time for afternoon class. Western New Jersey’s rolling hills are gloriously beautiful, as if to stick a thumb in the eye of the famously uncharming wilds most people see flying into Newark.
Socolow was moving offices to a newly built space. He had already donated his life’s work to the Science History Institute, a museum and library in Philadelphia. That work forms an archive of 78 boxes, which the library measured as 95.5 linear feet. I offered to help him look over the remainder, books he needed to offload, ones I might want to take.
When I arrive, Socolow is at his desk in his home office. Chest-high built-in bookcases line two walls. Behind him is a small portrait of Einstein, for whom time was an illusion, the man who finished his career about a mile from Socolow’s house at the famed Institute for Advanced Study. Beside him is a new book by his friend Frank von Hippel, a MacArthur Fellow, grandson of a leading Manhattan Project scientist, and fellow retired Princeton professor, born one day before Socolow in the late 1930s and still living nearby. There’s an 1840 book about travels in Yucatan he got at a used book store for $40. It was a steal. “I kept a straight face,” he tells me, when he realized this gem was going for so cheap. The book has an inscription inside its cover from Joseph Henry, the physicist, former Princeton professor, and the first secretary of the Smithsonian. There’s a copy of Patient Earth, Socolow’s own coauthored book from 1971, as well as Impatient Earth, an essay with an update from 2020. I love seeing the two titles side by side, and tell him so.
What can a person do so that within a human life, or a small town, or by 2075, something is better? Emily Dickinson spent an entire life in one small town, and her work has lived on across the world for centuries. Some people have visited nearly every country in the world and remain unknown.
What I’m finding from Socolow, what I’m trying to do, is think not about our connection to all scales, but to the next scale. The students I advise don’t want to be told they’re doomed, and they don’t want to feel hopeless, so they choose a walkable life, and live together in a communal, off-campus, living-learning house. A single individual there can accomplish a good deal more by coordinating with their housemates. The scale of a small community is accessible and plausible. The house can coordinate with others on campus to shape the college’s priorities and direction. The campus can be part of discussions in town to shape the direction townspeople want to head. The town is part of a region with three main cities. It is plausible to plan for regional action. Things can change.
There’s time to think to the next scale. Socolow has been doing it his entire adult life. So were Augustine and Tolstoy and Camus and so is Solnit. It isn’t new, we aren’t alone.
That was the premise for the vulnerability assessment. Work on the neighborhood scale to allow policy at the city scale, so you can think about regional scale and then apply the regional example to statewide politics, and on. That’s the premise of the stabilization wedges: work in one sector and build up capacity while working on the next sector, and the next. That’s the premise of community-based organization: Build your home so you can build your neighborhood so you can build your town.
The attempt to capture our smallness inside the grandness of the universe is a timeless human quest, I get that. Tolstoy’s theological view is a typical one; God is that which is without scale. Even if I’m not so theological about it, I share the modern anxiety. And that anxiety is currently a dominant emotion.
Clark writes that “deranged jumps in scale and fantasies of agency may recall rhetoric associated with the atomic bomb in the 1950s and after.” After talking to Socolow a number of times, I don’t think it recalls so much as continues that rhetoric. The new atomic age was a test case for the coming collisions of scale that derange us now. The Doomsday Clock was about sounding the alarm. It was meant to shake people, to grab them by the shoulders and yell that they pay attention to human-made catastrophe.
We’ve flipped in the past 50 years, nearly the exact span of my own life. A half century later, and so many people have gone from urgency to hopelessness. They feel bombarded by all scales, not just the next one.
There’s room to reconsider that bombardment. There’s time to think to the next scale. Socolow has been doing it his entire adult life. So were Augustine and Tolstoy and Camus and so is Solnit. It isn’t new, we aren’t alone.
And so Socolow and I stand in his home office, trying to measure. It’s misty outside and calm inside. He is thinking in linear feet of books, where the spatial scale of distance is a proxy for the temporal scale of his life’s work. I’m thinking in years, measuring my sense of contribution and belonging against the shadfly-like limitations of a mere biological lifespan. I’m cautious, excited, gratified that the two of us can talk and compare across the scales of our current lives. That Blake couplet in the epigraph above runs through my head. Socolow’s keenly aware of his own place in our epoch. Nearly a hundred linear feet of a life’s work at an archive, and still, as we consider our various measures, he tells me, “I am searching for ways to be constructive, and there are small opportunities here and there so far.” There is wisdom here, even if no clock can measure it.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/01/13/scale-climate-doomsday-clock/
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