The Long Now Foundation
A while back I bookmarked this article on the the Long Now Foundation. It's a rambling article and it took me several attempts to actually start reading it and stick with it, however it's interesting and probably worthwhile in the end. Here's a little tidbit:
Can you give us some examples of long now thinking, historical that we are reaping the benefits of now?Well there’s one very famous example, it’s an English example, there’s a college in Oxford called New College, which was built about five hundred years ago. The college is a big high building and it has very thick oak beams to support the ceiling. About twenty years ago those beams started to appear to be in such bad condition that it was necessary to replace them, so the dean of the college said to the head gardener - because Oxford has a lot of lands and forests, actually all over England – “We need a lot of oaks - what shall we do?” And the gardener said when they built that college they planted a grove of oaks, to replace those beams, and so they had been planted five hundred years in advance of their need – so that’s a kind of long term thinking. I don’t know that anybody is doing that kind of thing now.