The Speed Trap

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In that spirit, Hillis is now at work with musician Brian Eno and others on designing the world's slowest clock, which will chime just once a millennium. He hopes that at a conference 3,000 years from now, people will look back on our time and see this clock as a symbol of "the moment when they took responsibility for the future. When they stopped believing in just now."

The prominent German environmental thinker Wolfgang Sachs shares Hillis' interest in devising an aesthetic of slowness and offers his own ideas about what form it would take. "Medium speeds will be considered an accomplishment, something well done," he says. "And when you see someone going fast, you shrug your shoulders, saying, `What's the point?'"

Sachs believes that speed is an under recognized factor fueling environmental problems. As he puts it, "It's possible to talk about the ecological crisis as a collision between time scales--the fast time scale of modernity crashing up against the slow time scale of nature and the earth." In his view, genetic engineering, with all its potential for ecological havoc, is an example of how we interefere with natural processes in the name of speeding up evolution. Sachs' recent report Sustainable Germany--which maps a route to a Green society--embraces slowing down as a key environmental objective, proposing to put 100 kilomter-an-hour (60 m.ph.) speed limits on Germany's autobahns and scrap plans for a high-speed rail network. He also recommends strengthening local economies and cultures so that people won't have to rely as heavily on long-distance travel.

"A society that lives in the fast lane can never be a sustainable society," Sachs told the conference, adding that a slower society would also be a more pleasant, elegant place to live. "In a fast-paced world we put a lot of energy into arrivals and departures and less into the experience itself. Raising kids, making friends, creating art all run counter to the demand for speed. There is growing recognition that faster speeds are not just a natural fact of the universe. It's an issue for public attention. What has not been discussed before now is: What kind of speed do we want?"

Jogi Panghaal, a designer who works with community groups in India, defines the issue as not simply whether speed is good or bad, but whether the world of the future will allow a variety of speeds. He worries that a monoculture of speed in which the whole world is expected to move at the same pace will develop globally.

India and other traditional societies of Asia, Latin America, and Africa are undergoing culture shock as the rule of Western efficiency bears down upon them. People who once lived according to the rhythms of the sun, the seasons, and nature are now buying alarm clocks, carrying pocket calendars, and feeling the pressure to move faster and faster. At the conference, Panghaal warned that inhabitants of the industrialized nations may feel this loss as much as the traditional peoples do because less modernized cultures provide inspiration for finding a slower, simpler way of living--including the two-week vacation in the Third World that has become a necessary ritual of replenishment for many of us.

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