TTBOOK Presents: Deep Time

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Time rules our lives. We wake, eat, work, and sleep on the clock. Our days unfold in a standardized symphony of alarm clocks, school buzzers, and meeting timers. Meanwhile, global positioning satellites measure time in millionths of seconds, and financial trades circle the planet at the speed of light.

Time-keeping is among the greatest accomplishments of the human species – but somewhere along the way, we made a fundamental miscalculation: we began to mistake our clocks for time itself.

Deep Time is a new series all about the natural ecologies of time from To The Best Of Our Knowledge and the Center for Humans and Nature — with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation. In Deep Time, TTBOOK will explore biological time, geological time, cosmic time, ancestral time. We’ll imagine time as a spiral, a loop, and also as an eternal present – as we learn to live beyond the clock.

To learn more about the series, visit ttbook.org/deeptime

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16 episodes
Avg 42 min
English

Episodes 16

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S2 · E6
Jun 7, 2025 · 52 min
Deep Time: Infinity is Forever
Contemplating the infinite is a time-tested way to shrink the present down to size. But if you think about it for very long, infinity can really mess with your mind. There’s something fundamentally paradoxical about it, and beautiful.
S2 · E5
Feb 15, 2025 · 51 min
Deep Time: The Art of Time
Some artists work with pen and ink, some use brushes and paint. And some make art out of time. Meet some contemporary artists who are finding new ways to bridge the distance between us and the furthest reaches of time.
S2 · E4
Dec 21, 2024 · 52 min
Deep Time: Reclaim the Night
The longest nights of the year are here, but how many of us will see them? The global spread of light pollution is making it harder to experience dark skies and natural darkness. Learning how to reconnect with the planet’s ancient nocturnal rhythms can be profoundly restorative. Nature writers and darkness activists tell us what we’re missing.
S2 · E3
Nov 18, 2023 · 51 min
Deep Time: The Cosmos and Us
Our lives are so rushed, so busy. Always on the clock. Counting the hours, minutes, seconds. Have you ever stopped to wonder: what are you counting? What is this thing, that’s all around us, invisible, inescapable, always running out? What is time?
S2 · E2
Aug 19, 2023 · 52 min
Deep Time: How Earth Keeps Time
Are you ready to think in centuries instead of seconds? Eons instead of hours? It’s time to make thousand-year plans and appreciate how Earth keeps time.
S2 · E1
Jun 3, 2023 · 52 min
Deep Time: The Tyranny of Time
When you’re on the clock, you’re always running out of time – because in our culture, time is money. The relentless countdown is making us and the planet sick. But clock time isn’t the only kind. There are older, deeper rhythms of time that sustain life. What would it be like to live more in tune with nature’s clocks?
May 26, 2023 · 1 min
Deep Time: What would you do if you had all the time in the world?
Deep Time is a series all about the natural ecologies of time from To The Best Of Our Knowledge and the Center for Humans and Nature. We'll explore life beyond the clock, develop habits of "timefulness" and learn how to live with greater awareness of the many types of time in our lives.
S1 · E8
Apr 15, 2022 · 36 min
Kinship: Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan on embracing the 'wisdom of the desert'
Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan has been called the “father of the local food movement.” For decades he’s campaigned for seed diversity and sustainable food production. Some of his insights come from the farming practices of Indigenous people living near the U.S.-Mexico border, who’ve grown food in arid habitats for centuries. Originally from the Midwest, Nabhan moved to the Arizona desert several decades ago. He reflects on “the wisdom of the desert,” and also talks about his work to foster a “r
S1 · E7
Apr 8, 2022 · 39 min
Kinship: Biologist Merlin Sheldrake on the mind-bending world of mushrooms
The fungal world is mind-bending. Mushrooms may look like plants, but taxonomically, fungi are more closely related to animals. They go inside their food to eat it and “play games with individuality,” says biologist Merlin Sheldrake, author of “Entangled Life.” One underground fungal network in Oregon spreads over four square miles, but genetically, it’s a single organism. As Sheldrake says, “they are everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.” He talks with Steve Paulson about his lifelong f
S1 · E6
Apr 1, 2022 · 42 min
Kinship: Ecologist Suzanne Simard on the internet of trees
Thirty years ago, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard was a lone voice in the wilderness, arguing that commercial logging practices were destroying the symbiotic relationships between different tree species. She showed how mycorrhizal networks fused with tree roots to create complex systems of communication and cooperation. Today, Simard is a celebrated scientist. Her concept of “mother trees” helped inspire James Cameron’s blockbuster movie "Avatar," and she was a model for one character in Richard
S1 · E5
Mar 26, 2022 · 38 min
Kinship: Anthropologist Enrique Salmon on 'kincentricity'
Anthropologist Enrique Salmon formulated the concept of “kincentricity,” a worldview that sees everything around us — plants, animals, rocks, wind — as our direct relative. As Salmon says, “the rain is us, and we are the rain.” In his native Raramuri culture, culture and language are embedded in the mountain landscape of Chihauhau, Mexico. Salmon teaches a class called “American Indian Science,” in which he asks his students to incorporate their personal experiences into their observations about
S1 · E4
Mar 18, 2022 · 51 min
Kinship: Shapeshifting
There are old folktales and legends of people who can become animals. Animals who can become people. And there’s a lesson for our own time in those shapeshifting stories — a recognition that the membrane between what's human and more-than-human is razor thin.
S1 · E3
Mar 18, 2022 · 51 min
Kinship: When Mountains Are Gods
If you look at a mountain, you might see a skiing destination, a climbing challenge, or even a source of timber to be logged or ore to be mined. But there was a time when mountains were sacred. In some places, they still are. What changes when you think of a mountain not as a giant accumulation of natural resources, but as a living being?
S1 · E2
Mar 18, 2022 · 51 min
Kinship: Plants As Persons
Over the past decade, plant scientists have quietly transformed the way we think of trees, forests and plants. They discovered that trees communicate through vast underground networks, that plants learn and remember. If plants are intelligent beings, how should we relate to them? Do they have a place in our moral universe? Should they have rights?
S1 · E1
Mar 18, 2022 · 51 min
Kinship: Eye-To-Eye Animal Encounters
There's a certain a kind of visual encounter that can be life changing: A cross-species gaze. The experience of looking directly into the eyes of an animal in the wild, and seeing it look back. It happens more often than you’d think and it can be so profound, there’s a name for it: eye-to-eye epiphany. So what happens when someone with feathers or fur and claws looks back? How does it change people, and what can it teach us?
Mar 11, 2022 · 2 min
Kinship With The More Than Human World
When you think about your neighbors, your friends and family, do you consider the nonhuman relationships in your life? With the birds and trees, the rivers and hills around you? In this series from "To The Best of Our Knowledge," leading scientists, philosophers and writers illuminate ways in which “personhood” transcends the human species and shows how kinship practices can deepen our care and respect for the more than human world.

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