How long is a long view?

I recently took out The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, by Peter Schwartz (1996, Currency/Doubleday). Schwartz's ideas about scenario building and planning clearly have merit but I just came across a section that makes me realize that his idea of the 'long view' is really just the 'slightly-longer-then-before-view.' The section is the introduction to a chapter on building blocks for scenarios and the need to understand driving forces that influence outcomes in order to do effective planning.

Schwartz describes how temple priests in Egypt at the time of the pharaohs would look at the color of the water in the Nile river to divine what the yearly floods would be like. Different colors signified which tributary the water was coming from and the tributary determined whether it would be a dry year, a good year or a severe flood year. He points out that the rain is one driving force on the welfare of the Egyptians and their dependence on the Nile's flooding for growing crops is another.

However, then he says "Had the Egyptians had irrigation canals and fertilizer, they could have planted crops further out in the desert. They would not have had to worry about the river flow at all." How long a view is this?

Reading

Although I have always been an avid reader, for most of my life that meant reading fiction, primarily science fiction for the first twenty years, then science fiction and mysteries for the next twenty years - what my husband always called mind-candy. I almost never read nonfiction, finding it mostly useful as a cure for insomnia. However, over the last few years, I have lost my literary sweet tooth and been more drawn to nonfiction. It started several years ago when I opted for exercise and patience rather than surgery to fix an excruciatingly painful lumbar disc problem. This decision in itself marked a change since patience has never been one of my key qualities and exercise was also not something I undertook for its own sake.

The doctor's orders included long walks, so I began to listen to books on tape as a way to pass the time, starting with my usual mix of science fiction and mystery. However, listening to mind-candy on the move wasn't as enjoyable as reading it curled up on a couch, so I moved over to the library's collection of nonfiction on tape, where I found Bill Moyers' Healing and the Mind. An excellent series on the mind-body connection and healing from within, this was the perfect selection for someone looking for more holistic solution to a slipped disc. I moved on to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a book revered by any environmentalist worth her salt, but one that I would have been reluctant to admit that I had never actually read. I found listening to it exhilerating and starting checking out other nonfiction that I would have avoided in the past as too dry and dull. A series on philosophers included a selection on Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. What I learned about the 'invisible hand' was eye-opening and will be a subject for another day.

By the time my back was better, I found that I was drawn as often to the nonfiction section as the fiction section of the library and not just the ones on tape. As a recent convert to nonfiction reading, there are many books that I missed when they first came out. In some ways this is not a bad thing because I am sure that many books that were acclaimed when first published have not stood the test of time. However, I find that, unlike the mind-candy, which tended to be an escape that took me away from the world, the nonfiction makes me want to engage more with the world and talk to people about what they are reading, thinking and learning as well. Feel free to join me as I discover this new world.