The Big Here and the Long Now: From Global Uniformity to the New Diversities

By Thomas Hylland Eriksen

For thousands of years, humanity's story was one of diversification. Across centuries and continents, our species proliferated new approaches to family and community life; to agriculture, economics, religion, artistic expression, and self-understanding. Today, this process is in reverse.

Culturally and ecologically, we are witnessing an almost universal drive towards homogeneity and the loss of diversity. The global forces of capitalism have created a world riddled with overlapping crises, with any alternatives pushed into the margins, narrowing the scope for action when we need it most. And yet its logic is never totalizing: contrary to Margaret Thatcher's famous mantra, there are many alternatives.

The Big Here and the Long Now begins with the story of how our world of efficiency, standardization, and development optimism first came into being, and how promises of progress, growth, and prosperity have, in recent years, acquired a nasty aftertaste. The book concludes with hope and an exploration of creolization and hybridity. With biocultural diversity already being revived by activists and indigenous communities, from Manhattan to Micronesia, there are plenty of green shoots. Now they must be cultivated and nurtured.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0745352227
• ISBN13: 9780745352220
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
• Length: 384 Pages