A Living Time Capsule Shows That to Be Human is to Be Wild

When I was a kid I had a thing for time capsules. This was the late ’90s, and the oncoming millennium had created a fever pitch for burying the present. My own time capsule endeavors were usually jam jars or plastic lunch boxes taken secretly from the kitchen, into which I’d ritually—but unsystematically—gather objects. They contained no newspaper clippings or letters from presidents, but plastic hair clips, drawings of animals, and bits of junk picked up on my walk to school. Every newly found object was as precious as the last, and with each time capsule I was curating a tiny, subterranean museum.

The number of time capsules buried in our tiny garden eventually grew so abundant that my dad had to remove them, picking out jars from an overcrowded flowerbed. ‘Infinite time’, he would complain, ‘doesn’t necessarily mean infinite space’. I wasn’t really sure what he meant by this, although I suspected he hadn’t understood the importance of the project.

A time capsule is as much an impulse, an urge, as it is a collection of objects. It anticipates nostalgia and projects a largely one-sided conversation into the future. As with the Ark, it’s the time capsule enthusiast, and not the one who opens it, that chooses what should be remembered or forgotten. It’s a thrilling act of power.

The largest time capsule in the world was put together by Keith Harold Davisson, a man from Seward, Nebraska. Within this forty-five-ton-vault, created for the 1975 Bicentennial, is Davisson’s own version of history. This buried collection is filled with the banal and the arbitrary, made spectacular only through its scale: thousands of items, including bikini panties, aquamarine leisure suits with stitched yellow flowers, piles of telephone books, and a brand-new Chevy. It shouts; it swaggers—insecure in the knowledge that the most exceptional things in this world are forgotten.

I stopped burying my own time capsules eventually, not long after seeing one excavated. I remember the town officials in respirator masks and green gloves chipping away at the rust-sealed sarcophagus, and the sci-fi sense of unreality this caused. As the lid was peeled away, our breaths were collectively held in anticipation; all eyes peered into the breach. Inside the capsule was nothing but a thick brown sludge. During its internment, water had leaked inside, turning every precious newspaper and handwritten note into pulp. It emanated a sour, rotten stench, like we’d exhumed a corpse.

It wasn’t until years later that I found Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule. I’d been trying to find new ways of looking at ecological problems, and I’d become interested in land art’s approach to working with the earth. As an artist, Denes began as a painter but felt confined by the edges of the canvas. Her work is excessive and boundless, and its spilling out into the world was inevitable.

Tree Mountain—Living Time Capsule is a large, man-made mountain in Ylöjärvi in Finland. Spiraling upwards towards its peak are 11,000 silver fir trees, planted according to an intricate and mathematically calculated pattern. Viewed from ground level, it appears to be a young virgin forest like many others, but seen from above its precise curves and turns are almost hallucinatory. Like all time capsules, Tree Mountain was as much ritual as object: Each tree was planted by a different volunteer, who will then act as that tree’s custodian. When that custodian dies, they will pass their responsibility onto someone else, who will then pass it on after their own death. This process of intergenerational protection, it is hoped, will endure for many centuries.

Most time capsules, my childhood attempts included, are born from a desire to suspend the present. They bury the present underground, where it is mostly forgotten, relegated to a subterranean world teeming with worms and microbes indifferent to our stories. But Denes’ time capsule was different to those I’d seen before. Alive, accountable. Through its model of intergenerational guardianship, the future is not so much a foreign country but something irrevocably tied to the past and present.

It’s also open. Deep underground, most time capsules are enclosed and unavailable, but this one faces outwards into the world. Its roots secure it into the earth, but its needles radiate their thick, sugary perfume into the air. With each passing year, their lean trunks will stretch further upwards into the sky, as straight as Tuscan columns. The tree canopy will thicken as branches reach over to embrace their neighbors’, casting shadows onto the ground below. This canopy will provide a home for the ebb and flow of Finnish wildlife—the shade-tolerant ferns, the fungi, the ermines, and the wolves that hunt them. It’s creating the environment that contains it.

From our apartment blocks, or from the aisle of a supermarket, it’s possible to persuade ourselves that we’re separate from the natural world. If the sea levels rise, or the air is poisoned, or if the crops fail yet again, we can (if technocrats like Elon Musk are to be believed) just remove ourselves entirely. File our divorce papers with the planet and start a colony on Mars. The reality, of course, is that our earthly environment is as much a part of the cultural world as the natural, and natural resources like oil, agriculture, and patented organisms are major epicenters of human power. But in day-to-day life, it is possible to construct a false notion of separation as a matter of routine. President Trump’s revision of climate policy, rolling back years of environmental progress, demonstrates the elasticity of this relationship.

But, for Denes, planting those trees was a devotional act, suturing the divide between the human and non-human worlds. It’s a negotiation between wildness and cultivation: Humans may plant and tend to the seedlings, but the trees themselves grow according to their own secret rules. Such a relationship expresses our profound and complex entanglement with the natural world. In this, whether intentionally or not, Denes builds on many centuries of Indigenous ecological philosophies, which have long understood the nature of these entanglements. Tree Mountain’s sticky, knotty ‘aliveness’ links us to both future generations and to the world more generally.

Tree Mountain isn’t perfect (but then what is?). Denes arranged for just one species of conifer to be planted, meaning that the forest isn’t particularly biodiverse. With its monoculture, it’s more like a farm than a wild and spontaneous forest. Nor, with such a localized gesture, does Denes’ address the larger, structural issues of climate change. How can a forest really survive for centuries if the rest of the world can’t? I point this out to avoid sounding too sentimental, too mushy—an easy trap to fall into when talking about nature. Being mysterious, a forest can act as a cipher for almost anything.

The strangeness of a forest is partly an issue of scale. The lifetime of a tree far exceeds our own. When the world’s oldest conifer—a bristlecone pine growing in eastern Nevada—was prematurely cut down for research purposes, and its rings counted, it was found to be around 5,000 years old. This is as old as writing, as far into the past as the founding of Troy. A time capsule for all human history, its tree rings could be analyzed for climatic changes (a severe winter would yield a particularly dark ring), offering up clues about the future. After the tree’s untimely and controversial cutting in 1964, and not without irony, the dead conifer was named after the Greek immortal, Prometheus.

Sometimes I try to remember what it was like to feel immortal. Those long days in adolescence, waiting for an adulthood that never seemed to arrive. I’d stopped making time capsules by then, and preferred to use my endless time in other ways: drawing the same pattern in a notebook, maybe, or clumsily learning to roll cigarettes, or waiting for a boy to return a text. Still, at that point, was the anticipation of a future.

In later years, time veered off course. Talk of the future got caught in the throat, and the things that should have happened never did. Self-driving cars and space colonies, sure, but climate apocalypse and no healthcare. For most of us dumped into the cohort dubbed ‘Millennial’, any imagined future seemed contradictory, or even non-existent. Instead, we were stranded in the junkyard present, picking around for scraps and antidepressants.

But, to steal a phrase from Didion, we must tell ourselves futures in order to live.

Denes’ Tree Mountain is not some eulogy for a lost future. It has life in the present and, through its intergenerational guardianship, it also insists on what is to come. This shared responsibility—for the planet, for each other—prefigures something good. This is pragmatic rather than romantic. If an ecosystem collapses, so do we. This is why Tree Mountain points us in so many directions at once: deep into the soil (and time itself), but also upward to the treetops. It’s an active and vital engagement with the world, and for that I am grateful.