"imagination and time"

I know that one particularly demanding part of Latour's essay on "Agency @ the Time of the Anthropocene" involved his reflections on time. He observes that rationalism is "all about" time flowing from past to present (p. 10),  whereas "in the real world time flows from the future to the present" (p. 13); or, as he explains later, "Matter is produced by letting time flow from the past to the present via a strange definition of causality; materiality is produced by letting time flow from the future to the present, with a realistic definition of the many occasions through which agencies are being discovered" (p. 14). I suspect that this reversal has something to do w/ highlighting the serendipdous, the unpredictable, not knowing what will happen...but really? I DO NOT KNOW what this means (though it certainly intrigues and evokes...)

--and I thought of it again when an alum called my attention to this experiment in "time and imagination," in which the creators of the "Future Library"  imagine "words growing through the trees, an unseen energy, activated and materialised, the tree rings becoming chapters in a book..." The Future Library "has nature, the environment at its core – and involves ecology, the interconnectedness of things, those living now and still to come. It questions the present tendency to think in short bursts of time, making decisions only for us living now." It seems to move, in other words, from the future to the present.