Time and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The relations between time and nature are so complex and so close that the two are often implicitly collapsed into one category. Whether or not “time” describes some movement in the world beyond the social (philosophers continue to debate the question), the experience of time is always socially determined. Still, time almost always seems to be the most “natural” phenomenon. Time appears to be the fabric of everything dynamic, from night and day, to the seasons, to something so fundamental to current thinking about “nature” as evolution. Without ideas of time, our current notions of change and causation are unthinkable. In much of the contemporary world, in which we understand the “passage” of time as “linear”, and the future as a result of what has “come before”-i.e., the past cannot return, and the future is passive-the idea that time could be constituted otherwise seems not only culturally alien, but empirically false.

Conceptions of time as reversible, cyclical, or fate, are associated with “primitive” mythology. But there is nothing necessarily more false about these ways or understanding the order of experience. We cannot prove the existence of the pace or form of a “natural” time, by which others could be standardized. We are time’s only fixed measure; Einstein’s relativity shows that even the rate at which time ticks away depends on how fast we are moving through space. Indeed, the concept of space-time that falls out of physics is based on the idea that the two dimensions are in fact one: All space exists in time, all time ticks away in space, and, perhaps most importantly, all movement and change takes place in both time and space simultaneously.

Consequently, while assuming a constant linear rate of temporal change (years, seasons, days, milliseconds) is necessary for strictly biophysical analyses of the environment, in the investigation of the relation between nature and society, it is much more problematic to rely on a single time; for the problem of time is already posed by the idea of nature-society relations. Its most obvious manifestation is perhaps the diversity of “timescales” we use to understand change: We speak of different timescales depending upon the phenomena of interest. For example, think of the idea that human life has only existed for a brief instant on the “evolutionary” or “geological” clock, or of the charge that those who are not obviously concerned with a sustainable future are “myopic”-i.e., their personal timescale is too short or too private. Even the vagueness of phrases like short-term, or long-run show how geographically, culturally, and historically specific any notion of time is.

The problem of time is also common in historical studies of more recent nature-society dynamics, and in theoretical attempts to deal with the direction and form of those dynamics. First, the patchiness of data often makes it difficult to establish past conditions, and even harder to guarantee the continuity across the times and places for which we do have data. Archeologists trying to piece together the fate of ancient societies usually find only a few points of reference across thousands of years, with no information directly pertaining to the centuries in between. Evidence that diets changed radically at a certain point, for instance, often offers no clue as to the how and why of the transition.

To fill in those blanks, we rely on assumptions about relations between humans and human relations to the non-human world to provide a priori narratives about the form and direction of change. These assumptions can be grossly inaccurate, as Fairhead and Leach show in a famous study of west African forests. They explain how the expectation that indigenous people’s environmental practices are inevitably destructive led scientists to completely misread the forest history of some parts of the region, seeing deforestation where there has actually been active afforestation. Temporal assumptions like these also trouble dominant narratives of progress and development, which lead to naturesociety analyses that frame environmental degradation as natural, or presume an inevitable if as yet unnamed technological fix. A good example of this is the so-called environmental Kuznets curve, which suggests that ecological damage is inevitable in the process of national economic growth, but will decrease after a certain development plateau has been reached.

Time is also central to the study of the difference nature’s difference makes in human productive systems. Mann and Dickinson’s seminal work framed this problem as the mismatch between periods of circulation or reproduction in biology and those in political economy. In other words, crops and money have different timescales over which they can grow or be reproduced. Corn will only grow at some times and in some places, and it takes a more or less specific duration to do so. Money can grow anywhere at any time, at least in theory. To the extent that nature does not instantly reward investment in nature-based sectors like agriculture or forestry, then, capital’s circulation and accumulation is slowed while it must wait for the weather to get warmer, crops to ripen, or trees to reach merchantable dimensions. From this perspective, agricultural biotechnology can be seen as the efforts of business and the state to overcome this mismatch by, for example, accelerating crop growth rates to speed up production, or increasing cold or heat tolerance to extend growing season or geographic range. In addition, from this view it is the degree of the mismatch in circulation times that defines a natural resource as renewable or nonrenewable; coal, for example, despite the fact that it is produced over time, cannot attract capital willing to wait out the time of production.

Another way in which the problem of time affects the study of society-environment relations is crystallized in what might be called the ecology of the future. Many environmental narratives take what is called a declensionist form-it is presumed that humanity always harms the nonhuman world, and that, barring radical change, we are on a downward slide to an apocalypse that will significantly alter the biology of the planet, and possibly remove us from the picture altogether.

Other, more progressive narratives are founded upon the idea that we can weather this storm, or technology will allow us to avoid it. Either way, the future has become one of the principle frames through which environmental change is understood today, and our ecological expectations matter as much as, if not more than, present conditions in the planning and management of socio-environmental systems. All so-called “environmental policy” is thus a political statement about time. Whether it is the local and informal arrangements for the sustainability of a common property fishery, or the formal and state-enforced management of nuclear waste storage, it is always about how fast change is happening and in what direction, what temporal horizon should be meaningful to society, what form the future will take, and how we should care about it.

Bibliography:

Robert Ayres, “Limits to the Growth Paradigm,” Ecological Economics (v.19, 1996);
Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life (Routledge, 2004);
Gregg Easterbrook, A Moment on Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism (Viking, 1995);
James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, “False Forest History, Complicit Social Analysis: Rethinking Some West African Environmental Narratives,” World Development (v.23, 1998);
David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Blackwell, 1996); Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (Basic Books, 1963);
Susan Mann and James Dickinson, “Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture,” Journal of Peasant Studies (v.5, 1978);
Joseph Masco, “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War New Mexico,” Cultural Anthropology (v.19, 2004);
Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Random House, 1989);
W. Scott Prudham, Knock on Wood (Routledge, 2004).