The Ecological Impact of Time

Abstract

The increasingly technical nature of the industrial way of life has brought about dramatic changes in the temporality of socio-environmental problems. Local, short-term, acute disturbances in the environment have turned into global, long-term, chronic perturbations, and yet both the scientific and socio-political solutions offered for environmental problems are usually of a distinctly short-term nature. Despite the centrality of the time factor, time in all of its multiple expressions - as tempo, temporality, timing and rhythm, and so forth - has not yet received the attention it deserves. This paper suggests that the failure to engage with time has hastened the environmental crisis to its present proportions. Inclusion of the time factor in ecological (as well as in social and economic) discussions thus has worldwide consequences not only for humanity's understanding of and relationship with nature, but also for proposed solutions to the environmental crisis.