International
The ecological crisis in its temporal dimension
This article explores some of the ways
the ecological crisis clashes with our acceleration of time.
It teaches us that preserving, restoring and caring for
both ecosystems and personal relationships take time and effort.
And it warns us very clearly that time is running out:
if we don’t have time for life, our civilization is doomed.
Jorge Riechmann
In Time’s arrows: Scientific attitudes towards time, US author and poet Richard Morris said that although the genus Homo has only existed for two million years, it’s already capable of destroying itself… We’ll probably not even succeed in emulating the cockroach, which has been evolving for 250 million years.
Or as Jane Goodall, the British primatologist, put it in her autobiography, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (Gracias a la vida in the Spanish edition), written with Phillip Berman, there’s no room for doubt that given time we humans could create a moral society. The problem, as she knows all too well, is that we’re running out of time.
Also writing on the subject of time, the Swiss sociologist Gilbert Rist said in The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, “Long duration characterizes ‘ecological time’ as opposed to the short-term in which political life is developed, not to mention the instantaneous nature of commercial time.”
Vertiginous times As time is a dimension so basic to human existence, biospheric life and cosmic evolution, it would be surprising if it wasn’t affected, and profoundly, by an event of the caliber of the global ecological crisis.
And so, indeed, it is. One need only think of the vertigo that assails us when we realize that, to a certain extent, the time to save the world is running out: the enormous implications in dramatically altering the planet’s climate, ending oil reserves and eliminating tropical forests in just three to four generations...
On the other hand, our interventions—mediated by modern techno-scientific power—extend into almost unimaginable futures: think about what it means to modify the genomes of living species, which could entail a reorientation of biological evolution. Or consider the introduction into the biosphere of nuclear waste, which will emit ionizing radiation for tens of thousands of years...
And if humans disappear,
will we be replaced by octopi and squid?Could human beings’ destructive power and lack of wisdom cause us to disappear? Eminent scientists don’t exclude this possibility. In his award-winning 2001 book, The Universe in a nutshell, Stephen Hawking, the British theoretical physicist, accepts that by 2600 the world’s population will live shoulder to shoulder and the Earth will glow from electricity consumption and may destroy itself.
Christian de Duve, the Belgian Nobel prize-winning cytologist and biochemist, in his well-known work Vital Dust: life as a cosmic imperative (1996), notes that our era recalls one of those important evolutionary ruptures marked by large-scale extinctions. And the French explorer and humanist scholar, Théodore Monod, perhaps the last great naturalist, left as a testament a reflection piece called “Y si la aventura humana viene a fallar” (And if the human experiment fails) in 2000, the year of his death, in which he says: “We’re capable of senseless and insane behavior. From now on everything is to be feared, including the annihilation of the human race.”
That horrific scenario is not unthinkable in the light of the world social crisis and the growing ecological threat. US biologist, theorist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson points out in his alarming 2002 book, The future of life, that until now Man has played the part of planetary assassin. The conservation ethic in the form of taboo, totemism or science has almost always come too late. But, he offers, perhaps there’s still time to act.
We need to be patient with humans. We’re not yet ready. We have a lot to learn. In terms of cosmic time we’ve only had a minute of life. But evolution took a leap from unaware to consciousness with human beings. And with consciousness we can decide on our own destiny. From this point of view the current situation represents a challenge to a possible disaster: moving on to a higher step and not plunging into self-destruction.
But will there be enough time to learn? Even given the hypothesis that human beings disappear as a species, the principle of intelligibility and amortization would be preserved. This is the first principle of the universe and then of humans. One day, it will emerge in some more complete being. Monod even has a candidate already present in current evolution: cephalopods. or mollusks, such as the octopus and squid. They have remarkable anatomic perfection: the head has a cartilaginous cap that functions like a skull and eyes like vertebrates. They also have a highly developed mind, even a double memory to our one. Obviously they won’t come out of the sea and up onto the mainland tomorrow. They’ll need to evolve for millions of years, but they already have a biological basis for a leap towards consciousness.
Anyway, there’s an urgent need to choose: humans and our future or the octopus and squid. We’re optimistic: we’re going to nurture sanity and learn to be wise. But it’s important to start now showing a love for life in all its majestic diversity, have compassion with all those who suffer, rapidly put into effect the needed social justice and love Mother Earth. We’re inspired by the Judeo-Christian scriptures: “Choose life so you and your children may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Let’s hurry because we don’t have much time to lose.
From the time of natural cycles
to the time of the clockNear and far, fast and slow: these are the burning issues of our 20th and 21st century world, showing that some of the most outstanding aspects of the worldwide ecological crisis, and also of local environmental problems, must be viewed as temporal imbalances and conflicts: problems with time. And when we really think through intense contemporary debates such as those concerning sustainable development, recycling materials, technological moratoriums, renewable energy and irreversible damage to the ecosystems or reduced working hours, they too are really just debates about our relationship with time.
The literature addressing the issue of time concepts is extensive. Very quickly, limiting ourselves to our own culture, we went from cyclical, mythical time to linear, oriented time between classical Greco-Roman antiquity and the Judeo-Christian world. Another transition took place between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age: from flexible time—marked by the natural cycles or “natural time of mutations,” as the Basque poet Joseba Sarrionandía called it—to the time of the clock.
In Times’s arrows, Richard Morris says that the Greeks and Romans weren’t the only ancient peoples that thought time was cyclical. In the time of the Vedas (between 1500 and 600 BCE), Indian philosophy conceptualized cycles within cycles. The shortest was an age, calculated to be about 360 human years, while the longest was the lives of the Gods, which were estimated to be about 300 billion years. But time never ran out, even after those billions of years. The Gods themselves died and were reborn while the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction went on forever.
Only when mechanical clocks became widespread—from the 14th century on—did a new concept of time appear, inconceivable in earlier eras: time as an abstract and homogenous quantity, with its own existence. This was certainly one of the factors that precipitated the 16th-century scientific revolution. Juan de Mairena, creation of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), defined human beings as “animals that measure time,” and “animals that use clocks.” US historian Lewis Munford (1895-1990) emphasized the mechanical clock’s importance as one of western society’s most far-reaching technological advances. It has allowed us to disassociate time from natural cycles and arrive at the concept of abstract time.
MIT historian Bruce Mazlish explains: The clock not the steam engine is the crucial machine of the modern industrial age... Isaac Newton’s favorite metaphor for the planetary system is that it’s like a giant clockwork mechanism. Nature on the sublunary world then began to be contemplated in terms of a clockwork mechanism… Time became a human construct: in urban environments artificial lighting ended the need for natural light… Mechanical time imposed a new discipline on the human race within and outside of factories and in all social life: the social world acquired the same dimensions as the Newtonian physical world. Expressed in an image: Father Time was magically transformed into a mechanical clock.
Shortage of time is a cultural diseaseShortage of time—worshiping speed, accelerating pace, compartmentalizing everyday life, hold-ups in the daily commute through urban sprawl, the focus on wage labor and a commoditized leisure—has become something of a cultural disease in the rich Northern countries that’s tending to spread over the entire world. There’s an African saying that all white people have watches but never have time. And Joaquín Araujo—UN Global 500 Roll of Honor for 1991—wrote: “Everything is little less than fraud if the relationships between human beings are measured by the clock’s time, which doesn’t exist.”
In the days marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—with a large, shameless display of propaganda—it was noticeable how, in interviews with citizens from former Soviet bloc countries, they kept coming back to a recurrent theme, over and over again: the lament for lost time. In years gone by, in those low-productivity, pseudo-socialist societies, there was time for everything and especially for friendship and love. In the brave new capitalist world it seems there’s no time for anything. Anette Endesfelder, a young West Berliner, put it like this: “Time was different. Before, seeing friends was considered an occupation in itself. Today, it feels like you’re wasting time. It seems like we should be working all day.” Ivan Klima, the Czech novelist, said it his way: “The spectacle is the new God…In the old days friendships were more intimate, more intense, partly because we had plenty of time to cultivate them, whereas now everyone races from one appointment to another.”
Ways to spend timeThe businessman who spends time manufacturing things tells people they should spend it consuming these things. There’s no succession of days, the same day repeats itself, and that’s why the ancients said that time doesn’t exist. The priest asks us to give time back to God, its rightful owner. Authors of books want us to spend time reading what they have written. And filmmakers tell us that only the image merits our time. Musicians think we won’t have enough time to listen to all the music they’ve composed. Travel agents put adverts in magazines saying that the best way to spend time is to travel. However, government believe that, by right and by law, only our nation is deserving of our time. And our sweetheart is second to none in believing she has a right to it. We plan to have a little time to ourselves, whenever possible. And my father told me not to waste it, but where was I supposed to keep it forever?
Oscar Wilde complained that the trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings. Democracy has this same temporal dimension: it takes time, a lot of time. Time is needed for differences of opinion, public explanations, open discussions, building consensus, reviewing decisions, accountability...
Hurrying these processes is incompatible with quality. Societies where people “don’t have time” can’t afford democracy. This is one of the reasons for the deep antagonism between capitalism—with its drive towards constant acceleration—and democracy. Never forgetting that without democracy in the workplace—in the factories, offices and fields—there is no democracy. And, there’s no democracy in this increasingly powerful techno-scientific world of ours without democratic decision-making about scientific research and technological development.
Citizenship and responsibility go hand in glove; both must be considered in their temporal dimension. We recall Ortega’s definition of nation as a “stimulating project of life in common.” Obviously such a project can only be envisaged within a certain period of history. But, over two decades ago, the French thinker Henri Lefebvre posited that the citizen has been degraded to a mere user and consumer. Citizens think and act within a range of responsibilities and therefore within a time period, reflecting on past experiences, trying to learn lessons from history and assess the likely future consequences of different social choices. Consumers, on the other hand, seek immediate satisfaction, squandering and immensely impoverishing their temporal field.
Meaning is intertwined with time. We can only give meaning to our actions and our life by putting them within a time period, in the context of action unfolded over time. Degrading time into a succession of unconnected moments plunges us into unlivable meaninglessness. Therefore—as French historian and political activist Jean Chesneaux (1922-2007) observed in his acute essay Habiter le temps—the crises in our relationship with time are crises of meaning.
Five “arrows of time”Almost all the basic laws of physics, especially those of mechanics and nuclear physics, are indifferent to a sense of time. The laws of electricity, quantum mechanics and mechanics don’t distinguish between past and future. However, from the human perspective—also for organic life in general—the most outstanding feature of time is precisely its uni-directionality and irreversibility. Hence the usual metaphor of the “arrow of time,” coined by the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington (1882-1944).
Physicists and cosmologists know that there are five different ways to distinguish the direction of time. The most important of all is the Second Law of Thermodynamics or the entropy law. It’s perhaps the most general scientific law ever discovered: it applies to almost everything, including the lives of living beings. This law states that while the quantity of matter/energy remains the same in a closed system, such as the universe, as the First Law indicates, its quality deteriorates gradually over time as it is inevitably used for production, thus converting usable energy into unusable energy. As usable energy decreases and unusable energy increases, entropy increases. The entropy of a closed system never decreases because an isolated system spontaneously evolves towards thermodynamic equilibrium. There was less entropy in the past and there will be more in the future.
It should be pointed out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn’t mention anything about the “flow” of time. It says nothing about the moment we call “now,” which is being inexorably displaced into the future. It only says that the universe appears different in the two opposite directions. There’s nothing in physics that helps describe this flow. Physics says nothing about the speed at which time “is left behind” relative to ourselves.
The first arrow then is the entropic arrow. The second “arrow of time” is the cosmological arrow: the expansion of the universe after the initial Big Bang. The matter making up the universe was more compressed in the past, and will be more dispersed in the future.
The third arrow deals with the subatomic particle, the kaon, and we can ignore it because it’s the least important. The fourth arrow of time is the electro-magnetic arrow: waves.
Finally, the fifth arrow—which, along with the first, is the most important to us—is our subjective sense of time, a psychological arrow. While physical time recognizes no special moments—doesn’t even use the idea of now—this concept is basic to our experience of the passage of time, which is related to cyclical biological processes, with our body’s biorhythms.
All living beings
disintegrate and regenerateAll living things—and especially humans—are subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy law, which is a principle of degradation, disintegration and deterioration.
But living things experience that disintegration, fighting it with regeneration. The molecules in each organism degrade and die and are replaced with others. Apoptosis—programmed cell death—is the basis of this renovation process. Human skeleton, nerves and kidney cells are formed only once and have to last a lifetime. Those of the skin average 19 days while the circulatory system needs thousands of millions of new cells every day. In about seven years, 90% of the human body is renewed. It has been calculated that every year we produce the equivalent of 228 walls of small intestine, 18 livers and 6 bladders. The French philosopher and sociologist, Edgar Morin, wrote: “We live using our decomposition process to rejuvenate ourselves, until the moment when it can no longer do so.”
The sequoias—redwoods—can live more than 4,000 years, a crocodile more than 100, a hummingbird only 2 or 3. At first glance, there’s no common pattern to such different lifespans. However, metabolic physiologists have made a surprising discovery: per ounce of body weight, all living things would seem to consume the same amount of energy throughout their lifetime. The swan, robin, bat, hedgehog or human use about 2,500 kilojoules per 0.035 ounces of body weight throughout their lifetime, so that a faster metabolism results in less longevity. Conversely, the less energy an organism uses, the longer it lives. Translating time into units of metabolic energy, the longevity of a fly, tree, bird or human are surprisingly similar.
Time in nature, the body,
social life and the industrial systemThe global ecological crisis has a lot to do with the mismanagement of time, with the apparent inability of industrial societies to rationally organize the diverse temporalities that affect human beings, and especially, with their current inability to consider and make projections into the distant future. Minimally, this mismanagement concerns four different temporalities whose coordination fails miserably in the most industrialized societies.
In the first place we have the body’s time: rates of development, maturity, reproduction and parenting, aging and death are called biological rhythms, and are adapted by what are called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, some 8,000 cells situated in the cerebral hypothalamus to both solar and lunar light through that “internal clock.” Humans, like almost all terrestrial animals, are characterized by circadian biological rhythms: cycles of hormones (testosterone, melatonin, cortisol and serotonin) released on a daily basis. In addition there are annual rhythms and women’s menstrual cycles, which keep pace with lunar months.
In the second place we have Nature’s time: generational succession, cyclical seasonal rhythms, migratory animals’ annual rhythms, cyclical fluctuations over several years in prey and predator populations, the biological evolution of species over extensive periods of time, etc.
Thirdly, we must also consider time for social life: time for play, meeting one another, children’s socialization, family life, cultural and political activities, etc.
Lastly, there’s the industrial and financial system’s time: the mechanization of production activities goes hand in glove with imposing linear, homogenous, abstract time—measured by clocks—on the whole of society. In the last decades of the 20th century this culminated in the appearance of world or global time: that of the telecommunication networks and the financial markets where information circulates at unimaginable speeds. Increasingly, this new time is being imposed on different societies, which until recently had very diverse temporalities. According to Italian law professor and politician Pietro Barcellona, “The production process is objectively presented as a large computerized flow that passes through and destroys traditional arenas and, with an unprecedented acceleration of time, overrides temporal distances until traditional temporalities almost disappear: night, day, workday, holiday, etc.”
Contemporary capitalist societies have enormous difficulty managing the duration, the long term. This isn’t only apparent in ecological problems but in a whole series of social issues and options from cultural creativity to privatizations. Let’s think about privatization: considered through the prism of time it is tantamount to favoring immediate, short-term profitability and ignoring the very different temporal logic of public services that have to function over time in order to meet social needs, which are often ongoing.
Nowadays, we can detect serious temporal problems behind the depletion of the stratosphere’s ozone layer, global warming, massive planetary pollution, catastrophes of biodiversity or deforestation and the destruction of fertile soils. The biosphere’s extended timescale, with its balances and transformations, clashes with the kind of instantaneous ubiquity of “global” time, in which the financial markets, cyberspace and telecommunications operate. This is the much analyzed phenomenon of our globalized world’s contracting time-space continuum, subordinated to the logic of short-term benefits and unable to take the future into consideration.
From 300 million to 300 yearsThe industrial system’s timescales can brutally clash with those of the biosphere. It took 300 million years to fix atmospheric carbon and form deposits of fossil fuels such as coal, oil or natural gas; meanwhile, by burning fossil fuels for energy, industrial societies are taking just 300 years to return it to the atmosphere.
This process is a million times faster: a brutal violation of the biosphere’s timescale. Perhaps it’s not surprising that this has led to potentially catastrophic climate change. Along with which, the biggest ecological problem we industrial-era humans are causing is undoubtedly biodiversity disaster, which can also be interpreted as a temporal collision: in this case, between the rapid rate at which genetic biodiversity is being destroyed and the exceedingly long time needed for it to emerge. On a global scale, the loss in biodiversity is dramatic: according to the United Nations it’s a “global crisis of species extinction.” The threat to the tropical forests is particularly worrying because although they occupy only 6% of the Earth’s land surface, it’s estimated that they contain half the planet’s living species. It’s thought that if the current rates of extinction continue, by the middle of the 21st century between a third and two thirds of all the living species on the planet could disappear.
Unforgivable follyBecause biodiversity is the “life insurance” for life itself, the consequences of this disaster are unimaginable: more diversity gives the ecosystem greater capacity to regulate itself, which is why diversity generates stability. Increased biodiversity allows the ecosystems to respond to disturbances, to adapt to changes, to face crises. More simplified ecosystems are more vulnerable.
Scientists such as US entomologist Edward O. Wilson have spent more than 25 years sounding an anxious alarm. For them, the loss of genetic biodiversity will be worse than “exhausting all fossil fuels, economic collapse, a limited nuclear war or being conquered by a totalitarian government. However terrible all these catastrophes would be for us, they could be repaired within a few generations. The only process that’s taking place in the 1980s and will need millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity, resulting from the destruction of natural habitats. In all likelihood, our descendants will never forgive us for this folly.”
Examples of temporal clashes could multiply. The capacity of rivers, lakes and estuaries to decontaminate themselves is being overwhelmed by the rapid rate we are filling them to the brim with waste. The physical-chemical-biological process of forming fertile soils is hundreds of times slower than the destruction of soil by inappropriate human practices... In all these cases we are witness to a tremendous collision of timescales.
We’re used to viewing pollution problems in spatial terms: as an accumulation of unsuitable material in the wrong place. But, generally speaking, pollution can be seen as a problem of temporal collision: in the long run, if the thresholds of irreversibility aren’t exceeded, almost everything is biodegradable. That’s why green economics has an interesting perspective on natural resources, time and pollution.
Three moments of brutal acceleration Since our emergence as a species within the mainstream of biological evolution, humans have changed and, at the same time, modified our environment. In this long history of coevolution between the biosphere and human beings we can distinguish three important changes of pace; three moments of brutal acceleration in the changes we have imposed on the biosphere.
The first occurred during the humanization process, 40-50,000 years ago, when the rapid pace of cultural evolution overtook the slow pace of biological evolution. The “great leap forward”—discernible in the paleontological record by rapid advances in manufacturing tools and in artistic expression—took place when the culture of our ancestors, Cro-Magnon Man, replaced that of Neanderthal Man, who was very slowly evolving, keeping pace with biological changes, and possibly wasn’t able to articulate a language similar to our own.
The second, and much better known, moment of acceleration occurred some 12,000 years ago with the development of agricultural settlements: the Neolithic Age. The third moment, now in historical times, was the formation of the modern world in the 16th century—with the parallel development of techno-science and a capitalist global economy—leading to the industrial revolution, which began in the 18th century, and culminating in Fordism, which began in the 1930s. Today, everything seems to indicate that this last great acceleration has exceeded the limits that permit the positive coevolution of human societies and the biosphere that hosts them.
“There’s no more time for us
to continue making mistakes” Shortage of time to react appropriately to the consequences of our own actions causes anxiety: techno-scientific development’s global course and the industrial society’s pace increasingly resemble an out-of-control vehicle’s suicide run. We’re running out of time to be acting this way. “There’s no more time for us to continue making mistakes,” was the dramatic warning with which Sicco Mansholt, the fourth president of the European Commission (1972-1973), closed his book The crisis in our civilization in 1974.
“Time is running out,” we read in the Club of Rome’s report. “Some problems are already of such magnitude that we cannot deal with them successfully, and the costs of delay are monstrously high. If we don’t wake up and act quickly it may be too late…. The speed of evolution and current mutations lead us to consider that time itself has an ethical value. Every minute lost, every decision delayed, means more deaths from hunger and malnutrition; means evolution towards irreversible environmental phenomena.”
There’s no proportion between the velocity with which we are introducing synthetic chemical substances or transgenic organisms into the biosphere and that with which we’re evaluating the possible damage they may cause. In the summer of 2001, Domingo Jiménez Beltrán, director of the European Environment Agency, said that there’s hardly any data on the toxicity of 75% of the approximately 100,000 chemical substances marketed in the European Union. And the data on 86% of the substances produced—more than 1,000 tons a year—is insufficient for minimal risk assessment. Although a strategy was implemented to fill this information gap, we have a time problem: at the present rate it will take 100 years to assess no more than 2,000 of the chemical products with high-volume production.
Transport speed:
Perverting means into endsApart from certain occasional exceptions—such as enjoying speed for its own sake on a roller coaster—speed has no value in itself. We seek it because it’s useful. Saving transport time or being more productive in work allows us—so they say—to enjoy more time for life, for a better quality of life. What’s the reality of such promises?
In The automobile society: a dead-end street, the German journalist and political scientist, Winfried Wolf, wrote: “What’s generally important for capitalism—production motivated by maximizing profits—is also true for the transport sector: it’s not about satisfying human needs or demands but about maximizing profits by increasing traffic, transport and mobility. In short, it’s about producing artificial, unnecessary traffic: a veritable inflation of transport.” So much effort to gain time hasn’t resulted in a reduction of the time devoted to transport and allowed us more time for leisure, being together, art, involvement in democracy or work but, perversely, has resulted in increased distances we have to—or are willing to—travel, in turn maintaining the time we spend traveling or even increasing it.
In the more industrialized societies, the prevailing level of the transport system’s essential irrationality, based on private vehicles, isn’t fully appreciated unless we try to sum it up in terms of time, from the cradle to the grave, as requested by good ecological methodology. In his book Energy and Equity, Ivan Illich made this calculation for the United States in the 1970s. According to his calculations, the average US citizen dedicates more than 1,500 hours a year to his car: sitting in it, working to pay for it and for gas, insurance, tolls, fines and taxes to build roads and parking spaces, and that’s not counting the time he spends in hospitals, in courts or watching TV car ads. Conclusion: these 1,500 hours a year allow him to cover an average of 6,213.7 miles, which is 3.73 miles per hour: the speed of a pedestrian.
We’re therefore, under the most optimistic and unrealistic of assumptions, moving almost at the speed of a pedestrian or a cyclist. Anyone who ignores the possibility of rationally, cordially, humanely discussing values, ends up hopelessly lost in the confusion of means with ends.
The ecological damage of hasteAn obsession with productivity is an obsession with time: more products in less time and with less human labor. Many ecological conflicts are explained this way: the dominant drive for productivity leaves no time to engage in sustainable agriculture or organize a rational transport system.
In the case of transport, which is responsible for a huge percentage of the environmental impact of modern industrialized societies, it seems clear that the obsession with going “even faster” is one of the factors most affecting ecological devastation. Let’s think, for example, about the velocity of moving traffic: a vehicle’s maximum energy efficiency is when it’s run at a moderate speed of 50-56 miles an hour. After that, the laws of mechanics say that engines consume increasing amounts of fuel with decreasing performance, to the point that lowering speed from 75 to 56 miles an hour saves 25% in fuel consumption. Something similar happens with road construction, whose environmental impact is directly related to the traffic speed for which they are designed. For traffic traveling at 75 miles an hour the road will need to be 77 feet wide, as opposed to 50 feet for traffic traveling at 62 miles an hour; and the radius of the minimum curve has to increase from 492-656 yards to 710-984 yards.
Everything suggests that when we try to rush those last few minutes, the environmental impact increases disproportionately: exponentially rather than linearly. When all’s said and done, such patterns are shown in the relationships between other well-known ecological quantities: the economic cost of decontamination, for example. When talking about transport, there’s no doubt that haste is directly transformed into ecological unsustainability.
No time for life...Those who dream of being able to rush through all the beauty of Paris in a weekend wouldn’t even consider the possibility of traveling by train. Similarly, those who only have three days to relax in Mallorca prefer the plane, spurning the sea voyage. On the other hand, think about agricultural production. Modern industrial agriculture, based on the widespread use of a few highly selected varieties, has cause a heavy loss of agricultural biodiversity. This genetic erosion is the result of replacing local varieties, intensive exploitation of species, ecological depletion, deforestation, fires… However little we look into this matter, the time variable has a lot to do with these processes.
If we don’t have time for life, our civilization is surely doomed. Researchers say that if the laws on treating experimental animals humanely were complied with, they couldn’t do research. Industrialists say that if the anti-pollution laws were heeded, then production would stop. Genetic engineers say that if the safety requirements for releasing genetically modified organisms into the environ¬ment were respected, there would be too many obstacles to successfully commercializing recombinant products. Entrepreneurs say that if some workers didn’t die, construction wouldn’t be finished on time. “And dominating everything and wasting everything on accumulation and specialty: the hurry; the hurry that leaves behind all space and time filled with fallen and forgotten pieces of heart and brain, that will never again be reunited,” as the renowned Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, said in Limit of progress.
Towards an ecological culture of going slowAccording to the dominant discourse, we can’t afford a green economy. We can’t afford sustainable agricultural production. We can’t afford an Earth-friendly energy system. We can’t afford not to destroy, pollute and devastate. We can’t afford time for life.
If we think we could allow ourselves time for life—which is a matter of implementing profound social and cultural changes—and resolutely counter the adage that time is money with time is life, we would have to address a range of problems that could be characterized as the ecological culture of slowness in opposition to the capitalist culture of speed. In fact, ecological culture can only be a culture of slower rhythms, of slow times. Hurry, hurry, in addition to being the title of an excellent film by Carlos Saura, is a militant capitalist slogan.
The immediacy of using and discarding is directly opposed to the duration and durability that characterizes an ecologically sustainable society. Preserving, restoring and caring require time and effort, whether for ecosystems or personal relationships. The thought-provoking metaphor of “The garden of objects” ventured by the outstanding Italian designer Ezio Manzini is that “we should consider our artifacts not as objects that perform their services requiring minimum effort and minimum attention but as we do the plants and fruit trees in our own garden, both beautiful and useful: objects that would last and, like a tree, be loved for how they are and what they do; objects that would render a service and would require tending because taking care of objects can be a way of taking care of that much larger ‘object’ that is our planet.” Such a metaphor could only have been thought of in protracted, deliberate times, those needed to cultivate a garden and build personal relationships with living beings or even inanimate objects.
Ultimately, the insane acceleration we experience in contemporary industrial societies is tied to the speed with which money circulates and the greed to reap the benefits. Conversely, we can’t think of an ecological economy without slowing down, decelerating.
Let’s revisit the linear/cyclical time dimension. Linear time is undoubtedly that of industrial modernity, while cyclical time characterizes the life of agrarian societies and, at least partly, should govern the development of an ecologically sustainable society. If we tried to characterize the industrial revolution in terms of time, we would not only have to address acceleration but also independence from Nature’s cyclical time; the transit from biomass to fossil fuels; from cyclical work in tune with nature (day/night, winter/summer, etc.) to industrial work paced to the production demands of capital; from seasonal agricultural products to greenhouse crops; from traditional animal husbandry to the intensive, industrial, factory-farming of livestock…In this regard, the Hungarian philosopher Julius T. Fraser proposed defining technical modernity’s time through the phenomenon of “graying the calendar,” erasing the distinctions between day and night, between working days and holidays, between warm and cold seasons...
Natural light cycles
and “slow times of being”In his book, The rhythm of life. The time factor in nature, Josef H. Reichholf wrote: “Why don’t we adapt to the natural course of time? What will be the consequences of our increasingly frequent attempts to get away from very ancient natural rhythms? Our chosen means is precisely the one that marks all rhythms: light. Through our artificial daylight we cut off the cycle of natural light, although we pay for it in energy, health and well-being…We aren’t clear if this increases the sensation of vitality or whether it damages our health because this macro-experiment, intended to suppress the rhythms of nature, is still too recent: the artificial light age is scarcely as old as a person. Do we know if our bodies will resist these reduced rhythms over time?.... Our indicator of time is the Earth’s rotation. Will it be a mistake to dispense with its rhythm?”
There’s no way to “make peace with the planet” without reintegrating human socio-economic systems with the “biosphere’s economy,” and that requires us to both readapt ourselves to nature’s cycles and take our foot off the accelerator, because making the economy green basically means two things: “close the cycles” and use renewable energy.
Closing the cycles is essential to achieving clean industrial production and this has an obvious connection with nature’s time cycles. Renewable energy sources—those that renew themselves according to the annual solar cycle—are dispersedly manifested in both space and time. This distinguishes them from fossil fuels and nuclear energy, which were concentrated over millions of years by biological and geological processes. Appropriate technology needs to be available to harness renewable energy and industrial and social time needs to be organized in a less pressured and less greedy way.
The Italian poet and thinker Pier Paolo Pasolini talked about “the slow times of being” in relation to Italian peasant culture before the “anthropological mutation” of the 1960s, with the neocapitalist leap towards a consumer civilization: “I’m talking about an agricultural world, with woods and woodcutters, simple food, classic esthetic interpretation, the slow times of being, customs repeated into infinity, lasting and absolute relationships, heartbreaking farewells, wonderful returns to an unchanged world...”
With no nostalgia at all for the past, I have to say that we can’t conceive of a sustainable society that isn’t governed, in very important aspects of its dynamic, by “the slow times of being.” Ultimately, reintegrating human socio-economic systems into the “biosphere’s economy” requires living more cyclically—which includes respecting a calendar that retains all its colors instead of drifting into a uniform grayness—and living more slowly. We could say: to rebuild the industrial society ecologically requires “ruralizing it,” at least partially.
Time to implement
the precautionary principle Precaution is linked to time: time to think about what we’re doing and assess the possible consequences of our actions; time to discuss based on authenticated information and experience; time to assess the risks. A slower pace. A group of scientists wrote in a letter published in the weekly science journal Nature: “The clarity of ideas is more important than efficiency; the direction of the research more important than the speed with which it’s printed.”
Unfortunately it seems that such ideas are very much in the minority in an ultra-competitive context where science and technology are increasingly serving the imperatives of capital accumulation. To understand the dynamic driving modern biotechnology’s development, just visit the Monsanto website, one of the leading companies in the so-called “life sciences” sector. This is some of its thinking: If a life sciences company wants to be successful it has to be the first to invent and the first to market a product... Monsanto is setting the pace in creating more ideas, better and faster... Success is defined today in terms of creativity and speed... The goal is to market a stream of unique and valuable products before the competition… Maintaining a competitive edge requires the constant development of new products. And they have to be launched simultaneously—and dynamically—in multiple markets worldwide. If a brand isn’t in first or second place on the market, it’s a lost opportunity.
The gap between techno-scientific advances and society’s evolution is widening. Some analysts point out that, since the techno-scientific breakthrough in the 1960s, molecular biology’s development and the IT explosion have shattered the science-technology system’s overall stability, making it increasingly more difficult to control by public democratic powers. It has been suggested that the ecological crisis is principally a matter of speed and globalization. If a system accelerates too fast it doesn’t have time to select the most viable adaptations, and if it globalizes too much it becomes unsustainable, which means that it can’t fail in some areas and survive in others and therefore, so to speak, it puts all its eggs in one basket.
We need time to react to our own actions. The precaution principle is just an empty expression without this temporal dimension. A very rapidly developing, fetishized techno-science gets to be seen as the real protagonist of the story while humans are reduced to being helpless objects enduring the fallout from processes they don’t control. Without a slowdown in technological development it seems impossible for democratic, cogitative communities to re-appropriate techno-science—today increasingly at the beck and call of big capital—in order to reinstate it into a truly human social order.
Time for knowledgeThe knowledge is there for a holistic understanding of the complex systems vital for minimal human-oriented control within the biosphere—ecology, general systems theory, modern cosmology, even computer models of phenomena as complex as the Earth’s climate, social psychology… But we need time to refine the models and theories used by these disciplines. We especially need time to sift for the essential data in the gigantic agglomerations of information we accumulate but can’t really assimilate. And time to integrate contextual knowledge that enables well-informed decisions leading to effective action. Files, libraries and databases on all imaginable subjects grow exponentially but are simultaneously becoming unusable due to time constraints. Improvements in the speed with which information is processed and stored are offset by improvements in its even faster acquisition... of which we take increasingly less advantage. Almost twenty years ago Vartan Gregorian, director of the New York Public Library, referred to this disturbing phenomenon when he noted that all the available information in the world doubles every five years. Doubles! But the anomaly is that as information grows, its use decreases. Studies conducted in Japan in 1975 found that only 10% of the information produced was used, with the other 90% wasted. Today only 1-2% is used.
There’s an intrinsic, extremely important relationship between time and human praxis, which has at least two relevant aspects. On the one hand, praxis presupposes the ability to choose and a range of possibilities are required to do this. But time is also needed to take advantage of these possibilities; time for deliberation and decision-making. The quality of the decision is closely correlated with the quality of the information—having all the relevant information available without being distracted by an unmanageable mass of futile data—and also closely correlated with time.
On the other hand, we have time as kairos, a philo¬sophical concept used by Aristotle and the stoics. Kairos is the opportune moment, a historic opportunity occurring once and only once. It’s therefore supremely important to be able to identify it and take advantage of it. More recently, the German Marxist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) used this concept to redefine revolution as a kairological breakthrough. Time in politics is generally kairos time. Cultivating interpersonal relationships and developing a rich investigative personal life also makes extensive use of this concept, which in common parlance is often expressed as “a time for everything” (Ecclesiastes:3) when we try to calm our impatience with the impromptu. As Julio Cortázar said in a letter, “I’ve had books I was dying to read and let months pass waiting for the right moment. Given that time is full of pigeonholes of order, you can’t disregard an order from outside yourself when it is secretly in harmony with your inner time.”
Who’s high-jacking our time? In a very fundamental sense, conflicts about working time in capitalist society are central class conflicts. Power can be defined in terms of control over other people’s time. As the Spanish economist David Anisi said in his book Creators of scarcity, “We all start from a basic equality. Independent of our social coordinates, the day has 24 hours for everyone. Technically time is something impossible to produce. Only the exercise of power, when we appropriate other people’s time, can increase it. Power is measured as the ratio between the time taken from others and the time needed to achieve this.”
Well then, this struggle for the appropriation of other people’s time, which always exists in unequal societies, presents new traits in consumer societies. In 2000, the Spanish spent an average of three and a half hours a day watching television, a figure that has remained constant—with only slight fluctuations—since 1994. The corresponding figures for Japan (more than 8 hours a day) and the United States (more than 7 hours a day) are chilling as they indicate that in the supposedly more “developed” countries only time dedicated to paid work exceeds that of media consumption, whose quality is doubtful at best. In the mid-nineties, there were more than 1,000 million televisions worldwide. People hardly have time for life but they do have time to spend hours every day before a television screen, to which we should add the time spent on video and computer games.
“Cultural capitalism” has an elaborate strategy to highjack people’s time; it tries to occupy the maximum possible amount of each individual’s conscious time with ready-made contents.
Let’s think in spatial terms: our consciousness could be seen as a room that the mass media are trying to fill with useless junk and tidbits in the worst possible taste. But in order to live a human life worthy of the name we need empty spaces: time to meditate, to contemplate; time for silence and for parties and meeting one another; time for surprises, epiphanies, apparitions...
Time for poetryThe struggle to find time for our life, to recover the time that was high-jacked, is a cultural and political struggle to turn the leisure industry’s “free time” into genuinely free time and the time away from paid work into meaningful time. In short, to recover time to be human. “There will come a time when to there will be time to make time last,” the naturalist Joaquín Araujo promised. Poetry is a human activity where men have more often and more thoroughly questioned themselves about time and their times. “Would the poet sing without the anguish of time?” Antonio Machado asked through the mouth of Juan de Mairena, giving his essential definition of poetry as “a man’s dialogue with time.”
“Our clocks don’t just measure time, they also manufacture time,” wrote the Basque poet Joseba Sarrionandía in his book No soy de aquí (I’m not from here), “and, instead of natural rhythms and a person’s inner rhythms, impose on us an artificial monotonous regularity and an interminable tick-tock. Our lives today are organized by clock time; we accept this chronic servitude and scarcely have time to think about what real time is and what we want to do with it. Poetry time is precisely that other time, that of withdrawing from the race and finding more habitable areas.”
Poetry, says Esperanza Ortega, referring to the great Valladolid poet Francisco Pino, doesn’t evolve in linear, historic time but rather in its own circular, analog time. The Chilean teacher Gonzalo Rojas said something similar: “As to temporality, I have to say that I’ve never played with linear time but rather with circular time, which was the time they dreamed of in classical Greece and in the ancient Orient: that time of Borges or of Nietzsche.”
And we could also consider the thoughts of the Spanish poet José María Parreño: “Poems require time and silence, which our lives ostensibly lack. That’s why it’s the most narrative poetry that’s read the most and also why, in order for their slogans to be heard, advertising tries to create a margin of silence around itself, using the resources of the poem. It’s surprising to note how the poem gives us time and silence. The same thing happens with other precious things that we can only fully possess by giving them.” The habit of frequently reading poetry could, presumably, introduce us to different temporalities and provide us with resources for the political and cultural resistance we need.
Autolectic activities
need time and provide meaning The following observation could provide a more commonplace and less esoteric interpretation of the two ideas of the “eternal moment” and “circular time,” to which poets seem so prone: we can vanquish the time-devouring Cronus/Saturn, the time that’s hurrying us towards death, by increasing our involvement in activities sometimes called “autotelic.” These are activities whose purpose is self-contained; they aren’t directed at anything beyond themselves; they have intrinsic value rather than that of a tool for doing something else and that’s why they are intrinsically pleasing and satisfying: the enjoyment of love, the poetic experience, esthetic satisfaction, intellectual contemplation or the sensory, emotional and intellectual enjoyment of good food in pleasant company with intelligent after-dinner conversation. There’s no doubt that autotelic activities are one of the main sources giving meaning to human existence and we need to extend and expand these kinds of activities in order to achieve a good life.
One might think that the underlying reason why capitalism is the enemy of the good life is because much of what makes life valuable, meaningful and worth living, are autotelic activities. The capitalist dynamic completely ignores these activities, not to say that their expansion represents a mortal danger to capitalism. The capitalist dynamic aims at a world totally dedicated to producing goods and exchanging them in markets so as not to stop the accumulation of capital.
In this terrifying dystopia, (as the 19th century British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, called an anti-utopian world), all activities are aimed at one purpose: to make money. At all costs, capitalism must prevent the subject of human goals and especially ultimate goals or “ends in themselves.” Its own purpose of purposes, its’ ultimate reason for being—substantive not instrumental—is supra-human and should not be spoken out loud: the reason why the wheel of capital accumulation keeps on turning. For this blind process, this cannibal dynamism, human beings with their own purposes are a nuisance that has to be checked. Flexibility is the preferred term in such cases: capitalism’s materialistic move is to liquify all that’s solid. Political economy is resolved in fluid dynamics. Those who question the meaning of life are dangerous anti-capitalists, whom the system has to isolate and treat preventively.
Everlasting office chairsIn this context, we question the principal tenet of “dematerialization” that the advocates for ecologizing capitalism put forward in the 1990s. In order to escape from the ecological impasse that causes capitalism’s intrinsically expansive dynamic to operate within a finite biosphere, the proponents of “eco-capitalism” point to the only plausible way-out as being the idea of selling services instead of products, so “dematerializing” the cycles of production and consumption. This can be clearly illustrated with the example of the “everlasting office chair” mentioned by the authors of the Club of Rome report. If the structural elements of the chair (base, legs, seat mechanics) were optimizedfor ergonomic quality, comfort, strength, durability and easy repair; and the chair were designed so its most visible and perishable elements—cushions—were easily separated so they could be changed from time to time, we would have the almost-everlasting office chair. The immediate objection is of course: What manufacturer would be interested in producing such a chair? Once demand was met; goodbye to the company forever. The answer they gave is interesting: selling everlasting office chairs may actually not be good business, but renting them would be a fabulous business.
The 1972 Club of Rome report, Limits of Growth, asks if there’s a formula of interest to both manufacturers and merchants within this concept of longevity. The answer is leasing. That gives the product’s durability something that has direct market interest. The step from sale to rent, which optimizes performance, may have wide implications for industrial society. It might be the starting signal for a move towards a utilization service economy that rewards products’ durability and quality.
Is eco-capitalism possible?This shift from selling products to selling services is certainly conceivable within the logic of the system. But if this strategy became widespread, we would immediately come up against another limiting factor: no longer finite “ecological space” but each man and woman’s limited lifetime. To a certain extent, material products can be monopolized, hoarded and accumulated without being used and money can accumulate without limits. However, the consumption of services can’t be delayed, it takes place in “real time” and the day has 24 hours for everyone.
The problem can be clearly visualized if you think of the difference between buying books or video tapes, and keeping them without reading or watching them—because we fool ourselves in thinking that “someday we’ll have the time to do it”—as opposed to borrowing books from a library or seeing films transmitted by cable TV via a pay-per-view system. In the case of books borrowed or films transmitted, it’s not possible to accumulate them and the amount of capitalist profit comes up against the absolute limit of 24 hours in a day. And that, without reckoning that the strategy of “selling services instead of products” faces another important limit on the particular type of capitalism that has emerged from the restructuration of the 1970s-1980s: the enormous and growing political-economic power concentrated in a handful of large transnational companies.
The utopian eco-capitalism of the “everlasting office chairs” would require a redistribution of power in favor of local communities and workers to the detriment of big capital. Utopian eco-capitalism’s economies would tend to be more self-centered with local and somewhat more captive markets and less freedom for big capital. That’s why, although it’s conceivable to have eco-capitalism focusing on selling services instead of products, in practice it would be against our world’s major power interests: the big transnational corporations.
A new culture of sustainability
requires a new culture of time Controlling time is a basic form of power, perhaps THE basic form of power. Power over others—buying and selling working time—but also power over myself: self-determination so as to govern my lifetime according to my own wishes and interests in an era when the production industry for contents of consciousness glories in keeping people glued to a screen for many hours a day.
The first mechanical clocks in the 13th century had only one needle, the hour hand. The minute hand was added in the 16th century and, significantly, the second hand in the 18th century, along with the development of industrial capitalism. Once such exact time measurement appeared, the precisely measured hours and seconds became something that could be bought and sold: time could be marketed, something unthinkable in the previous feudal society. In the Middle Ages, one of the reasons usury was forbidden was because charging interest was considered the same as selling time and time belonged only to God.
The idea of sustainability, essential to any kind of environmental ideology, has a close relationship with time: for future projections—taking future creature needs into account now—and for formulating operational sustainability criteria in terms that include temporal magnitudes such as the replacement rate for renewable natural resources, the bio¬degradation rate for pollutants, etc. The formula preferred by economists in the move towards sustainability is “internalizing the ecological externals,” which just means assuming our responsibilities in order to make sounder links between the past, present and future.
In Beyond the limits: Global collapse or a sustainable future, US environmental scientist Donella H. Meadows (1941-2001) said we have to be very clear about the limits we have exceeded. It’s not about limits on the number of people or our economy’s monetary value, at least not directly. Nor is it about specific limits such as a wall we might have reached. These are velocity limits: limits to how fast sources can be renewed and waste reabsorbed. If we could slow down the flow of materials and energy being extracted from the ground by our economy and returned in the form of waste, she argued, we could go back to being within the planetary limits and return to the security this would produce. Actually, we could maintain the current world population, and even more people, in a way that’s compatible with the Earth’s limits.
Our greatest challengeContemporary concern about sustainability expresses the wish to rethink the time concepts implicit in the conventional ideas of “progress” and “development.” At first sight, this wish seems to be focused on demanding an expansion of the temporal horizon: it’s an intellectual and moral scandal that in our “risk societies,” ten years seems like the long-term for many people. But, more profoundly, it’s about moving us from an infinite to a finite temporal dimension. Conventional economics doesn’t even consider how both it and conventional agricultural could end; it hasn’t posited the possibility of the end of agriculture, but the idea of sustainability contains within itself the possibility of an end, regardless of the system to which it’s applied: ecosystem, agrosystem, industrial system...
Sustainability can be thought of as a new relationship with time, rebuilding industrial societies so they learn to take the real long haul into account, organize inter-generational relationships on new bases, rationally adjust to the temporal cycles of the biosphere and internalize mortality and finality. This is perhaps the greatest challenge we are facing in our time.
Jorge Reichmann is a writer and university professor and a member of Ecologists in Action. This text appeared in www.rebelion.org and was edited and subtitled by envío.
|
a monthly magazine of analysis on Central America