rhythms proved too imprecise for the demands of capitalism: People who followed natural rhythms might be late for the factory work of the industrial revolution. So the body had to be broken to the discipline of mechanical time.4
As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans were obsessed with time, always busy with the consuming passions of individualism: “The inhabitant of the United States,” he observed, “attaches himself to the goods of this world as if he were assured of not dying, and he rushes so precipitately to grasp those that pass within his reach that one would say he fears at each instant he will cease to live before he has enjoyed them. He grasps them all but without clutching them, and he soon allows them to escape from his hands so as to run after new enjoyments.” This culture, in which “rush hour” might be any hour of the day, has survived and thrived in America, leading to a society plagued by what sociologists call “time poverty.” In a culture of time poverty, we don’t have enough time for what really matters to us, because we’re too busy doing other things. Even at college, which is designed to be an interval of slow time in life, many students don’t make time for meaningful work or for reflection about their hopes and dreams because there’s “too much to do.” Our “lack” of time has environmental impacts because it drives us to convenience, where we often accept resource-intensive solutions to our time-management problems. We believe in fast food, for example, because we lead fast lives, circumscribed by the seconds of the clock.5
An alarm clock tells us to get up and get to work “on time,” but in focusing our attention on today’s time it marginalizes other important times of our lives, like yesterday or tomorrow. Yesterday, the clock presumes, is just history, and tomorrow might as well be science fiction. Clock time is also just human time. It helps us get places on time, but it keeps us from considering natural time and—depending on our beliefs—supernatural time. By focusing our attention on the personal present, it keeps us from other temporal perspectives, perhaps until it’s literally too late.
Past Time
Despite their enrollment at an educational institution designed to pass on cultural traditions from the past to the future, Joe and Jo College are not generally good at thinking in time. Most of us, in fact, don’t remember—if we ever learned—the environmental history that would help us make sense of the present, so we don’t know why we act the way we do. We don’t understand why environmental problems have developed. We don’t know about environmental successes or histories of hope. Playing by the rules of American presentism, we don’t take time to think about the past—unless, of course, we’re stuck in a history course.6
Whether we acknowledge it or not, however, we live in history, and dead men rule our lives. We inhabit the institutions dead men created and the buildings they erected. We learn from books they wrote and ideas they devised. Daily, we use the technologies they invented—amusing ourselves among the ghosts of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Philo Farnsworth. Most importantly, we live in the world that they developed, despoiled, or protected. When Columbus “discovered” America, he came in windpowered sailing ships, and encountered people who didn’t use fossil fuels. But we use lots of fossil fuels, because dead men later discovered coal and oil and exploited them to make our lives easier and more efficient. On the other hand, dead men and women also helped to create a sublime system of American national parks, and legislative protections for wilderness and the environment. The past is always alive in our present, but, because the clock calls us to our next appointment, we rush right past it.7
Future Time
American presentism also keeps us from a careful consideration of the future. College is, of course, a preparation for what comes next, and—despite the immediate demands of our clocks and watches—college students worry about the future a lot. But that future is usually individual and instrumental: We’re more concerned about preparation for graduate school or a career than about the quality of our communities or the fate of the Earth. Like other Americans, college students aren’t very skilled at imagining the long future, or making collective plans for the world they want to live in as adults, partners, parents, and citizens. Most Americans tend not to be very mindful of future generations, and when we are, we often ask, as devout utilitarians do, “What has the future ever done for us?” This shortsightedness makes it difficult, if not impossible, to confront systemic issues like urban planning, poverty, environmental degradation, or global weirding. That’s why, as Robert Paehlke says, “Time horizon may be the most important distinction between environmentalists and others.”8
As a consequence, we don’t think much about the future as something we create today, both in our activity and our inactivity. We don’t notice that we are making history with each of our everyday actions. As a result, we collectively create a future that few of us really want to live in. Like it or not, what we do either reinforces ideas and institutions today, or transforms them for tomorrow. When we approach our studies as tools for civic engagement, we learn how to change the world. When we explore possibilities for environmental responsibility in our own lives, we provide possibilities for future citizens, and so we create a future with our examples as a part of its usable past. Alternately, when we settle for a present so stressful or unpleasant that it drives us to waste time with escapist TV, we create a future with more commercials and commercialism and couch potatoes, reinforcing images of people and society that often contradict our deepest values.
Nature’s Time
Even if our alarm clocks located us in a stream of historical continuity, they still wouldn’t connect us to biological or ecological time. Clocks ignore nature’s time—the slow time of geology and evolution, the long cycles of prairies and forests and oceans. When we plan our lives only by clock time, we forget nature’s rhythms and begin to assume that our time is the only time. Even though most natural rhythms are cyclical, Americans believe in linear progress with practically inevitable human improvement. In nature’s time, it’s progress when the sun comes up each morning, and progress again when it goes down; progress when spring sprouts every year, and once again when bright colors announce fall. In nature’s time, efficiency isn’t measured by speed, but by sustainability and regeneration—the ability to extend the extravagant generosity of life to another generation. When the human time line meets nature’s time circle, however, it increasingly results in extinctions, which are literally killing time for other species.
In nature’s time, minutes and seconds don’t mean much. We think we’re on time when we arrive at the appointed hour, but nature might think otherwise. It takes nature about five hundred years to make one inch of topsoil, so when we live in a way that depletes soil faster than that (and we do), we are not “on time,” no matter how fast or productive we might be. When we live in a way that threatens the ecosystem services that our descendants will need, we’re more out of time than on time.
Sacred Time
Whether or not gods exist, people and cultures feel a supernatural relationship to the natural world. It may be Allah or Yahweh, the Corn Mother or the Rainbow Serpent, but many people believe that something supernatural creates the world, and that our time on Earth is a divine gift in a purposeful cosmos. For example, the Bible suggests that the universe is the work of a creator, and that time is God’s gift, so that an individual’s time is not just hers, but God’s as well. If that’s true, perhaps Thoreau was right when he claimed that you can’t kill time without injuring eternity.9
