Unless you’re jet-setting around the cosmos at relativistic speeds, nothing exists outside the framework of time every person, idea, culture, organism, landscape, and continent exists in a particular time-stamped moment while also bearing vestiges of a much deeper historical and evolutionary past. I use the word as a deliberate counterpoint to the idea of Time lessness, which is an impossible, and ultimately sterile, aspiration. In a sense, it’s perceiving the world in four dimensions. It’s the habit of seeing things not merely as they are now, but also recognizing how they evolved-and will continue to evolve-over time. Timefulness reveals how knowing the rhythms of Earth’s deep past and conceiving of time as a geologist does can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future. Our everyday lives are shaped by processes that vastly predate us, and our habits will in turn have consequences that will outlast us by generations. But spans of hundreds of years-the time a molecule of carbon dioxide resides in the atmosphere-approach the limits of our comprehension. The passage of nine days, which is how long a drop of water typically stays in Earth’s atmosphere, is something we can easily grasp. Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales in our planet’s long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating for ourselves.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |