TY - JOUR
AU - Huebener, Paul
AB - While the field of ecocriticism has largely been associated with concepts of place, bioregion, and other spatial concerns, there are also many ways in which environmental approaches to cultural and literary studies can benefit from a concentrated focus on issues connected to time. Various scholars have considered matters of time and the environment from a range of important perspectives; indeed, the diversity of these approaches speaks to the fact that “time” is never a single entity, but is rather a collection of multiple, contested practices and experiences that continuously take shape through the negotiations of culture with nature. For my own part, I have benefitted greatly from the work of many scholars of time, from Johannes Fabian and Barbara Adam to Michelle Bastian and Rita Felski, and I think it is worth our while to keep building our toolbox of “timely” insights. I want to suggest that a critical focus on time as it relates to the environment should be understood as both a coherent field and as a collection of diverse approaches that can draw from a wide range of insights into the cultural politics of time and the environment. In this article, I make a case for an approach that I call ecocritical time studies. “Critical time studies,” as I have suggested elsewhere, is “a process of inquiry that advances thoughtful re-evaluations of the social politics of time through the examination of temporal assumptions and the fostering of critical temporal literacy” (Huebener 14). By honing our ability to read time critically, we can understand how time itself operates socially as a form of power, and we can recognize that “imaginative responses are key to understanding and questioning this power” (14). While my earlier work on this topic has mainly tried to address concerns within the human domains of cultural politics, including attention to race, class, gender, and age, I would like to suggest here that critical time studies, in the form of ecocritical time studies, has much to contribute to the efforts of ecocritics and environmentalists early in the twenty-first century. In particular, this article examines ways in which ecocritical time studies can equip us to articulate, question, resist, embrace, and reshape the functioning of time as a form of power and discourse within socio-environmental activities. The final section of the article also highlights the importance of bringing literary studies to bear on issues connected to time and the environment. I draw my examples mainly from the Canadian context because that is where my expertise lies and this will ground the discussion within a coherent frame of reference. However, I also intend for this project to face outward. I am suggesting that ecocritical time studies can take literary and cultural criticism in a direction that will help us to reread the massive social problems of sustainability, not just in Canada, but within all spheres of social-environmental practice. Or perhaps “spheres” is not the right word. Following the insights of Sarah Sharma, let us not rely only on the spatial notion of the public sphere, but also consider our existence within a “temporal public” (142). “We’re Taking Our Time” (But Not with Oil Pipelines) To consider one example of how we might think through the hazardous negotiations of ecological and cultural time, I will begin (as things so often do) with oil, and in particular with the regulatory approval processes for resource development projects. The process that a society develops in order to approve or reject projects such as oil pipelines reveals just how important temporal assumptions can be to environmental practice and discourse. Because of this, the ability to read these concerns through an approach that understands time as a form of power is vital; such an approach reveals the necessity of political and environmental strategies that consciously articulate the cultural politics of time. Like so many realms of social concern, energy projects involve a conflict between fast and slow, acceleration and caution, and other contested temporalities. I want to suggest here that fast and slow can both play the role of hero and villain in turn, and that a literacy of time is our only hope for telling the difference. Thinking about oil reveals the need for critical temporal literacy. Slowness has become an infamous point of critical contention. The Slow Movement is praised for resisting the menace of social acceleration (Honoré; Berg and Seeber), and it is criticized for its hopeless idealism and its blindness to systemic inequities. Sharma, for instance, speaks of the need to recognize “the temporal labor and temporal architectures that make slowness desirable and possible for some but not for others” (111), while Hartmut Rosa argues that attempts to slow down are essentially doomed for a number of terrifying reasons (157–59). Perhaps the best-known recent ecocritical study of slowness is Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. “By slow violence,” he writes, “I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Many of us have been inspired and vexed by his important question: “how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody … ?” (3) Nixon’s call to highlight slow disasters and slow crimes offers a potent approach for critical readings of certain problems. In terms of petroleum, his work can help us to read oil extraction projects and pipelines as triggers for the long, slow violence of climate change as well as the slow and always incomplete recovery process set in motion by oil spills—a process that has barely begun by the time the news media, or their public, loses interest. As Nixon writes in reference to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, “the time frames of damage assessment and potential recovery are wildly out of sync” (22). The trouble with slowness that I wish to emphasize here, though, is somewhat different. Alongside the debate over the Slow Movement, and Nixon’s focus on long, slow repercussions, we need additional approaches in order to respond to other manipulations of temporal politics in the context of the environment. Time can be wielded as a tool of power in many ways. Opposition to the development of new industrial projects can usefully advocate for slowness in the sense of diligent caution and precaution; such opposition is a tactic for mitigating the accelerated pace of profit-based developments and the harms that they cause. At the same time, though, a critical attention to temporal power reveals that slowness alone will not save us. While acceleration is indeed often tied to unsustainable practices, the trouble with slow is that it too can be deployed as a tactic of profitable destruction. Speed and slowness both embody shifting forms of power. The particular political decision that I will focus on here is one made by Canada’s federal government under Stephen Harper in 2012; even though the specific moment in which this decision occurred has now passed, it remains instructive for thinking through the ways in which similar moments recur again and again. In 2012, the federal government decided to shorten the maximum period of time for the environmental review of major resource projects. Previously, such environmental reviews were allowed to take up to six years; after the policy change, the time limit became two years. This decision was tied most obviously to the review of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway oil pipeline, a proposed pipeline system for transporting bitumen substances from Alberta to coastal ports in British Columbia, from which oil tankers would then gain access to Asian markets. The compression of environmental reviews from six years to two years was a welcome temporal shortcut for Enbridge spokesman Paul Stanway, who warned that “There is demand for both gas and oil in the far east. The clock is ticking, though” (qtd. in Paris, “Speeding Up”). His language jibes with that of then Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who commented that economic growth is “going to come from innovation, it’s going to come from an accelerated regulatory system” (qtd. in Paris, “Budget Shortens”). The narrative of rapid development is assumed here; fast profit takes precedence over any other concerns, and within this ideology there is no time for lengthy environmental assessments. This policy approach privileges the ticking clock of quick shareholder profit, and it disregards the ticking clocks of ecosystem collapse and climate change. Meanwhile, beyond the implicit belief that development must occur rapidly, additional forms of temporal power are at stake. The shorter environmental review timelines applied not only to future reviews but retroactively to reviews that were already underway. For the Enbridge proposal, this meant not only that the rules were changed mid-game and that various reasons to be cautious about the pipeline project may not have had time to come to light, but also that Fisheries and Oceans Canada (itself the target of simultaneous massive budget cuts) simply would not have time to complete the necessary risk assessments for the nearly 1,000 streams and rivers in the pipeline’s path (“Northern Gateway Review”). The imposition of acceleration as well as the ability to retroactively apply new temporal edicts operate clearly here as tools of political power in the service of approving profitable fossil fuel projects. A fast review is not so much an assessment as an endorsement.1 Significantly, when the conversation shifts from the green-lighting function of these environmental “assessments” to the imposition of actual environmental regulations, the above emphasis on speed and acceleration disappears, giving way to pleas for slowness and precaution. In response to a proposal by the Government of Alberta to implement a carbon-pricing scheme that “could cost industry up to 94 cents per barrel” (Paris, “Greenhouse Gas”), the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, in documents obtained through freedom of information laws, writes, “Major policies like this one should not be fast-tracked. Adequate time is required for study analysis and consultation” (Paris, “Greenhouse Gas”). Sure enough, the federal government delayed the release of draft regulations, and once again the government’s language closely mirrors that of the industry, with then Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq’s spokesperson saying, “Our government is working with the provinces and stakeholders to develop these regulations. We’re taking our time and they’ll be ready when they’re ready” (McCarthy). Industry Government On speeding up environmental assessments “There is demand for both gas and oil in the far east. The clock is ticking, though.” Economic growth is “going to come from innovation, it’s going to come from an accelerated regulatory system.” On slowing down environmental regulations “Major policies like this one should not be fast-tracked. Adequate time is required for study analysis and consultation.” “Our government is working with the provinces and stakeholders to develop these regulations. We’re taking our time and they’ll be ready when they’re ready.” Industry Government On speeding up environmental assessments “There is demand for both gas and oil in the far east. The clock is ticking, though.” Economic growth is “going to come from innovation, it’s going to come from an accelerated regulatory system.” On slowing down environmental regulations “Major policies like this one should not be fast-tracked. Adequate time is required for study analysis and consultation.” “Our government is working with the provinces and stakeholders to develop these regulations. We’re taking our time and they’ll be ready when they’re ready.” Industry Government On speeding up environmental assessments “There is demand for both gas and oil in the far east. The clock is ticking, though.” Economic growth is “going to come from innovation, it’s going to come from an accelerated regulatory system.” On slowing down environmental regulations “Major policies like this one should not be fast-tracked. Adequate time is required for study analysis and consultation.” “Our government is working with the provinces and stakeholders to develop these regulations. We’re taking our time and they’ll be ready when they’re ready.” Industry Government On speeding up environmental assessments “There is demand for both gas and oil in the far east. The clock is ticking, though.” Economic growth is “going to come from innovation, it’s going to come from an accelerated regulatory system.” On slowing down environmental regulations “Major policies like this one should not be fast-tracked. Adequate time is required for study analysis and consultation.” “Our government is working with the provinces and stakeholders to develop these regulations. We’re taking our time and they’ll be ready when they’re ready.” While the consequences of the above examples may be profound, to the extent that they exemplify the use of time as a form of power these events are entirely commonplace. The political scientists Tony Porter and Liam Stockdale have identified how processes tied to “the strategic manipulation of temporalities … help constitute globalization” (271); they point, for example, to “the manipulation of expectations about the future [in] the global derivatives market” (275) as well as “the ability of powerful corporations to construct and manipulate the temporalities of transnational production” (280–81). Alongside these global activities, any number of events show us that actors at all scales, from the national to the local to the interpersonal, routinely manipulate time for political advantage. If we are to approach the cultural politics of time thoughtfully, it is not adequate to criticize the social processes of acceleration and to advocate for “slowness.” The mobilization of temporal power takes shifting forms; yes, it privileges the fast profits of global corporations at the expense of the long-term health and security of the human and nonhuman agents who face the consequences of rapid development, and, yes, it obscures the slower and more sustained forms of inquiry that are necessary even to begin to account for the multiple nonlinear temporalities and modes of causation that exist at different biological and ecological levels. Perhaps even more insidiously, though, the mobilization of temporal power allows those in positions of privilege to initiate arbitrary temporal rules—deadlines, timelines, time limits, strategic manipulations of both speed and delay—and to change these temporal rules at will. In the face of such temporal inequities, a rigorous and politically aware form of ecocritical time studies founded on temporal literacy is necessary to work effectively toward the implementation of environmental, social, and temporal justice. Environmentalism must be concerned with the temporalities of ecosystems, and it must understand time itself as a form of power. What is Natural Time? If we are to concern ourselves with the temporalities of ecosystems, we will need to consider a great many complexities. Even the idea that cultural time exists in tension with natural time is problematic because it can seduce us into believing that culture and nature each pulse to a particular beat, when in fact human cultures and the larger environments to which they belong involve many complex, intertwined temporalities. For a planet that rotates once a day, the earth contains astonishing varieties of time. Kate Soper has shown that the question “What is Nature?” is incredibly complex; when we speak of nature we refer not to a singular entity, but rather, in different contexts, to countless aspects of cultural politics and symbolism as well as ecology and biology, allowing for a spectrum of perspectives across realist and social constructionist positions. It follows that the question “What is natural time?” must be equally complex. Barbara Adam’s notion of “timescapes” offers an example of how we might begin to engage with these complexities: “Where other scapes such as landscapes, cityscapes and seascapes mark the spatial features of past and present activities and interactions of organisms and matter, timescapes emphasize their rhythmicities, their timings and tempos, their changes and contingencies. A timescape perspective stresses the temporal features of living” (Timescapes 11). Many attempts to discuss natural time tend to privilege limited perspectives, closing off other avenues of understanding. While the Slow Food movement, for instance, seeks usefully to resist some of the ruthless accelerations of late modernity, Sharma notes that The type of time that is valued by the slow food movement is “natural time,” whether it is the time of the earth, the seasons, or the biological clock. It is imagined to be precapitalist and preindustrial. Individuals are expected to reclaim an “essential” experience of time, and such a reclamation is assumed to be possible. But the temporal politics of slow food recedes almost entirely from view because of this naturalized conception of time. (122) As is the case with other visions of nature as a pristine site of return to an ideal past, the essentialized vision of natural time disavows not only the unfolding complexities of ecosystems, but also the forms of ideology and inequity that are always tied up in different temporal experiences. Consider, as well, the limitations in the idea that “Days are the most natural division of time” (Dewdney 36). Such a statement is insightful, yet it is unnecessarily restrictive in envisioning a particular scale or focus for “natural” time. Likewise, in his writing on the importance of rethinking time within the social sciences, John Urry advocates for the adoption of what he calls “glacial time,” a consciously slow form of social engagement that “resists instantaneous time and seeks to slow time down to ‘nature’s speed’” (194). Urry’s project is compelling in its critical resistance of intensively speed-based social politics, yet it does not account for the fact that the ecosphere contains many particularities and interrelations. The equation of glacial time with nature’s speed assumes not only that nature’s speed is very slow, but more importantly that there is such a thing as a singular speed of nature, an assumption that Urry begins to question, perhaps, with the use of quotation marks around “nature’s speed.” Ecosystems themselves contain countless different, and frequently interdependent, temporalities. Some of the slower temporalities of the earth unfold through the epochal processes of tectonic shifts, evolution, fossilization, and glaciation, while these processes in turn contain their own wide variations in pacing. There is a bristlecone pine growing today in the White Mountains of California that is 5,062 years old and counting (“Rocky Mountain”); it sprouted as a seedling several centuries before the construction of the earliest Egyptian pyramids, and now it is listed in an online database that counts its age while keeping its exact location a secret. While the bristlecone pine is among the slowest of all organisms, it also participates, minute by minute, in the same ecological world that enacts the faster, sometimes astonishingly rapid, temporalities of hurricanes, forest fires, and electrons. As Tim Ingold notes, the temporal rhythms of a pear tree range from its “solid trunk,” which “presides immobile over the passage of human generations,” to the much more rapid growth and decay of foliage (168). The bristlecone pine lives, moment by moment, within the same unfolding world as Dolania americana mayflies, whose adult females live for less than five minutes. Within a given place, each element of the ecosphere encounters and contributes to many temporal experiences and events that are nested within one another and whose boundaries are indeterminate and pliable; Timothy Morton uses the terms “concentric temporalities” (69) and “fuzzy temporalities” (71) to describe these phenomena. As Marlene Creates points out, a single waterfall involves many different forms of time, from the fast flow of each droplet, to seasonal variations in the volume of water, to the slow erosion of the rock. Using the word “taskscape” to refer to the arrangement of land and time within which we exist, Ingold notes that “the temporality of the taskscape … lies not in any particular rhythm, but in the network of interrelationships between the multiple rhythms of which the taskscape is itself constituted” (160). Ecosystems contain as many “times” as they do objects, processes, or creatures—probably more. The temporalities of the rotation and revolution of the earth, too, have many complex expressions. Christopher Dewdney calculates that as the northern hemisphere moves gradually toward the sun during the late stages of winter, “the shock wave of spring spreads northwards at sixteen miles a day, a little more than half a mile an hour. You could easily outwalk spring” (32). In the Arctic, the tilted axis of the planet means that the sun does not set for months on end in the summer and does not rise for long periods in the winter. Arctic caribou have adapted to this by switching off their circadian rhythms of sleep and wakefulness. Andrew Loudon, a professor of Animal Biology at the University of Manchester, explains that instead of relying on circadian patterns, the Arctic caribou have developed a habit of frequent napping, so that “the animal accumulates sleep but in many episodes” (qtd. in “Caribou’s Inner Clock”). Larger seasonal patterns of behavior may actually suggest that in these Arctic dwellers, the circadian clock has been replaced by a “circannual clock” (“Caribou’s Inner Clock”). Around the world, other creatures regulate their behavior in coordination with an even wider variety of ecological cues. The speckled sea louse in northern Wales uses an internal “tidal clock” to synchronize its swimming and feeding patterns with the tides, while the marine worm Platynereis dumerilii spawns during the new moon, thanks to its internal “lunar clock” (Vogel). Gretchen Vogel writes in Science that these discoveries “suggest that noncircadian clocks might be common and could explain a variety of biological rhythms.” The struggle to represent natural time in ways that accurately reflect the peculiarities of different climates and longitudes becomes a focus in Kate Wersan’s study of gardening handbooks in the eighteenth century, in which horticultural authors tried to articulate the natural patterns of time relevant to successful gardening, resulting in a “running debate among professional garden authors over how best to represent time on the pages of a book. … In the pages of their garden almanacs, dictionaries, calendars, and encyclopedias, each of these scientifically minded practical gardeners wrote against mechanical and regularized time, instead proposing different methods to find a more accurate and portable organic timekeeper” (283, 285). Meanwhile, because most published manuals of gardening techniques were based on the growing conditions in England, gardeners in America had to find ways to adapt the timing strategies to their own locations. A vital tool in this regard, both in England and in America, was known as the “early melon,” “a melon seedling grown in winter in a box of dung … [which] became a widely used method for testing and calibrating horticultural advice” (285). As a kind of living clock, the early melon became “a tool capable of revealing, standardizing, and teaching organic time. The melon would teach a gardener to perceive organic time, extending the hope of finding in nature a more perfect temporal order” (287). The early melon speaks to the tension between the impulse, on the one hand, to recognize the unique particularities of time on different parts of the earth, and, on the other hand, to simultaneously capture and regularize natural time. Frequently at stake here is the fact that just as nature and culture are not separate, but are intertwined, so too are various “natural” times inflected through human activities such as seeding and harvesting cycles, the breeding of livestock to select artificially for rapid growth, the sudden onset of the Anthropocene, the replacement of old-growth forests with bustling cities, or even the manipulation of our own internal clocks through the use of electric lights. Michelle Bastian points out that leatherback turtles (and, we surmise, many other creatures) participate in complex interrelated time scales; as a species, they have survived through deep time, and yet their current populations are caught up in the midst of rapid ecological changes spurred by human activities (41). Resisting the assumption that the human world is separate from nature is an important task of the environmental humanities, and this task becomes much more intuitive when we linger on the deep intertwining of human and nonhuman times. As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, human societies themselves evolved partially in response to global climate patterns, a process that now functions increasingly in both directions (213). “The landscape,” Ingold argues, “is never complete: neither ‘built’ nor ‘unbuilt’, it is perpetually under construction” (162).2 Strangely enough, Paul Ricoeur’s commentary on time and narrative becomes illuminating here. Much like an ecologist investigating the many living processes within a body of water, the literary scholar examines a collective body of imaginative texts and declares that “there are as many temporal ‘experiences’ as poets, even as poems” (2: 81). No school of thought can account for all the temporalities of nature any more than a work of literary criticism can construct a final temporal analysis of every poem in existence (or perhaps even of a single poem). An awareness of this limitation itself must vitally underpin any project that seeks to investigate ecological times. When we equate one particular temporality—slowness, or cyclicality, or anything else—with natural time, we are privileging a single, limited perspective, and closing off other forms of understanding. To suggest that there is such a thing as a singular “natural time” would make as much sense as arguing that every work of literature represents social and personal experiences as a homogeneous “literary time.” Not coincidentally, this insight echoes the larger conclusions about human time that have been made by various scholars in sociology. As Barbara Adam and other time theorists have shown, human cultural temporalities are themselves incredibly complex and diverse, and it is a mistake to imagine that any cultural temporality can be reduced purely to the influence of clocks, or cyclicality, or any other form.3 In Ricoeur’s assertion that “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative” (1: 3), there is a degree of ambiguity as to what form time might take before it “becomes human time.” Just as other elements of the ecosphere are always enacting their own particular temporalities, we might say that human social practices, or even consciousness itself, serve to draw time into the house of culture. Where Ricoeur sees narrative as the trigger for the conversion to human time, poet Don McKay identifies memory; he defines memory as “the momentary domestication of time” (Deactivated 30). Because memory, like narrative, is a necessary condition for human identity and for coherent forms of interaction with the world, we must forever fashion time into human shapes, just as we shape the air to fit inside our lungs. Human culture exerts a real, but shifting and limited, power of appropriation over different forms of time. A critical awareness of the perpetual—and perpetually incomplete—process by which “wild” time is domesticated into human time is necessary for understanding its contexts, biases, exclusions, and limitations. To repurpose McKay’s words about the practice of nature poetry (another form of wilderness encounter that inevitably involves human perspectives), the domestication of time “should not be taken to be avoiding anthropocentrism, but to be enacting it, thoughtfully” (Vis à Vis 29). We must be critical readers of the cultural narratives through which we shape our encounters with ecological times. Literary Ecocritical Time Studies One of the cultural practices that I have alluded to only briefly up to this point is literature, but as is so often the case, literary texts can play a vital and unique role in reorienting human frames of experience. As Catriona Sandilands explains, “literary texts in themselves, as points of environmental activity, contribute through critical practice to an environmental public culture” (128). Far from existing within a secluded artistic enclave, literature can enact “an interruption of the totality of environmental discourse constituted outside the literary domain” (129). Moreover, if narrative, as Ricoeur suggests, is the primary mechanism that we have for ordering and comprehending time, for making time human, then thoughtful literary texts should be among our most capable tools for expanding, questioning, and shaping our awareness of the contested temporalities central to human–ecological relations. By contemplating the flow of time in various parts of our cultural and ecological worlds, literary writers have been able to interrogate the limits of cultural conceptualizations of time and comment on the human place within both time and the ecosphere itself. Janice Fiamengo has said that “‘speaking for’ animals in Canadian literature […] has always been double-edged: both an exploration of the radical otherness of the animal and an intensely human, and human-centred, endeavour” (2), and her warning certainly applies to writing about trees, bioregions, and ecological time as well.4 This double-edgedness can become a means of thoughtful anthropocentrism through which insights into nonhuman experience, precarious as they may be, can reshape cultural patterns of thought.5 What kind of CanLit ambassador to ISLE would I be if I didn’t discuss Margaret Atwood? In her 2007 poem “Bear Lament,” she sees an encounter with a polar bear as an opportunity to subvert a problematic view of time in the natural world. The poem is addressed to “you,” whose romanticized conceptualization of the bear’s static existence in time gradually breaks apart over the course of the poem. With apologies to Atwood, I have italicized some of the poem’s temporal phrasings to emphasize this shift. You once believed if you could only crawl inside a bear, […] this would save you, in a crisis. Let you enter into its cold wise ice bear secret house, as in old stories. In a desperate pinch. That it would share its furry winter dreamtime […] But no, not any more. I saw a bear last year, against the sky, a white one, rearing up with something of its former heft. But it was thin as ribs and growing thinner. Sniffing the brand-new absences of rightful food it tastes as ripped-out barren space erased of meaning. So, scant comfort there. Oh bear, what now? And will the ground still hold? And how much longer? (52–53)6 The sequence of temporal language begins with the fairy tale opening “once,” the mythical “old stories,” and the eternal “dreamtime”; that is, the bear is perceived to exist in an alternate reality beyond the forces of temporality and causation to which everyday human events are subject. With the words “But no,” however, the poem rejects this romantic vision of nature as a static refuge and inviolable home of eternal balance, and it moves jarringly into the real anxieties of the immediate past and the ongoing present with the phrases, “not any more,” “last year,” “former,” “brand-new,” “now,” and “how/much longer?” Even the shift in verbs from the imaginative temporality of the conditional tense (“could,” “would”) to the specific moments of the past tense (“saw,” “was”) to the immediate present tense (“tastes”), and finally to the future tense (“will the ground/still hold?”) sees the poem’s temporal condition migrate from comforting fantasy to uneasy actuality and fear for the very real future. There is no need for Atwood to name the cause of the bear’s unstable ground and lack of food; we know about global warming. But Atwood’s language is suggesting that the unprecedented human assault on the biosphere destroys not only animals and ecosystems, but also the romanticized view of nature as a stable realm independent of human affairs. Her observation of the changing Arctic wrenches the bear from its reassuring atemporality, placing it precariously within the increasingly barren present—and it is her close attention to temporal language, the same temporal language with which we negotiate every time we speak, that accomplishes this shift. The result is that the “ground” of our cultural view of nature as an unchanging landscape is fractured along with the ice. The poem acknowledges that despite several centuries of evidence to the contrary, the notion that life on earth is ordered through a permanent set of relationships has retained a hold within the collective Western consciousness much longer than it has any right to.7 By compelling herself, and her readers, to finally reject the notion that nature is stable—and thus to reject the secure concept of nature altogether in favor of a more critical awareness of changing ecosystems, temporal ideology, and our own culpability in bringing about the deadly volatility of the present age—Atwood offers a lament not only for the polar bear, but also for a damaging cultural belief in a stable natural time unaffected by forms of discourse and social power. In this sense, the title of the poem reads in the imperative. Bear lament: give birth to, and carry with you, the necessary sadness that has been denied for so long. Only through grieving the loss of our comfortable assumptions can we take up the call for a critical temporal literacy. If the domestication of time involves bringing natural temporalities into the house of human culture and shaping them in alignment with particular human ideologies and priorities, there must also be a process by which human time becomes wild time—a process of forgetting or denarrativizing our usual temporal modes. This process occurs whenever time risks escaping the ticking digits, ordered calendars, ideological constructions, and other human-scale reference systems by which we attempt to categorize it. Works of literature, paradoxically, participate in the narrativizing domestication of time as well as the self-conscious unravelling through which this domestication is revealed as fragmented, partial, and ideological.8 Literature can be especially well-suited for identifying escapes from human temporality, and can, at least momentarily, make visible the limitations of the ways in which we have domesticated time, lending a more nuanced and humble perspective to cultural temporalities and the environmental processes on which they depend. Whether through imaginative shifts in perspective, practical sociopolitical undertakings, or some combination of these, cultural and literary texts and practices can work to challenge (or to reinforce) the dominant hierarchies of time that legitimize unsustainable social practices. Ecocritical time studies can assist in such challenges by helping us to read culture with a critical awareness of the sites of temporal privilege that shape our understanding of human–ecological relations, taking on the problems of temporal discrimination, power, language, and diversity, as well as the need for temporal justice alongside social and environmental justice. Ecocritical time studies equips us to ask questions such as: How does time function as a form of power in social practices and human-ecological relations? How are the temporal factors of speed, delay, time limits, or short-term emphasis manipulated, and by whom? Does a particular text or practice envision a problematic distinction between the present and the future or between nature and culture? Does it account for the diverse temporalities that exist within and between human cultures and ecosystems? How might it shift our temporal perspectives? A critical understanding of our own place within our ecological and temporal contexts, and of the actions that we take within the times available to us, depends on the examination of temporal assumptions that is made possible through such critical readings. Footnotes I am indebted to Catriona Sandilands, Amanda Di Battista, and Ella Soper for encouraging and developing this article and for orchestrating the larger cluster of papers to which I am delighted to make a contribution. I am also grateful for the very useful anonymous review comments. 1 Northern Gateway itself was eventually approved—and then eventually overturned. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, which had taken power by this time, decided not to appeal the latter ruling (Tasker, “Ottawa Won’t Appeal”). And yet, just weeks after this decision, the Liberal government went on to approve the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline and the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline (Tasker, “Trudeau Cabinet Approves”). As for the short time limits for environmental assessments, an advisory panel to the federal Environment Minister concluded in April 2017 that the time limits were not working well (McDiarmid). Nevertheless, the battles over fast and slow continue in other forms. There is always another project, another controversy, another rush, another delay. 2 See also Daniel Gustav Anderson’s efforts to contextualize ecocriticism within natural and cultural histories. He seeks “to frame a theory of temporality that specifies the location of the ecocritic in time” (35). 3 See, for instance, Adam’s chapter “Perceptions of Time,” especially pages 509 and 519. 4 While Laurie Ricou notes that animal stories hold a position of historical significance within Canadian literature, he suggests that an emphasis on bioregions and ecosystems in literary and cultural studies would radically disrupt our understanding of the fields. “I hope to argue,” he writes, “the value of shifting ecocriticism’s dominating emphasis from place towards a system of animals and plants, water and soil. To do so will necessarily disturb the long-standing primacy of landscape-place in Canadian literary criticism” (161). My attempt to see time as a dominating emphasis might be understood, in some ways, as a complementary project. 5 While I focus on poetry here, fiction and other narrative forms can also adeptly question temporal assumptions. To offer just one example, the characters in Thomas Wharton’s novel Icefields learn to orient themselves around the slow activity of a glacier; as Pamela Banting writes, the narrative is one “in which a glacier is the dominant character and prime mover of events” (301). Works of historical fiction, a prominent form in Canadian literature, also frequently serve to question assumptions about the progression of time. In his study of Canadian historical novels, Herb Wyile notes that “speculative fiction is not an objective, detached, authentic glimpse into the future, but rather usually a very purposeful, subjective, and rhetorical extrapolation from present circumstances, and the same might be said of historical fiction. Except, of course, that it faces in the opposite direction” (xii). The temporalities of poetics, too, open up many possibilities beyond those addressed here. See, for instance, Robert Kroetsch’s work on the Canadian long poem. 6 Excerpt from “Bear Lament” from The Door by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 2007 by O.W. Toad. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company; McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited; and Little, Brown Book Group Limited. All rights reserved. 7 The classical notion that life on earth is divinely ordered within a permanent Great Chain of Being was gradually dismantled by such events as Georges Cuvier’s study of American mastodon fossils at the end of the eighteenth century, which helped bring about the notion of extinction (Kolbert 24), and later by Darwin’s insights into natural selection. Assumptions of stability in nature, though, continue to hold sway in other forms. As John Kricher explains, “The balance of nature paradigm is of little value within evolution and ecology. It has never been clearly defined and is basically misleading. But the balance of nature is esthetically satisfying, a fact that is largely responsible for its continued vigor through the ages” (23). 8 Amitav Ghosh’s thinking can illuminate the ideological nature of the domestication of time within narrative. He makes the point that the emergence of the novel as a literary form was in many ways characterized by “the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday” (17). An emphasis on the regularization of modern experience in the bourgeois novel thus reinforces the rationalization of everyday life, a process that “eventually pervades the sphere of free time, private life, entertainment, feelings” (19). Works Cited Adam Barbara. “Perceptions of Time.” Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture and Social Life. Ed. Ingold Tim . Routledge , 1994 . 503 – 26 . Adam Barbara. . Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards. Routledge , 1998 . 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Wyile Herb. Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History. McGill-Queen’s UP , 2002 . © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - Timely Ecocriticism: Reading Time Critically in the Environmental Humanities
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isy037
DA - 2018-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/timely-ecocriticism-reading-time-critically-in-the-environmental-fzaq470pyG
SP - 327
EP - 344
VL - 25
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -