Natural Time – Cassidy Puhlick

Natural Time is a form of subjective time that organisms experience in relation to their environment and occurrences from nature, as well as the body’s natural rhythms. Its opposite is clock time, which is less subjective and is determined by the mechanical ticking of clocks. Forms of natural time include the body’s circadian rhythms, the rise and fall of the sun, the changing of seasons, menstruation cycles, lunar phases, all signs of growth and change in the natural environment or within our bodies. Indigenous societies across the world would use natural time to track harvesting seasons. However, due to colonization, the concept of man-made time became the norm since natural time was more irregular and the process of industrialization required more regularity in time for the purpose of productivity. A key consequence of this is that our understanding of environmental phenomena such as climate change is now painted by the lens of clock-time. This is posing new challenges because we are trying to understand the climate crisis on a time scale that is regular and has metrics to it, but climate change is unpredictable and better measured using natural time. Another characteristic of natural time is its flexibility. Rather than assigning a certain minute to each passing moment of the day, as is done with clock time, natural time breaks apart the day using terms such as “daybreak,” “sunset,” or “dusk.” This means that natural time is dynamic and will change with the seasons. Clock time would argue that the sun will rise and set at different “times” per day, but with natural time, the sun will simply just rise and set.

References:

Zadeh, Joe. “The Tyranny of Time.” NOEMA, Berggruen Institute, 3 June 2021, www.noemamag.com/the-tyranny-of-time/.