#chronodiversity

[makingcontact]

Jenny Odell and Discovering Life Beyond the Clock (Encore)

Excerpt from the book cover, reading “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock” superimposed on top of orange and pink geological features. Credit: Penguin Random House Have you ever really considered how we view time as a society? From work to leisure to appointments, we schedule every minute of our days, but how often do we think about why we treat time the way we do, our relationship…

[probablyasocialecologist]

Forest dieback means a decline in chronodiversity. This concept relates to biodiversity, or the variety of life on Earth, crudely measured as the number of species, or “species richness.” Conservation biologists make a precautionary assertion about that enumeration. They argue that safeguarding the maximum possible amount of genetic information created over millions of years of evolutionary history is wise and moral. The complement of species richness is temporal richness. The biosphere has further possibilities if it contains species of various evolutionary ages, species of various life strategies and life spans, and specimens of various ages within species. It is an ecological loss of doubled magnitude when a species-rich, age-rich rain forest becomes row upon row of monocultural, monochronic crops. Over the past two centuries, states and corporations—often working against local users and Indigenous activists—have divided the forested areas of the globe into binary zones: large industrial plantations of “ordinary” young trees and small inviolate preserves of “extraordinary” old trees. Before the awareness of anthropogenic climate change, preservation through segregation had its own logic—the logic of permanence. National groves were supposed to last forever. Now, in a time of fateful dynamism, these outdoor museums of olden trees may be doomed by their fixity.

[makingcontact]

Jenny Odell on Saving Time

Excerpt from the book cover, reading “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock” superimposed on top of orange and pink geological features. Credit: Penguin Random House On this week’s episode, we take a critical look at productivity culture and the idea that time is money by speaking with Jenny Odell, acclaimed author of Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock and How to Do…