Rush to nowhere: Richard Swift says it's time we slammed on the brakes - Keynote

New Internationalist, March, 2002 by Richard Swift

So the imposition of industrial time has had pride of place in the history of empire. The repetitive racist discourse about work-shirking 'natives' (slothful, unreliable, no sense of how to plan ahead) repeats the history of enclosure during the late Middle Ages in Europe, when work time was imposed on a reluctant agricultural population. The adoption of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 as the international standard shaped the first wave of the global economy. Local times and methods of telling time were swept away. The same process continues to this day. It became a condition of Mexico joining the North American Free Trade Agreement that it adopt Daylight Savings Time.

Some kind of standardized time-telling is obviously here to stay. But the obsession with 'saving' time through speed-up, frenetic living and the constant, neurotic measurement of nanoseconds is doing both human culture and the natural world a severe disservice. For what we lost when we pulled time out of nature was a respect for the natural rhythms and ecological balance on which we depend to survive. Our data-based culture has replaced contemplation and critical thought with a narrow, instrumental form of reasoning, no matter how it gets dressed up with cyber-babble about 'lateral thinking' or 'virtual intelligence'. Basic assumptions seldom make it to the table.

There is a different way to think about time -- not as a commodity but as a continuous flow. In his fascinating book Faster, The Acceleration of Almost Everything, James Gleick concludes that one should 'at least recognize that neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had. It is what you live in. You can drift in its currents, or you can swim.' (3)

The currents of time-gobbling turbo-capitalism are at the moment threatening to sweep us away as a species if we do not find a way of swimming against them. It is perhaps in their ecological consequences that this is felt most sharply. The unsustainable pace of development is based on the concept of 'mining' natural resources. Mining is quicker and provides bigger yields than the more careful process of sustainable cultivation. The consequences: collapsing fisheries, falling water tables, shrinking forests, eroding soils, dying lakes, crop-withering heat waves and species extinction. Mining transforms renewable resources into non-renewable ones.

A clear example can be seen in the sophisticated and wasteful trawler fleets that have so laid waste to the world's fish stocks that 13 out of the world's leading 15 fisheries are now in decline. More than a third of the global catch is simply dumped, dead, back into the ocean. (4) The way we use, and misuse, water provides plenty of other examples. The worldwide consumption of water has more than tripled since 1950. From the US Great Plains to the Punjab, aquifers have been drained to feed industrial agriculture and its unsustainable yields. In 1995, 92 per cent of the world had relative sufficiency in water, but this is projected to decline to 58 per cent by 2050, when two billion people will be living in a situation of water scarcity. (5) Conflict over water rights, particularly where it involves transborder rivers, is already acute and likely to increase.