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DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING; SIT THERE
TIME AND THE ENVIRONMENT
"No psychology is complete unless it explores our relationship with our natural environment, and no study of that relationship is complete unless it explores our experience of time"
by John Revington
Rainforest Information Centre, PO Box 368, Lismore NSW 2480, Australia
Email: rainfaus@mullum.com.au
Contents
A New Myth of the Fall
2.1 Death and Time
2.2 Humanity Out of Time
2.3 Compulsive Busyness
2.4. Consuming to Stay Busy
2.5 Doing vs Being
2.6 Not Another Thing To Do
2.7 The Infernal Combustion Motor
2.8 Time Management as Social Control
2.9 A Sense of Place Implies a Sense of Time
2.10 Time and Relationship
2.11 Entropy as Metaphor
2.12 Indigenous Views of Time
2.13 Time, Parenting, Education and Environment
2.14 The Pressure to Operate on "Someone Else's Clock"3.1 Our Paradoxical Relationship with the Future
3.2 The Future Wears New Clothes
3.3 Why?
3.4 Joanna Macy and the Nuclear Guardianship Programme
Introduction
No psychology is complete unless it explores our relationship with our natural environment, and no study of that relationship is complete unless it explores our experience of time.
In this paper I examine the connections between our relationship with time and the global environmental crisis.
My interest in the topic arose as a result of reading an article entitled "Time Pollution" by John Whitelegg. In concluding the article, he wrote:
Time is central to notions of sustainability ...a sustainable economy cannot be founded on principles which, through their monetarization of time, orientate society towards higher levels of motorization, faster speeds and greater consumption of space [Whitelegg 1993 p.134].
I began to think more widely about how our attitudes towards time, and our valuation of it, affect our behaviour in other areas of our lives.
I began to view our use of transport as just one example of the way in which our perception of time affects our relationship with the Earth. I looked at things such as work, human relationships, agriculture, possessions and education, keeping in mind the question, "How do attitudes to time affect this particular aspect of our relationship with the environment?".
It was an exciting process, and showed me how viewing issues with a new perspective can yield fresh insights and understandings. New ideas -- new to me, at least -- seemed to spring up whenever I investigated an area of human activity.
The idea of investigating this topic also appealed to me because of how busyness has affected my own life.
Until about ten years ago when I was in my early thirties, I never thought much about time. I took it for granted because there seemed to be plenty of it. But gradually, things changed. Inevitably, aging made me face the fact that I am moving inexorably through time towards the point when I will cease to exist. I have come to take more notice of time because there is not as much of it as I would like -- not for me, anyway. Or rather, not for the "me" whom I usually assume myself to be. It was this growing consciousness of my own mortality which moved me to write this short poem:
By the end of this line,
My death will be closer.
I thin towards the point
Of the wedge of possibilities
That seems to be my life,
And whatever line of hope
I cling to, or clings to me,
The point remains the same.
In addition to a changed attitude associated with aging, there was in me a growing unease about the global environmental situation. I came to feel that as a member of the species that has the power either to save or to destroy complex life on the Earth, I had a responsibility to become involved in environmental work. I began working at the Rainforest Information Centre (RIC), a Lismore-based environmental group working to protect Australia's and the world's rainforests. The level of activity at RIC was often feverish. Rainforests were disappearing at the rate of a football field a second, and frantic activity was the characteristic response.
My changed relationship with time was also influenced by my move from Brisbane to Bodhi Farm, a community of about 35 people on the north coast of New South Wales.
Bodhi Farm is situated on 160 acres of dense forest, about 30 kilometres from Lismore, the nearest large town. It was founded along Buddhist principles, and meditation continues to play an important role in the lives of many of its members.
From this description, Bodhi Farm may seem like a place of peaceful isolation, but this is not the case. I found that on Bodhi Farm, I was living with a group of people who were busier than any I had been associated with previously. Among the adult members of the community, there was a very keen awareness of the need for social change in our society, and there was a strong commitment to work towards achieving that change in many different fields. I was struck by how the resulting busyness affected people. It appeared to increase their levels of stress and diminish the amount of time they could spend with each other and with the land they lived on. And it involved a great deal of travelling to and from Lismore in motor cars.
I resolved that none of this would happen to me because I valued the freedom of having plenty of unstructured time. My sense of myself was closely connected with spending large amounts of time alone with nothing in particular to do. Yet, nine years after moving to Bodhi Farm, I now find that I am just as busy as everyone else. I find that I have too little time to myself, too little time to spend with loved ones, and too little time to spend on the wonderful piece of Earth that is my home.
At first I assumed that other people on Bodhi Farm would not have been so busy, if only the world had not been in such a sorry state. However, it has become clear to me that there are other forces at work. It is not just the desire to help a troubled world that drives people on Bodhi Farm to be busy. In many cases, there is a powerful compulsion to engage in a lot of activity, and this compulsion would be expressed in striving for some other goal if the current one were to be removed. I began to wonder why this was so, and I began to wonder how widespread this tendency was.
My interest in another aspect of our relationship with time -- our attitudes towards the future -- has also been kindled by personal experience. In my work as editor of RIC's quarterly journal, the World Rainforest Report, I am constantly bombarded with bad news about the state of the world. In particular, I have been struck by the number of warnings about the horrendous future we are creating for human beings and for all other species. The response to these warnings continually astounds me. It astounds me because it is so hopelessly inadequate. My astonishment increased when, three years ago, I became a father. My concern over the kind of world my son and his generation will inhabit weighs on my mind constantly. There are plenty of other parents in the world. Do they have the same fears? Are they doing something about the problem? There didn't seem to be much outward sign of it, though I believe a deep fear of the future lies below the surface for many people.
We put so much love and care into looking after the welfare of our children. We even think of their futures, in terms of how they will earn a living and whether they will brush their teeth regularly. Yet collectively, we do little about their environmental future. In fact, we busily undermine it by continuing to consume and pollute at unacceptable rates. I find this appalling, insane, and criminal in its negligence.
* * *
The first three sections of this paper deal in different ways with the past, present and future respectively. The first section on the past takes the form of a myth. Its primary purpose is not to give a historically accurate account of our civilisation, but to outline the problems I have identified in our relationship with time. I found that writing a new a myth was an effective way of illustrating my views. The second section deals with our relationship with time on a day-to-day basis, and how that relationship affects the Earth. In the third section I discuss our troubled relationship with the future.
Section Four is an account the research interviews which I conducted with four people on Bodhi Farm. The interviews focused on the issue of what motivates people in their decisions to be busy, and how their lives are affected by their levels of activity.
The fifth and concluding section I have called an "Inconclusion", since the idea of drawing conclusions seemed to be inappropriate. Given its emphasis on the dynamic nature of social research, this title should meet with the approval of the Social Ecology Department. In this section I outline other aspects of the topic which I believe could be areas of fruitful investigation. I also talk a little about my personal relationship with time and make some tentative suggestions about possible solutions to the problems I have identified.
* * *
I do not suggest that our attitudes to time can be singled out as the cause of all our problems. Nor am I suggesting that it would be possible to solve all our problems by changing our attitudes to time. Our relationship with time is interwoven with other aspects of our worldview in a complex fabric, in which it is not always possible to identify what is cause and what is effect. To isolate our valuation of time in the manner I have attempted here is possible on a theoretical level only.
If our attempt to isolate our attitudes to time from our other attitudes is possible only in theory, then the same can be said about the exercise of isolating individual responsibility from social responsibility for the present state of the world. I suspect that the interrelationships between individual values and cultural values are too complex to be analysed in detail. Consequently, definitive statements about whether change will come about as a result of alterations in the structure of society, or as a result of changing individual values, are difficult to justify. I deal with this issue further at the end of this paper.
I believe that examining our attitudes to time is worthwhile because it sheds light on the way we operate. By increasing our understanding of ourselves and our society, such an analysis can help us break free of the limitations which prevent us, individually and collectively, from leading lives which are both more fulfilling and more in harmony with our environment.
Attempts to understand the relationship of humans with their natural environment have given birth to the discipline of ecopsychology, Ecopsychology, says Theodore Roszak (1994 p.5), "proceeds from the assumption that at its deepest level, the psyche remains sympathetically bounded to the earth that mothered us into existence". No study of our bonds with the Earth is complete without a consideration of how we experience the passage of time.
My aim has been to examine how our attitudes to time influence our behaviour, and how those attitudes are linked to other factors which affect our actions. There emerged two main ways in which our values and perceptions of time affect our relationship with the Earth.
Firstly, there is a widespread compulsion among large numbers of people in industrialised countries to cram their lives with a great deal of activity. Much of this activity involves the consumption of too many natural resources to produce too many unneeded products. This may enrich us materially, but it impoverishes us in many other ways and it impoverishes the Earth. I believe this behaviour is an inevitable result of an unsatisfactory relationship with time in our society.
Secondly, we have an astounding disregard for the future. Repeated warnings from scientists and environmentalists about the consequences of our actions have had little effect. Economic growth and a burgeoning global population, the two basic causes of the ecological crisis, go largely unchecked.
So, excessive busyness and a disregard for the future are the most obvious ways in which time affects our relationship with the Earth. However, I came to feel that this was by no means the whole story. Our troubled relationship with time wounds our psyches on a very basic level, so that we are not truly at home in our lives, our bodies and our relationships. If we are not truly at home with ourselves and our world, how can we treat them with the respect and understanding they deserve? Our compulsive busyness and our disregard for the future are just the most obvious symptoms of our failure to do so.
Showing how these two symptoms pervade our society and our relationship with the Earth was fairly straightforward, but I found that uncovering and describing the deep psychic wounds that I believe affect our lives so deeply is a much more difficult challenge, and I have not done so as effectively as I would have liked.
Yet the threads of the story are there, and in my own life at least, my relationship with time will be a continuing challenge and area of exploration. A famous artist is reported as having said "If a picture is finished, that means it is dead". Neither the project, nor my own exploration feel finished. I hope that means there is life in them.
1. The Past:
A New Myth of the Fall
By studying archaeological and anthropological sources too numerous to mention, I have been able to discover how we reached our present state. I have chosen to reveal my discovery in the form of a myth. I don't quote my sources, but then neither do other better known but less accurate accounts of the Fall. One of the great things about writing a myth was that I felt I could get away with anything if it helped illustrate my point. And of course, myths achieve clarity through simplicity.
Thousands of years ago, before time began, our ancestors spent perhaps four hours a day gathering food and attending to their other needs. It was because their needs were not very great that it took so little time to satisfy them, and our ancestors were able to spend the rest of the time doing whatever they liked. They made love, played with their children or just hung around talking with one another.
They also spent hours simply gazing at flowers or watching ants and marvelling at their busyness. People spent days walking to the bus stop, and when they got there, they discovered buses hadn't been invented yet. But they didn't mind. They didn't feel their walk had been a waste of time because there was plenty to see and experience along the way.
"Nobody had a watch or a diary.Therefore, everyone was happy"
If the passage of time was noticed at all, it was recognised against the background of the changing seasons, the cycles in women's bodies or the aging of generations. The notion that time could have been divided into discrete segments of equal magnitude would have been incomprehensible. Nobody had a watch or a diary. Therefore, everyone was happy. Everything was as it should be.
And then, one day, something terrible happened. One of our ancestors got bored. Let us assume it was a man, since men like to decide which events in our history are the important ones, and then claim responsibility for them. It would be interesting to know why he got bored. Perhaps he felt guilty about something, or angry, and so he found it unpleasant to be alone with his thoughts. Perhaps he had been banished from his tribe and had no-one to talk to. Whatever the reason, he felt bored. In need of stimulation.
He began rubbing two sticks together. They got warm. He rubbed faster. They got hot. Intrigued, he rubbed even faster, until one of the sticks began to glow.
The rest, of course, is history. In fact, history began with the Rubbing Together of the Two Sticks. History requires time and time requires change. Not the unchanging, cyclical change that our ancestors experienced prior to the Rubbing of the Sticks, but big, irrevocable changes that altered forever the lives of human beings and all that they touched.
Our Ancestor of the Two Sticks ended up creating fires that raged out of control, burning vast tracts of forest and consuming many of his fellow creatures in the process. Despite this, our ancestor liked what he had created. Because he could make fire and the other creatures couldn't, he felt separate from and better than all the creatures he had destroyed. And for a while at least, making fires was a welcome distraction from the boredom he felt.
He convinced his tribe that they could not do without fire. They began to spend a lot of time collecting wood, rubbing sticks together and cooking food they had previously been happy to eat raw.
Some time later, no-one knows how much later -- maybe a week or two, or a few thousand years, another of our ancestors got bored. Let us assume it was a man, since even if it had been a woman, there was bound to have been a man around to claim the credit. He rolled a log down a hill, did a bit of thinking about the implications of that, and history began rolling downhill even faster.
"Out of boredom, civilisation was born.
Through the fear of boredom, civilisation is maintained.
Civilisation is waging a war against the Earth
and nothing is safe or sacred any more "
He convinced his tribe that they could not do without wheels. People found ways of using wheels to get from one place to another much more rapidly. And once they could do so, they invented very compelling reasons for why they should spend their time moving rapidly from place to place. They began to live further apart so they would have an excuse to travel greater distances in order to visit each other.
People's lives changed utterly, and in their confusion, they came to see these two bored ancestors of theirs as geniuses and heroes. In fact, they were villains. The Earth and all its inhabitants continue to suffer as a result of their villainy.
Out of boredom, civilisation was born. Through the fear of boredom, civilisation is maintained. Civilisation is waging a war against the Earth and nothing is safe or sacred any more.
With the advent of civilisation, people no longer spent just four hours a day providing for their needs. No longer did they spend their days playing with their kids, making love and talking to one another.
Kids got sent off to other people who were paid by the hour to look after them. It was reported that people made love less frequently because they were too busy, too tired or had stress-related headaches. When they did make love, it was usually all over in a couple of minutes. Because they no longer spent much time relating with others on an intimate level, their relationships became awkward and unfulfilling, so people developed strategies to minimise their intimacy with others. One of the more common strategies was for people to ask each other, "how are you?", without waiting long enough to hear the answer.
Instead of looking at flowers, they picked them and stuck them in vases, telling themselves they would look at them when they weren't so busy. Instead of looking at ants, they tried to outdo them in busyness. To describe this busyness, they used the four-letter word, "work".
Instead of walking to the bus stop, people bought cars. They needed cars so they could drive to work. They needed to work so they could afford the cars they drove to work in. They couldn't walk to work because they didn't have time, which is why they had to have cars, which is why they had to work. Get the picture?
Once people had cars, no-one lived in one place for very long. After a few years in one place, the average human packed their bags and moved on. This meant they didn't have to care for the land they lived on, because they knew if they stuffed it up, they could always move somewhere else. The term, "a sense of place" was invented to describe what they had lost.
When people thought of the future, they no longer saw that future as being inseparable from the future of the place where they lived. Because their future was no longer tied up with the future of a particular piece of Earth, they no longer realised that their future was inextricably linked with the future of the Earth.
Busyness became the norm. People who were engaged in constant and frantic activity no longer saw themselves as busy because there was no one who wasn't busy for them to compare themselves to. And because people were so busy, they didn't have time to stop and wonder why they were so busy.
2. The Present
In this section I examine our view of time and some of the forces which have shaped it. I also explore how our views of time influence our behaviour, and how that behaviour affects the Earth.
2.1 Death and Time
The awareness of death is crucial to our experience of time. Perhaps time would still be said to exist if we were immortal, but it would mean something very different to us.
Because we all know that we will die, time comes to be seen as a scarce commodity which has to be spent wisely. Several months ago, my two-and-a-half-year-old son Tane and I found a dead mouse. Together, we dug a tiny hole in the Earth, placed the mouse in it, and covered it with soil. Then we sat quietly for a while and I told Tane how "the worms" would eat the mouse and pieces of it would be in all the plants and the other animals. It didn't seem to make much of an impression on him at the time, but a few days later he told me very insistently that the mouse had got better, climbed out of the hole and trotted back to its house. The experience had affected him more deeply than I had thought.
A little boy's first contact with death, and the start of a process which will lead to the realisation that he, too will die.
Tane's arrival in my life brought me face to face with my own mortality. When he was born, I was nearly forty. I had made a conscious choice not to have children, and fatherhood seemed like a terrible burden. Like a fifteen-year-plus jail sentence, with no time off for good behaviour. When Tane is fifteen, I will be fifty-four, and what seemed like precious years of opportunity will have been spent rearing Tane rather than doing the things I felt were so important. If I was not going to die, my years would stretch on endlessly and being a father would not prevent me doing anything else. Fatherhood would then be an unmitigated joy which did not limit me in any way.
Perhaps my age at the time of his birth meant that the impact of the experience was greater. Darryl Reanney points out that "the realisation that death is the inescapable end of life becomes particularly acute in the mid-life phase of the modern life-cycle" (Reanney 1991 p.135).
I believe that almost all human beings struggle against the bare fact of their own mortality and I believe this inner struggle is mirrored in their treatment of the Earth. In their efforts to "make the most" of the finite time available to them, many people react by trying to cram as much activity as possible into their days, and much of that activity is harmful to the Earth.
The Buddha told a parable about a man who, chased by a tiger, was forced to hang by a vine over a cliff. Below him, another tiger waited to devour him if he fell. A mouse began to gnaw at the vine which kept him from falling. The man reached out and plucked a strawberry which grew nearby. How sweet it tasted!
Modern humans are like the dangling man, except that while we are hanging on the vine, we spend our time frantically treading air in an effort to deny the existence of the nibbling mouse and the hungry tiger. We never truly appreciate the strawberries.
Darryl Reanney sees the failure of industrialised humans to come to terms with their own mortality as being a root cause of much of their self-destructive behaviour:
Far from facing death, the contemporary mind denies the existence of the problem, displacing activity into side-issues and self-gratification. At the core of the psyche, there is now an emptiness, a 'gap at the centre' disguising the bottled genie that is the cause of so much of the modern angst [Reanney 1991 p.135].
2.2 Humanity Out of Time
Whether or not a failure to accept our mortality is the underlying reason for it, there is something dysfunctional about the way most of us experience the passage of time. As Alan Durning (1994 p.73) points out, "the more people value time -- and therefore try to save it -- the less able we are to relax and enjoy it". We are like musical instruments that insist on playing faster than the rest of the orchestra.
"Speed and haste", says Joanna Macy, "...are inherently violent" (Macy 1991 p.211). By operating at speeds which are too fast for vital aspects of our lives to unfold naturally, we do violence to ourselves. By doing violence to ourselves, we blind ourselves to the violence we do to the Earth.
We move too quickly to allow our emotions the space they need to unfold. We move too quickly to allow the time it takes to nurture one another. By moving too quickly, we cut ourselves off from our relationship with the Earth. The more I am cut off from another person, the less I will understand or care about how my actions affect her. The more I am cut off from the natural world, the less I will understand or care about how my actions affect it.
As a quotation used at the start of this paper points out: "Dialogue with nature cannot be rushed. It will be governed by cycles of day and right, the seasons, the pace of procreation, and by the larger rhythm of evolutionary and geologic time" (Orr 1992 Chapter 5). When we are out of touch with those cycles, true dialogue is not possible. Without "dialogue with nature", we become estranged from the processes which make our existence possible, and just as alienation among people breeds discord, alienation of humans from their environment promotes abuse.
In the 1972 movie Zaccharia, a young gunfighter's Whitman-like mentor urges him to slow down. "In my business", protests the young man, "slowing down can be fatal". The older man's response: "Then hurry up and die. Hurry up and die".
Joanna Macy talks about modern humans being "out of sync" with the natural world, and of a need to "reinhabit time". It could be said that by failing to inhabit time, we fall to truly inhabit the Earth. We are not really at home in our bodies. We are out of touch with their rhythms and constantly thinking about what we will do, or should have done rather than about what we are doing. An essential step to rectifying this situation, says Macy, is "reinhabiting time" which involves being at ease with what we are doing. Macy talks about how for her, a changed perspective of time resulted in observable physical changes. Her pulse rate slowed and her breathing became more relaxed (Macy 1993 p.234).
In one way, the view I have described here may seem like a pessimistic one. In another it is extremely optimistic because it recognises the enormous potential of human beings to lead lives which are far more fulfilling from the ones most of us presently experience.
2.3 Compulsive Busyness
Isabella Conti (Montouri and Conti 1993 p.128), took time off from her busy working life as a psychologist to cruise the South Pacific on a yacht. At first, she writes, "I thoroughly enjoyed the slow pace and the minimal demands on my schedule". After a time, however, she became depressed.
She was in this depressed state when she met Tom, a 75 year-old man who for a quarter of a century had lived by himself on a deserted island. Conti estimated that Tom "could easily have exhausted what he needed to do in half a day and spent the rest of the time in complete leisure", yet he was so busy that he barely had time for a brief conversation with her. One of the tasks he set himself was to spend two hours a day shovelling sand on the beach so that the view he saw in the evening was more pleasing to him.
"In a flash", writes Conti, she understood that Tom "escaped depression" by keeping busy with tasks he was good at. "Tom taught me that leisure only has meaning in the context of work, and only when the balance is in favour of work".
Conti apparently felt she needed to look no further for the source of her depression: she was depressed, she felt, because she hadn't been busy. This seems an unsatisfactory place to have ended her enquiry, and it leaves me with many unanswered questions: Why should a leisurely pace, with few set tasks, make a person depressed? If she had used the opportunity to look more deeply at her own inner processes, would she have encountered a more fundamental reason? Was she avoiding something? Why don't Buddhist monks who spend up to twenty hours a day sitting still become extremely depressed? Do we really have to alter the face of the Earth by shovelling sand for hours every day in order to avoid depression? Was it just Conti's twentieth century conditioning that made inactivity hard to take?
Whatever the answers in Conti's case, I believe that many people manufacture busyness in order to avoid having unstructured time, and that this behaviour is closely linked to our excessive consumption levels. This is not always the case, however. There are many people, particularly in low-income families, who do not have much choice about how busy they are. Society has arranged things so that in order to pay education, health, transport and housing expenses, low-income families need as much work as they can get.
It is important to realise , though, that their plight comes about not as a result of an overall shortage, but because the wealth in society is unfairly distributed. The overall surfeit of material goods in western industrial societies is undeniable. Harvard University economist Juliet Schor makes the situation clear:
Since 1948, the level of productivity of the US worker has doubled. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living in less than half the time. Every time productivity increases, we are presented with the possibility of either more free time or more money. We could have chosen the four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or every worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off -- with pay [quoted in Duming 1994 p.73].
2.4. Consuming to Stay Busy
Many people in industrialised countries work long hours producing vast quantities of consumer goods. A common belief is that the reason they work long hours is so that they can acquire more possessions. While this is to some extent true, I believe it is also true that people use the acquisition of material possessions as an excuse to be busy. For reasons I explain below, I believe that rather than being busy so they can consume, they consume so they have an excuse to be busy.
If the word "procrastination" means doing nothing in order to avoid action, then perhaps there should be a word for doing too much in order to avoid doing nothing.
It appears to me that having large amounts of time without specific activities to fill them is seen as something to be avoided and that having large quantities of unstructured time is for many people an unpleasant experience. My research interviews explore this issue further.
Stephan Rechtsaffen sees the origins of this aversion in the differences between thought and emotion:
The pace of our lives has created a chasm between our emotions and our thoughts, which operate at different speeds. Thoughts are processed electrically, communicating faster than our emotions, which are hormonal and chemical (Rechtsaffen 1994 p.64).
Our lives demand rapid thoughts, but leave no time for the slower process of experiencing our emotions fully. Consequently, says Rechtsaffen, we repress our emotions. They don't disappear, however:
"The moment we begin to slow down, they come flooding back and we begin to feel again" (ibid). Commonly, it is uncomfortable emotions like anger, anxiety or guilt at being inactive, that people experience when they begin to slow down. For this reason, slowing down is something people avoid by staying busy.
2.5 Doing vs Being
In a worldview where the individual is paramount, time becomes a major preoccupation because the individual is limited in time. Because the individual and her needs are considered so important, she comes to see her effective use of the limited time available to her as being of great moment.
Time, in this worldview, becomes a commodity. According to Ivan Illich, a new attitude towards time arose in Europe in the seventeenth century and helped prepare the ground for the industrial revolution.
Time became like money. I now can have a few short hours before lunch; how shall I spend time?...I am short of time so I can't afford to spend that much time on a committee; it's not worth the time!... it would be a waste of time; I'd rather save an hour [Illich 1973 p.44].
Making the most of the time available is equated with doing as much as possible, because our society values doing rather than being. "Doing" means acting on the world. Acting on the world means changing it in some way, and that generally means consuming.
"The best thing we can do for rainforests is to leave them, and the indigenous people who live in them, alone"
For example, the best thing we can do for rainforests is to leave them, and the indigenous people who inhabit them, alone. Ecosystems are quite capable of looking after themselves and did so successfully for thousands upon thousands of years until they were disturbed by ecologically destructive humans. Human interference does not solve problems -- human interference is the problem.
However, our preoccupation with doing leads us to think that in order to "save" rainforests, we need to do something, to take some action, spend money, initiate large-scale projects. Once we are told that billions of dollars are being invested in projects to save the forests, we feel comforted. We lose sight of the fact that large-scale development is the source of the problems that we are trying to solve with large-scale development.
To use another more pervasive example, the way we use transport systems implies a clear desire to fill up our time with activity. It would seem reasonable to assume that the availability of faster means of transport, such a buses and automobiles, would mean that people would have more free time available. If I lived three kilometres from the nearest shop, walking there and back may take me an hour. Going by car may take me ten minutes, leaving me fifty minutes more free time. However, according to John Whitelegg, when people travel faster, they "still work, sleep and play in the same proportions as always. They simply do these things further apart from each other" (Whitelegg 1993 p.131). Rather than spend less time travelling once I have a car, I will probably travel further. In stead of going to the shop three kilometres away, I will travel twenty kilometres to a shopping centre. In this way, the unwelcome possibility of having more unstructured time is avoided.
This means higher levels of consumption because I will have to spend time earning money to buy, register and maintain my car, and to keep it full of petrol. This also requires more time consumption, and if these factors are taken into account, it becomes evident that owning a car actually means that people have less free time than they would have if they did not own a car. Seifried (quoted by Whitelegg) uses the term 'social speed' for an indicator which compares the time taken to travel one kilometre using different means of transport when the above "hidden costs", plus environmental factors, are taken into account. The average social speed for a typical cyclist, says Seifried, is about 14 km/h. The social speed for the driver of a typical small car would be 13 km/h, even when the car travels at an average speed of 40 km/h, nearly three times as fast as the cyclist (ibid p.132).
More evidence of an addiction to busyness can be seen in the failure of greater mechanisation to reduce working hours. In 1959, in the Saturday Evening Post, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr. voiced his concern at what he saw as a forthcoming "age of leisure" as productivity increased with mechanisation. Thirty six years later, the work hours of most people have not declined as productivity increased. Instead, a large class of unemployed has been created in most industrialised countries -- and few of them rejoice in their large amounts of free time. In most cases, unemployed people would gladly exchange their free time for employment and a greater ability to consume. "Instead of viewing progress as a means of transcending work", writes labour historian Benjamin Hunnicut, "Americans now view work as an end in itself-- the more of it, the better" (quoted in Baldwin, 1994 p.52). The situation in Australia and other industrialised countries differs only in degree.
Of course, we are influenced by the speed at which those around us are working. People who choose to be significantly less busy than most other people are likely to feel judged and isolated. The fact that so many people behave in a particular way means that that behaviour is likely to be accepted without question.
In some cases, striving to produce as much as possible in the time available even works against the achievement of that pillar of capitalism, the maximisation of profit. This is despite the fact that maximising profit is the avowed reason for trying to maximise output.
One example of this is to be found in a fascinating article on the Amish religious sect in the United States. Gene Logsdon, a non-Amish farmer in Ohio says "Amish farmers are still making money in these hard times despite (or rather because of) their supposedly outmoded, horse-farming ways. If one of them does get into financial jeopardy, it is most often from listening to the promises of modern agribusiness instead of traditional wisdom". (Logsdon 1986 p.74). Many non-Amish farmers on comparable land, using expensive machinery and chemical inputs, have struggled to survive. Amish farming, says Logsdon, "is better than expert farming by about $150 and acre" (ibid p.76).
"It's better for men to do something stupid than to do nothing at all"
One may be inclined to assume this means the Amish work rather hard, given that they use horses instead of tractors and other machinery, but Logsdon says the Amish "do not work as hard, physically, as I did when my father and I were milking 100 cows with all the modern conveniences" (ibid p.76).
One Amish farmer, who belonged to a group that had allowed its members to use tractors in its fields, reported "I'm going back to horses. They're more profitable". A baseball team which Logsdon managed played a game against an Amish team. Some of the non-Amish farmers could not afford to take the time off from their work to play in the game. The Amish, however, "with their slow, centuries-old methods, had plenty of time" (ibid p.76). The Amish would probably agree with E.F. Schumacker, who claimed that "the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs" (quoted in Durning, 1994 p.73).
It is probably no coincidence that the Amish community spent a lot of time in social gatherings. Because they valued their relationships with one another, they made time for them. Because they put time and effort into them, their relationships were healthy and fulfilling (Logsdon 1986).
Traditionally in western cultures, men have been seen as more involved in doing, while women have been seen as being. As Australian author Tim Winton put it on the ABC Radio National's "Life Matters" Programme (August 14 1995), "It's better for men to do something stupid than to do nothing at all". Traditionally, men have gone out to work, while women looked after children and the home.
Feminism has altered the way in which gender affects an individual's relationship with time, but as Winton pointed out in the programme mentioned above: "I don't think feminism has changed the way we treat our little boys. We still somehow expect them to act instead of to be". Instead of males being encouraged to be more like women in this respect, women are now expected to be active in the world in the same way as men. Consequently, men are still not much involved in parenting, and both men and women are left with less free time. Changing this situation, said Winton, would probably involve accepting lower levels of consumption. It seems that an opportunity for more equitable gender balance in our time use has been missed.
2.6 Not Another Thing To Do
Rather than "waste" time by repairing damaged goods, we waste the Earth by buying new products to replace them. Rather than "waste" time by making one thing properly, we waste the Earth by making a lot of things shoddily. Rather than "waste" time by walking or cycling, we waste the Earth by driving a car. So long as we have attitudes such as these, fundamental and lasting change will be difficult. Given the predominant values of our culture, it is inevitable that such trade-offs will continue to occur.
To an individual or society that has a concern for its environment, but does not want to alter its outlook in any basic way, "looking after the environment" can be viewed as another activity to be fitted into the limited time available. Viewed in this way, "caring for the environment" will inevitably be given a priority and, compared in importance to all the other activities that have to be fitted in.
However "looking after the environment" is not one more thing we have to add to our list of chores, like mowing the lawn, doing the shopping or putting the cat out at night. Essentially it is not a matter of doing some particular thing. It is a matter of a basic change in attitudes and ways of viewing the world -- a change in relationship. To see it as one more thing that needs to be taken care of is to reinforce the fragmentation in our lives and is a product of our obsession with doing rather than being. Fragmented perception is inappropriate because ecological awareness is something which should inform everything we do. A deeper ecological awareness affects how we are in the world, not just what we do when we take bottles and paper to the recycling depot.
So unless there is a basic change to a worldview which integrates ecological thinking with all aspects of life, there will always be a conflict between environmental concerns and what is seen as self-interest. Unless this change in worldview occurs, we will continue to see "looking after the environment" as an unwelcome demand on our time.
2.7 The Infernal Combustion Motor and the Environment
Few would deny the link between consumption levels and the onslaught against the environment. However, the links between our valuation of time and overconsumption are not as obvious. I have examined some of them above, but the case of our use of private cars deserves more attention.
The connection between time valuation and the perceived need for more roads and private cars is in some cases quite explicit. In the United Kingdom, "every working motorist's minute is presently assumed to be worth 18.6 pence" by the Department ofTransport (Fairlie 1995 p.135). The Department's cost-benefit analyses, on which their decisions to build new roads are based, are calculated accordingly.
In our attempts to "save" time by using more rapid means of transport, we increase the consumption of metal, petrol, rubber, plastic, bitumen, gravel, lead, asbestos, oxygen and other materials. Through the consequent need for expressways, we consume vast amounts of space -- much of it previously wilderness.
Our addiction to speed has destroyed the cohesiveness of local communities. The number of neighbours that an individual relates with diminishes with the speed of the traffic in her street (Whitelegg 1993 p.133).
Of course it is not fair to be so one-sided. To get a balanced view of the impact of cars on our lives, we have to look at what they produce, not just what they consume. Cars produce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, lead and other pollutants in the atmosphere, millions upon millions of tyres that no one knows what to do with, millions of tons of wasted metal, Car accidents produce millions of corpses and crippled bodies.
Not all the effects of our addiction to the motor car are as direct. Without private cars, the global economy would be completely different. Many people have jobs primarily so that they can afford cars. Without the purchase of new cars by large numbers of people, the economic growth considered so essential to our wellbeing could not be sustained.
The number of new cars sold in a given period is used as an indication of the "health" of the economy. Perhaps in the future, ecological indicators will receive as much attention as economic indicators get at present. Perhaps car sales will come to be seen as an indicator of environmental ill-health.
2.8 Time Management as Social Control
Techniques of time management are a response to a problem faced by many people in our society
--they have too much to do in the limited time available. Much of what is written on the subject does not address the question of why so many people engage in more activity than they have time for. Instead, it focuses on more efficient use of time in order to maximise the amount that gets done.
For this reason, time management can be seen as an instrument for social control. The option of doing less is not considered. The dominant values which cause the problem go unquestioned. The aim is to increase efficiency so that people can do all the things they set out to do. While this may reduce stress to some extent, it is unlikely to slow the pace of people's lives.
Rather than address the underlying problem, the aim is to make the problem more bearable. In this approach, if an individual is unable to cope with the demands on their time, then they are held responsible. The possibility that excessive demands are being made on that person are not considered. As a result, the level of activity is not reduced and compulsive busyness, with all its attendant environmental consequences, remains.
In his assessment of what has been written on the subject, Stephen Covey recognises the personal and social -- though not the environmental -- costs of conventional approaches to time management; "The efficiency focus creates expectations that clash with the opportunities to develop rich relationships, to meet human needs, and to enjoy spontaneous moments on a daily basis" (Covey 1990 p.150).
Covey identifies an "emerging fourth generation" of theory which recognises that "'time management is really a misnomer -- the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves" (ibid p.150). The focus of this "fourth generation" thinking, says Covey, is not "things and time" but "relationships and results". That's great as far as it goes.
Covey emphasises the need for basic paradigm shifts if we want to make basic changes in our lives.
This is a potentially revolutionary approach. Coupled with his emphasis on relationships and interdependence, a fundamental questioning of our values could have positive and far reaching impacts. However, in his book, Covey himself does not question basic values such as maximising profit, economic growth and consumerism. There is no mention of what effect current values are having on environmental issues. Without the consideration of the ecological impact of all that we do, the paradigm shifts which Covey calls for will leave our environmental vandalism unchanged. Without such questioning, Covey's methods are like all the rest. The may make the ride more pleasant, but the destination is the same.
Related to this is the treatment for stress in our society. Often, this involves the use of tranquillisers, but even when natural relaxation methods are used, the cause of the problem is often ignored. Paul Wilson wrote The Calm Technique during the 1980s. It offered readers a technique to enable them to relax through meditation. Although it was successful, he felt that the book was not reaching the people who needed it most. His concern was for those who felt they could not afford to spare the half hour a day he recommended for the practices in The Calm Technique.
It is for these people that Wilson has now written Instant Calm. "Unashamedly", he declares, "this is a book of quick fix solutions" (Wilson 1995 p.3). It describes numerous techniques designed to provide immediate relaxation.
'While his new book may be of benefit to many people, it makes no attempt to attack the root causes of the tension they feel. The busyness that makes people unwilling to devote half an hour to relaxation is probably a prime reason for their need to relax. Techniques of "instant" relaxation are therefore likely to be band-aid solutions which merely enable the continuation of the lifestyle that is creating the problems in the first place. The fact that Wilson encountered many people who acknowledged their need to relax, yet were unwilling to devote half an hour a day to doing so, shows that tension is a problem of disturbing proportions, that it is closely linked to excessive busyness, and that many people are more attached to their busyness than to their health.
2.9 A Sense of Place Implies a Sense of Time
While thinking about how developing a "sense of place" affects one's sense of time, I remembered reading somewhere the following story about poet and environmentalist Gary Snyder. He was once involved in trying to stop a development which would have degraded the region in which he lived. "Don't fight it. Just go with the flow", a friend jokingly told him. "You're talking about the ten-year flow", responded Snyder. "I'm going with the ten-thousand-year flow". Snyder has written and spoken a lot about the importance of a "sense of place", and it is no coincidence that he also has a very different sense of time to most people in our culture.
Snyder had this to say about how a Sense of Place affects the way one treats the land one lives on:
Living within the terms of an ecosystem, out of self-interest if nothing else, you are careful. You don't destroy the soils, you don't kill all the game, you don't log it off and let the water wash the soil away. Biosphere cultures are the cultures that begin with early civilisation and the centralized state. They are cultures which spread their economic support system out far enough so that they can afford to wreck one ecosystem and keep moving on [Snyder 1977].
The concept of a sense of place has received a lot of attention from bioregionalists and other environmentalists. It has to do with the strengthening of one's identification with the land one lives on. It is seen as the regaining of something humans once took for granted but have lost in modern society.
Through developing love and concern for one's own land, the idea goes, one will be moved to treat it in ways which nurture it rather than exploit it. If all sites were sacred to someone, perhaps all sites would be preserved.
Developing a sense of place has direct arid basic implications for one's sense of time. A sense of place leads one inevitably to think of the past of that place -- and, more importantly, of its future. If I am twenty years old and see my future as being inextricably connected with the place where I live, I will have a deep concern for the welfare of that place twenty, forty, sixty years from now. If I have children, I will be concerned about its welfare one hundred years from now. If I come to love that place -- and intimate connection with it over a long period makes that likely, then I will have a deep identification with the welfare of that land five hundred or a thousand years from now. I will think in terms of my children's children and their children, living on that land with the same love and respect. When I die, being buried on that land will seem like returning home.
In a society where people move to a different home every five years on the average (Hillman and Ventura 1994 p.175), there is no possibility of such a deep connection developing. The frantic pace of the present has deprived us of the future.
2.10 Time and Relationship
What does it mean to just be? As Krishnamurti expressed it, "to be is to be related". One cannot exist without existing in relation to the people, creatures and objects in one's environment. In our culture, much time is spent pretending we are not related. We try to isolate ourselves from our environment and from each other. And one of the ways we do this is by being busy.
The compulsion to be perpetually acting in the world works against relationships being a priority because relating is more akin to being than to doing. True relating requires a certain passivity because it involves hearing and understanding others as well as being heard and understood. This is counter to the usual idea of doing things, which implies acting on the world.
In addition, for relationships to be fulfilling, unhurried periods of time are needed. If a relationship is to be worthwhile, it will probably require not just an exchange of factual information, but interaction on an emotional level as well. As discussed above, emotions proceed far more slowly than thoughts, and so limiting the time available for a relationship is likely to impoverish it by stifling its emotional content.
Alan Durning points out that:
Members of the consumer class enjoy a level of personal independence unprecedented in human history, yet hand in hand comes a decline in our attachments to each other. Informal visits between neighbours and friends, family conversation and time spent at family meals have all diminished in the United States since mid-century {Durning 1994 p.72].
This impoverishment has occurred in our relations with our non-human environment as well as our social one. The pace of meaningful relationship with nature will, as David Orr puts it, be determined by "cycles of day and night, the seasons, the pace of procreation, and by the larger rhythm of evolutionary and geologic time" (Orr 1992 Chapter 5).
So in general, the busier I am, the poorer the quality of my relationships, both human and non human. The less attractive my relationships, the less attractive the idea of spending time involved in them. In other words, the less I relate, the less I will want to relate. This means I will be more likely to pursue leisure activities which do not involve much interacting with others. This may in part explain why in 1985, the average American spent about 40% of her leisure time watching television (Baldwin 1994).
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