Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 19

Even if our alarm clocks located us in a stream of historical continuity, they still wouldn’t connect us to biological or ecological time. Clocks ignore nature’s time—the slow time of geology and evolution, the long cycles of prairies and forests and oceans. When we plan our lives only by clock time, we forget nature’s rhythms and begin to assume that our time is the only time. Even though most natural rhythms are cyclical, Americans believe in linear progress with practically inevitable human improvement. In nature’s time, it’s progress when the sun comes up each morning, and progress again when it goes down; progress when spring sprouts every year, and once again when bright colors announce fall. In nature’s time, efficiency isn’t measured by speed, but by sustainability and regeneration—the ability to extend the extravagant generosity of life to another generation. When the human time line meets nature’s time circle, however, it increasingly results in extinctions, which are literally killing time for other species.

In nature’s time, minutes and seconds don’t mean much. We think we’re on time when we arrive at the appointed hour, but nature might think otherwise. It takes nature about five hundred years to make one inch of topsoil, so when we live in a way that depletes soil faster than that (and we do), we are not “on time,” no matter how fast or productive we might be. When we live in a way that threatens the ecosystem services that our descendants will need, we’re more out of time than on time.