Capitalism’s Bad Rhythm
It is easy to forget that time exists differently for people than it does for other species and ecosystems. (If you’re not following me, think about dog years. A human day is like a dog week; a human year is like 7 dog years.) It doesn’t help that our man-made economic systems are the most prevalent keepers of time today—and also the most destructive force on the planet.
For the sake of constant growth and profitability, our industries and technologies have changed time in ways that were once unimaginable. Because our economic systems depend on infinite growth, they also depend on a constantly increasing timescales.
Since our concept of time is currently built around capitalism, it makes sense that time would exist differently in industrial sacrifice zones—the unsightly epicenters of production. These are the places that corporations and governments have destroyed, places where long-existing natural processes and communities are disrupted for the sake of limitless progress and profits.
Capitalism’s control over time is hypervisible in Louisiana’s wetlands. The info-bite that Louisiana loses a football field of land every 100 minutes is too threadbare to sink in and too shocking to actually comprehend. So instead, let’s just say that Louisiana is losing land faster than almost any other place in the world.
In his book The Place with No Edge: An Intimate History of People, Technology, and the Mississippi River Delta, geographer Adam Mandelman points out that Louisiana “has experienced a rapid acceleration of geological time” at the hands of fossil fuel and petrochemical companies—specifically the 10,000 miles of canals they dredged across its wetlands.
The natural processes that built the Mississippi River delta over a 5,000 year period are being reversed by destructive industry practices on a timescale that defies comprehension—human or geological: “Deltaic abandonment, a physical process typically unfolding as a trickle of environmental change across thousands of years, became a flood as eight millennia of deltaic time was compressed into eight decades” (Mandelman).
These industries that decide the speed and size of modern life are destroying ecosystems with a speed and size that geographers refer to as eventful. Again, Mandelman, discussing Louisiana’s wetland destruction through canal dredging: “To recognize the eventfulness of technology is to recognize its potential to intervene in the world not only materially…but also temporally…What would normally appear to be deeply distinct mutually unintelligible time scales—a human lifetime, a deltaic lifetime, and a petroleum lifetime—collided and became sensible all at once, leaving the region’s inhabitants heartbroken” (128-130).
The climate crisis is unfolding within these colliding timescales, and industrial sacrifice zones are ground zero for these collisions.
Dredged oil and gas canals at Isle de Jean Charles in Terrebonne Parish, LA. December 2022.
Over and over fenceline and frontline communities are forced to straddle the boundary of destruction and restoration, of inhabitable and uninhabitable, of land and water. As the wetlands continue to disappear and industry continues to encroach, these communities—many of which lived harmoniously along the wetlands for centuries and even millennia—are put in more and more vulnerable positions. They grieve a landscape that is dying at a speed that should be geologically impossible.
For thousands of years, civilizations and human temporality existed alongside countless other ecosystems and timescales. In many ways, human survival depended on awareness of other organisms’ timescales. These timescales were separate but mostly harmonious; they were interconnected.
Today, the human timescale is largely disconnected from any other timescale on earth. In fact, our timescale is disconnected from humanity. Modern time isn’t designed around human beings anymore; it’s built around an abstraction, a political philosophy, an economic structure that must grow to survive, and that growth has always been dependent on ecological destruction and human misery. Once we started fueling these colonizing structures with hydrocarbons and high-speed-internet and AI, the speed of the human experience began outpacing what the human species can endure.
Just as our biosphere cannot keep up with the destructiveness of industry, our human evolution struggles to keep up with the current pace of life that industry created and now demands. In that way, the climate crisis is a societal arrhythmia. And the more out of sync we grow with the timescales around us, the more aware of it we will become.
