Essay: Don't Just Do Something; Sit There – By John Revington

By John Revington. Originally published by the Rainforest Information Centre; republished here with permission.

Publication date not stated on the original page; estimated from internal references (the author notes writing “nine years after moving to Bodhi Farm” in 1986).

TIME AND THE ENVIRONMENT

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”

Introduction

The Past:

A New Myth of the Fall

The Present

The Future

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

Research
Inconclusion

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.

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).

2.11 Entropy as Metaphor

‘‘A society’s conception of time” write Suzuki and Knudtson in their book, Wisdom of the Elders, “is one of the pillars of its worldview”. The way a society views the passage of time, they point out, “plays a crucial role in shaping their relationship with the natural world” (Suzuki and Knudtson 1992 p.142).

It is a common perception that the industrialised West views time as being like an arrow, whereas indigenous cultures are commonly believed to view time as being more akin to a circle or a spiral.

It is clear that Western society does indeed view time as moving in a straight line. In this scheme of things, once we have passed a point on the line, we never return to it.

Our view of history and evolution conforms to this linear approach. For most of this century at least, advances in technology have helped promote the view that humanity has moved through the various stages of its evolutionary journey to the present along a straight, upwardly sloping line of progress. Developments in the last quarter of the century must have caused many people in the West to question this way of viewing human history, but a clear cut substitute for this view is yet to emerge.

Judeo-Christian cosmology, in which people do not remain on Earth when they die, but go instead to an unchanging heaven or hell for all eternity, is also consistent with this linear view of time. A belief in reincarnation would not fit so easily.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, also referred to as the entropy law, supports the view of time as an arrow. This law states that the universe is moving towards a homogeneous state in which no part possesses more energy than any other part. This means that the universe is “winding down”. At some time in the future, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us, the universe will come to an end because no differences will exist any more.

Edward Goldsmith in his book, The Way (Goldsmith 1992 pp.382-391), questions the applicability of this law to the universe as a whole. He describes the universe as an open system, since it has no identifiable limits. Goldsmith believes it is a mistake to assume that the universe as a whole will behave in the same way as closed systems such as steam in the boiler of a locomotive or hot air in a closed receptacle. It was the observation of closed systems such as these that lead to the formulation of the entropy law, and Goldsmith suggests that its more general application was accepted by scientists only because by doing so, a shortcoming in the Newtonian worldview was addressed.

Events in a world of billiard balls may be reversible, but once you burn a tree to ashes, you can’t reverse the process, and there was nothing in Newtonian physics to explain why. The Second Law of Thermodynamics appeared to provide this missing explanation, and so, says Goldsmith, it was accepted against all logic.

If one believes, as I do, that science is a collection of metaphors which reveal as much about their creators as they do about the “real world”, then the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be seen as a symbolic representation of our view of the universe – in much the same way that the Dreamtime stories of Aborigines are an expression of how they see the world. Viewed in this way, the entropy law symbolises and reinforces our view of time as a straight line with a beginning and an end.

Let us return to the assertion by Suzuki and Knudtson that a culture’s view of time plays a vital role in determining how that culture interacts with the natural world. How does our linear view of time influence the way we relate to the natural world? Because so many processes in nature are cyclical, I believe that an exclusively linear view of time is an obstacle to an intimate relationship with our environment. By seeing things solely in linear terms, we fail to understand the importance of nature’s cycles.

A linear view of time reinforces the notion that time is a scarce commodity which must be filled with as much activity as possible. Filling our lives with so much activity results in high levels of resource consumption. The desire to fit as much activity as possible into our allotted stretch of the time-line also means that we tend to act on the world rather than interact with it. And thirdly, engaging in all this activity means that we operate at a speed which alienates us from the rhythms of the natural world. Once we are cut off from something, we are likely to lack the understanding and the sympathy needed to act in that thing’s best interests.

2.12 Indigenous Views of Time

In her book Out of Africa, Karen Blixen makes some intriguing observations about the Kikuyu:

Natives dislike speed . . They are also on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not enter their heads. In fact, the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives [Blixen 1985 p.171].

I love the last bit. Nothing to do with passing the time – he sits down and lives. Just being in his world is enough. The contrast with our craving for additional stimulus could not be greater. It makes me wonder about the belief that we live longer than people in other cultures. Improvements in medicine, diet and hygiene mean that by and large, we are present on Earth for a greater number of years than is the case for most other cultures, but do we really live more in those years? What has happened to us?

Modern, city-based life obscures the utter dependence of human beings on their natural environment. This false isolation from the natural world is reflected in, and reinforced by, a way of measuring time which has little relation to natural phenomena.

A day is a measure of the rotation of the Earth about its axis, and a year is a measure of how long it takes the Earth to orbit around the sun, but hours, minutes and seconds bear no relationship to natural phenomena. They are merely a means of coordinating the complex activities of large numbers of human beings.

To indigenous people who measure the passage of time by the movements of the sun and moon across the Earth, clocks must be rather puzzling things. In our civilisation we are so accustomed to thinking in terms of minutes and hours that they seem to possess the same kind of reality as trees or rocks.

Speaking at a Heart Politics Conference in Northern New South Wales in 1993, Mary Graham, an Aboriginal from south-east Queensland, had this to say about how western civilisation measures time: “The clock is a small device for measuring its own ticks… nine o’clock or three o’clock in the afternoon don’t really exist at all, does it? But dawn exists, and dusk and midday, but Tuesday or Sunday don’t exist”.

Whereas the dominant culture appears to recognise only one kind of time, Mary said Aborigines experienced “about eight or nine senses of time. Linear time is just one of many”.

Mary Graham stressed that for Aborigines, land provided not merely nurturance, but identity and meaning. “It is our land”, she said, “that tells us we are human beings”. It would seem that even to say that Aborigines are in a close relationship with their land is misleading, since in their tradition they are not separate from the land, and for them to think of themselves as separate from it would have been inconceivable before they were introduced to such concepts.

Similarly, time as something separate from the changes occurring in their land would have been meaningless to traditional Aborigines. The contrast between such an experience and the European reliance on “a small device for measuring its own ticks” could not be greater.

To increase our understanding of how we are affected by the way we perceive time, and to awaken us to different ways of experiencing, it will be useful to look at how other cultures view the passage of time.

Indigenous cultures’ apprehensions of time reflect the intimate connection with the environments of which they are a part. In Wisdom of the Elders, Suzuki and Knudtson (1992) give several examples of cultures in which time is understood to be circular. It is useful to give some examples to illustrate the kinds of connections made between individuals and their environments.

The Mnong Gar indigenous people of Vietnam’s south-central highlands name each year according to “the forests we have eaten” (ibid p.154). A traditional shifting agricultural society, they clear an area of forest and cultivate it until declining soil fertility means they must clear a new area of forest. After about twenty years of moving from one area of forest to another, they return to the site they cultivated some two decades before. A year may bear a name such as “The year we ate the forest of the Stone Spirit Goo”, the forest of the Stone Spirit Goo being a particular area of forest which they cleared and cultivated in the period in question. Since after about twenty years, they return to an area they have cultivated previously, two periods of time about 20 years apart will have exactly the same name (ibid).

This way of measuring time clearly shows how closely the Mnong Gar are connected with the forest, and it shows a circular understanding of time. If the industrialised world were to measure time by “the forests we have eaten”,then its time would seen as passing with great rapidity. And in a linear rather than circular fashion, since once we eat them, they generally stay eaten.

In 1987, the Gitksan and Wetsuweten People of Central British Columbia were involved in a court case as part of their ongoing struggle to gain legal title to some of their traditional home lands. They attempted to explain to the court that their circular perception of time meant that their notions of cause and effect differ from those of the white invaders. To these two tribes, say Suzuki and Knudtson, the present is affected by “the seasonal pulsations of nature, the lives of ancestors long dead, and the world-shaping transformations of the mythic era of creation”(ibid p153).

The Barren Grounds Inuit of northern Canada divide the year into sixteen stages or months. Each stage is named according to the natural events which are characteristic of that period. The first stage in their year, for example, is named Ate’rwik, which translates as “the moon in which the Caribou go down from the forests in the south to Baker Lake”. Nuliarwik the sixth stage, is “the moon in which the caribou mate’’. Thus, the Inuit’s way of measuring time connects them to the caribou on whom they depend, to the region in which they live and to the cyclical changes which occur each year (ibid p.146).

2.13 Time, Parenting, Education and Environment

Our views of time – particularly the belief that there isn’t enough of it – have serious consequences for how we parent and educate our children. The way we parent and educate affects the kind of society we are creating. How this society will impact on the environment is a complex issue and it is beyond the scope of this paper to deal with it in any depth. Without a more detailed analysis, what I have to say here is fairly superficial and speculative.

My main aim is to show that there will inevitably be links between how we bring up our children and how they will treat the environment. And environmental considerations alone are reason enough to spend more time on parenting and educating our children.

One of the most obvious connections is that we are role models for our children. Although some may rebel against the values of their parents, it is inevitable that the values of one generation will bear a close resemblance to the previous one.

“The Cat’s in the Cradle”, a sad and evocative song by Harry Chapin about the relationship between a father and his son illustrates this point perfectly. While his son is growing up, his father repeatedly says he’d love to spend more time with his son – if only he weren’t so busy. Once the father retires, he wants to spend time with his son, but his son says “I’d love to Dad if I could find the time”, and he realises that his son has grown up just like him. This is a common situation, and it is tragic for its human costs. It is also tragic in its environmental implications. In this manner, the values of competitiveness, busyness and overconsumption are passed from one generation to the next.

If the warnings about the risk of impending environmental collapse are even partially true, human beings are in for a difficult time in the next fifty years. To cope with the times ahead, people will need to be emotionally healthy and capable of great resourcefulness and integrity. Because we choose to spend our time earning money and consuming resources rather than devoting the time needed to bring up children adequately, we are failing to prepare them for what lies ahead.

Psychologist and family therapist Stephen Biddulph believes that “it’s highly likely that boys have a biological need for several hours of one-to-one male contact per day. Put another way, to have a demanding job, to commute to work in a city and raise sons well is an impossibility. Something has to give” (Biddulph1994).

Traditionally, the job of parenting has been left to a large extent to women. Women are now spending more time working and the impact of this on children’s’ upbringing can at this stage only be guessed at.

Our system of mass education concentrates on what can be taught easily and quickly. Information can be transmitted far more quickly than values, and so it is the transmission of information that our education system aims at. Children are left to acquire values by chance rather than conscious design.

Given the suspect nature of our cultural values, it is easy to see this as a good thing. However, if a just, sustainable society is ever to become a reality, our methods of education and parenting will have to change. The characteristics of a society are to a large extent determined by the character of its citizens. You can’t build a sound building out of crumbling bricks, no matter how good the architecture is.

David Orr, writing in The Trumpeter (1990, p.52), had this to say about the effects of German education in the 1920s and 1930s:

Elie Wiesel recently made the same point about the Nazis. In most respects, the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s were the best-educated people on earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Weisel’s words, “It emphasised theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstractions rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience” (Orr 1990 p.53]

One teacher can successfully pass on information to thirty or forty students, but values, relationship skills, and a spirit of enquiry are not taught so easily in large, regimented classes. They are best passed on by mentors and role models in a one-to-one relationship involving mutual respect and understanding. Such relationships are time-consuming and unlikely to flourish in a system where pupil-teacher relationships of this nature are impossible and parents “don’t have enough time” to spend with their children.

2.14 The Pressure to Operate on “Someone Else’s Clock”

One of the people I interviewed for the research section of this project talked about how most people operate on “someone else’s clock”. This is an accurate description of the way in which most of us live. We move sat a speed which is determined not by our own internal rhythms, but by the demands of a society obsessed with end results. Slowing down in this situation is difficult. In a society less obsessed with speed and more tolerant of idleness, slowing down would be a much easier proposition.

The difficulties of slowing down in our culture are virtually the same as those encountered by anyone wishing to simplify her life and reduce her consumption. Alan Durning identifies the problems involved :

At present, living simply may be an unattainable ideal for most people. People’s choices are constrained by the social pressures, physical infrastructure and institutional channels that envelop them. Most would be immobilized if they abandoned their cars while still living amidst mass-transitless urban sprawl. Few workers have the option of trading extra salary for reduced working hours because few employers offer it, and they could not accept it quickly anyway, with mortgage and car payments, insurance premiums, college tuition, utility bills and so forth making demands on their incomes. Thus, a strategy for reducing consumption must focus as much on changing the framework in which people make choices as it does on the choices they make (Duming 1994 p.78).

The basic question raised by Durning about “changing the framework” in which people make their choices as well as attempting to influence the choices themselves is discussed further in the “Inconclusion” to this paper.

There is in our culture a strong pressure to have a certain minimum number of material possessions. To get these possessions, people need money. To get money, they need jobs. Therefore, the pressure to own things is a pressure to be busy.

There is also a strong social pressure to achieve. People’s self-worth is often dependent not on who they are, but what they have achieved. In order to achieve things and impress their peers, people need to be busy. In addition, busyness itself is closely related to self-esteem. Busyness often brings with it a sense of self-importance. Idleness is equated with worthlessness.

Social isolation is another likely consequence of refusing to rush. If everyone I know is rushing, then taking a stroll is likely to be a very solitary exercise. I may have to run with everyone else if I am to have any sort of conversation, even if it is likely to be rather breathless and superficial.

Durning claims it is necessary to focus as much on the “framework in which people make choices” as on the choices themselves. How then, can this framework be changed? This is a big question. To answer it, one has to ask the related question of how this framework is created in the first place.

This framework is in effect, the value system of a society. In theory at least, all individuals in a society have a say in determining this framework. As Bill Moyer points out, “the official powerholders in any society can only rule as long as they have the consent of the people” (Moyer 1990 p.13). Similarly, those who have most of the power to influence the values of a society can do so only with the consent of the people. However, it is clear that the power to influence cultural values is no more evenly distributed than is political power. An analysis of what sections of society exert a disproportionate influence on its values, and how they allowed to do so, would be a step towards influencing the “framework in which people make choices”.

Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this paper. It is clear, though, that some sections of society have a short term interest in promoting busyness as a virtue.

3. The Future

In this section I explore our relationship with the future and how that relationship affects the environment

3.1 Our Paradoxical Relationship with the Future

We have a paradoxical relationship with the future. In some ways we appear to be extremely worried about it, yet in other ways we appear to be blind to the future we are creating.

Our concern with the future is shown in the personal lives of most people. Financial security is a major concern for many, and generally this means having such things as a job which pays as much as possible, a house and land, savings, investments, superannuation and insurance. The need for emotional security can motivate people in their search for a marriage partner and even in deciding to have children.

To some, our concern for the future appears excessive. According to Christopher Titmuss, “we live cut off from day-to-day life by focussing on future worries” (Titmuss 1995 p.154).

On a larger scale, environmentalists appear preoccupied with the future and want others to share this preoccupation. Members of the green movement have repeatedly warned about the serious consequences of continuing in the direction in which industrial society is taking us.

However, the warnings have by and large had little impact on behaviour, and powerholders in our society seem happy to disregard the cloud which looms over our future. The public is letting them get away with it, despite the fact that many surveys have revealed a deep concern for environmental issues among large numbers of people.

Whatever the explanation, there is a general failure to respond to the environmental threats we face. This is what I mean when I write about our “disregard for the future” below.

3.2 The Future Wears New Clothes

Nothing about our attitude towards time is more astounding than our apparent disregard for the future. The threats of nuclear war and global ecological collapse have raised doubts about whether the human race – and other species – will survive the next century. Throughout its history, the humans have believed that their species would be on Earth indefinitely. Now, that faith in the future has been lost.

Joanna Macy and others have stressed the importance of this change. “I believe that this loss, felt at some level of consciousness by every one of us, regardless of political orientation, is the pivotal psychological reality of our time” (Macy 1991 p.5). Logic suggests that Macy is right, yet if one looks for a signs of this “pivotal psychological reality” in the behaviour of most people or governments, they simply aren’t there.

“If the possible end to life as we know it is not newsworthy, then what is?”

In 1992, the international Union of Concerned Scientists issued a “Warning to Humanity” to alert the world to the dangers of continuing its environmentally irresponsible ways. The “Warning to Humanity” was signed by 1,500 of the world’s most senior scientists and predicted that current environmental trends “may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know”.

When the “Warning” was reported in the press, it caused hardly a ripple. The news agency, Associated Press, rated it a “low priority” story (Australian Associated Press 1993). If the possible end to life as we know it is not newsworthy, then what is?

The Union of Concerned Scientists’ statement was perhaps the most authoritative of its kind, but it was far from being the only one. The Worldwatch Institute’s annual State of the World reports are perhaps the most respected reference on the ecological health of the planet. They make grim but convincing reading. In the 1993 Report, the authors state”.. if our generation does not turn things around, our children may not have the option of doing so" (13rown, et al 1993 p.21).

In the 1991 State of the World Report, the authors warn: “Every major indicator shows a deterioration in natural systems: forests are shrinking, deserts are expanding, croplands are losing top soil, the stratospheric ozone layer continues to thin, the number of plant and animal species is diminishing, air pollution has reached health-threatening levels in hundreds of cities, and damage from acid rain can be seen on every continent” (Brown et al 1991 p.5).

Speaking at the Stein Festival in Canada in 1989, David Suzuki, perhaps the world’s best known and most respected environmentalist, predicted that the planet’s life support systems faced irreversible damage if current trends were not altered in the next ten years. That was six years ago.

It would not be difficult to add to the list of grim ecological predictions made by observers with impressive credentials. The green movement has repeatedly used dire predictions of the future in its attempt to influence peoples’ behaviour. Yet on a global scale, the impact of these predictions on human behaviour has been negligible. If one looks beyond the superficial changes in rhetoric, it is clear that the actions of individuals, governments and multinationals have not changed enough to alter the course we are embarked upon.

Jonathon Schell (1982 p.3) says of nuclear weapons, “They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history”. Despite their immeasurable importance, he says, “the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much. We have thus far failed to fashion, or to find within ourselves, an emotional or intellectual or political response to them” (ibid p.3). This failure, says Schell, “has itself been such a striking phenomenon that it has to be regarded as an extremely important part of the nuclear predicament as it has existed so far” (ibid p.4).

Writing in the New Scientist (1989), Bob Ralph cited an event recorded by Joseph Banks in 1770 when 1870, the HMS Endeavour sailed into Botany Bay for the first time. The Endeavour passed four Aboriginal canoes, in each of which a man was spearing fish. Banks wrote in his journal: “The ship passed within a quarter of a mile of them and yet they scarce lifted their eyes from their employment; I was almost inclined to think that attentive to their business and deafened by the noise of the surf they neither saw nor heard her [the Endeavour] go past them” (Ralph 1989 p.74).

A short time later, women and children in a small village on the shore looked at the ship and according to Banks, “expressed neither surprise nor concern”. The four fishermen returned to the shore and totally ignored the Endeavour, anchored half a mile away. Were they failing to see something, asks Ralph, because it was “so far beyond their everyday experience” ?

We have our own Endeavour, suggests Ralph, sailing towards us, but like the aborigines, we appear unable or unwilling to take it in. Our Endeavour, according to Ralph, is the Earth’s rapidly growing population. He could also have cited the threat of nuclear war, or the global ecological crisis. We appear to be averting our gaze from all these issues, and their impact on our future.

3.3 Why?

How does one explain this astounding disregard for the future? Christopher Titmuss, in his book The Green Buddha (1995), maintains that by and large, people are unable to take much account of the future even when their own interests are at stake. Each prediction about the future, he says, carries with it the implication that things are not yet bad enough to warrant a change. The green movement, he believes, should “end this game of prophecy” and concentrate on the state of the world here and now (ibid).

Certainly, there is no shortage of appalling environmental news about conditions right now, and certainly the green movement may have more success if it concentrates more on “the Here and Now”, as Titmuss advocates. Yet, it is hard to see how a society can continue to be viable if it does not take account of the future.

“…if once we shook off our lethargy and fatigue and began to act, the climate would change”

I can see possible reasons for a lack of interest in the future. To me, they are not enough to explain this suicidal blindness, but for what they are worth, here they are.

One is that out of fear and despair, we believe we have no power to change the course we are embarked upon, and we therefore pretend that everything is okay.

Jonathon Schell’s words about our response to the threat posed by nuclear weapons are equally applicable to our response to the threat of ecological collapse:

At present we do nothing. We look away. We remain calm. We are silent. We take refuge in the hope that the holocaust won’t happen, and turn back to our individual concerns. We deny the truth that is all around us. Indifferent to the future of our kind, we grow indifferent to one another. We drift apart …But if once we shook off our lethargy and began to act, the climate would change. Just as inertia produces despair– despair often so deep that it doesn’t know itself as despair– arousal would give us success to hope [ibid p.320].

Perhaps our dread of what the future holds has rendered us unable to act – like an animal blinded by the headlights of an approaching car.

Our fear of the future is generally repressed. “This repression tends to paralyze”, writes Joanna Macy. “It builds a sense of isolation and powerlessness. Furthermore, it fosters resistance to painful, but essential information” (Macy 1983 p.7). Once we contact our own fears about the future of our world, she believes, a great well of vitality is released which can be used for positive action. This belief has been the basis of her “Despair and Empowerment” workshops. These workshops are designed to enable participants to contact their own fear, anguish and whatever other negative emotions they may feel about the state of the world. By fully experiencing these emotions rather than repressing them, Macy says that participants would be able to overcome their desire to avoid facing squarely the situation which human beings have created in the world. By doing so, they release reserves of energy which they can then harness to work for positive change (ibid).

Another possible reason for our lack of response is that because so many people lack a sense of place, they also lack a realistic sense of time. Because their future is no longer tied to the future of a particular part of the Earth, they are unable to think about the future of the Earth as a whole. If I assumed that I and my children after me were going to spend our days on the land that I now occupy, and if I depended on that land to supply my food and other needs, then I would be bound to take care of its future. If, on the other hand, I am not attached to a particular piece of the Earth, then I may find it hard to be concerned about “The Earth”, which cannot be experienced as an entity and must therefore remain just a concept.

Another possible reason is that our image of time has ceased to be the circle and has become the arrow. Instead of seeing the future as being in some way a repetition of events that have happened in the past, modem industrialised humans see the movement of time as being in one direction only. (This is dealt with in more detail in section 2.11). With such a view, it is probably easier to countenance the end of time. Sooner or later, an arrow falls to the ground. Why try to fight it?

Joanna Macy points out that Ronald Reagan and his notorious Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, made public statements about the imminence of Armageddon. Watt, in particular, did not attempt to conceal his fundamentalist belief that there would be no more generations on Earth. He therefore saw no reason to preserve what would not be needed in the future (Macy 1991 p.209).

Another possible explanation is that individuals feel the magnitude of the forces arrayed against them – in governments and multinationals – are so large that they have no chance of influencing the course of the future. The trend towards the centralisation of power, and the disempowerment of local communities have helped to bring this about.

Whatever the reasons behind our disregard for the future, it is crucial that the future becomes more real to us.

3.4 Joanna Macy and the Nuclear Guardianship Programme

In my search for written material on the connection between our attitudes to time and our relationship with the environment, I found that not much had been written specifically on this issue. I believe this to be a confirmation of the importance of exploring the topic. There needs to be more awareness about it.

One of the few writers on the subject is Joanna Macy, and it was inspiring to discover the relevant chapters of her book, World As Lover, World As Self Clearly, she has thought and felt deeply about the issue.

In her exploration, nothing is more moving than her involvement with the issue of nuclear waste storage. The radioactive wastes produced by nuclear power plants and in the production of nuclear weapons “extend the effects of our actions into vast reaches of time”. She calls our mismanagement of this problem “the most appalling example of our denial of the future” (Macy 1992).

These wastes can cause “disease, death and sterility”. They can also affect the genetic code itself and they will have the potential to do so for thousands of years. Yet “we dump millions of metric tons of waste into open unlined trenches, into the sea, into cardboard boxes and into tanks that crack and corrode within a decade or two” (Macy 1992).

Joanna Macy has been campaigning to have these wastes stored in guarded waste silos which would, in addition to protecting future generations from the threat they pose, be a testimony and reminder of our commitment to the future. Few people have thought as deeply about how our actions will affect yet-to-be-born humans as Macy has, and Brian Swimme once said of her, “she has thousands of friends, and most of them haven’t been born yet” (Macy 1992).

As well as providing perhaps the most extreme example of our rather less than ideal relationship with the future, Macy’ 5 account of her response to this issue is enlightening in the way that it affects her personally.

Prior to her involvement with the nuclear waste issue, she had been oppressed by the feeling that time was short: “Hurry, hurry to keep the world from blowing up”. However, when she realised how long these wastes would be around, “the question of how fast one could get something done was replaced with the question of how long - how lo-o-n-n-g a period one could do it in” (Macy 1992). This produced not only a change in attitude but physical changes as well: “my breath slowed, the rib cage eased. The horror of the waste was helping me reinhabit time”.

This suggests that our relationship with time affects us in a very direct, physical way. A changed attitude to time produced observable physical changes. By “reinhabiting time”, we reinhabit our bodies.

4. Research

The focus of my research was much narrower than the focus of my project as a whole. While the paper explores the whole issue of how attitudes to time affect environmental issues, the research section concentrates upon the question of what motivates people in choosing to be busy.

I did not try to make any connection between the activities of the people I interviewed and resource consumption or environmental degradation. As explained in the “Assumption” section which follows, I have not attempted to establish this connection, since I believe it to be self-evident.

The question of why people are busy, yet claim to wish they weren’t, has intrigued me for some time. I have wondered whether they dislike the alternative of having time on their hands, and if so, why. More recently I have made the connection between our culture’s liking for busyness and environmental degradation. My primary objective was, through exploring the issue with the interviewees, to increase my understanding of what motivates so many people in our culture to be busy. I believe the research was successful in this respect.

Through a questioning of these motivations, as well as through a greater understanding of the costs associated with excessive busyness, people may become less enslaved to this tendency in their lives. The costs involved are not just environmental. As these interviews show, being busy can harm people’s health and their relationships with others, People may find that they are much happier if t hey are less busy, and that they can easily forego the increased ability to consume that is generally associated with a busy lifestyle. As well as impoverishing the Earth, busyness can impoverish people’s lives.

I do not suggest that people are likely to slow down out of a concern for the ecological health of the planet. As is often the case, what is good for the Earth is also good for human beings, and short-term self interest could be reason enough for people to slow down. It is not in individuals’ selfish interests to cram their lives with one activity after another. In fact, it is not in anyone’s best interests. People have been duped. Compulsive busyness is a fraud which needs to be exposed.

Assumptions

No attempt was made to find a balanced sample. Rather, I deliberately selected people whom I considered to lead busy lives, and who I believed were articulate and aware of what motivated them. So I am not suggesting the fact that all interviewees were busy proved anything. Rather, I am trying to increase my understanding of the widespread phenomenon of busyness by increasing my understanding of a few busy people. I am assuming that the experience of a few people can shed light on the experience of people in general.

I assumed that large numbers of people in our society are busy and made no attempt to establish this fact. I assumed also that by discovering more about what led the people I interviewed to be busy, I would learn more about what motivates the large numbers of busy people in society as a whole.

I believe many of the motives of the people involved will be similar to those of other busy people in our culture. This is despite the fact that the people I interviewed are far from typical of people in society at large. They have chosen a lifestyle which differs radically from the norm, and their values differ accordingly. However, I believe it reasonable to assume that since they have been exposed to the same kinds of conditioning as most people in our culture, many of their motivations will be the same. In addition, the people involved are articulate and have a well-developed ability to reflect critically on their own motivation. Also implicit in my approach was the assumption that in general, busyness is linked to resource consumption and therefore to environmental degradation. I make no attempt to establish this connection, as I believe the link to be clear.

I do not assume that busyness is intrinsically bad. Many people make a conscious choice to engage in a great deal of activity and in doing so, achieve a great deal that is of benefit. If many people in the green movement were not busily working to counteract the impact of other people’s busyness, the level of environmental degradation would be even greater than it is. However, it seems to me that many people are driven by motivations they are not aware of, and which do not serve their own interests or those of the Earth as a whole. I aimed to explore whether this was in fact the case and, if so, to discover more about these motives.

I should add here that large segments of society simply do not have the freedom to be less busy. Low-income families have to work hard just to survive. To them, busyness is not a matter of the psychological factors discussed here, but the harsh reality of having to pay health, housing education and transport costs, and if possible make some provision for their long-term security.

This is a major difference between society in general and the people I interviewed. The incomes of the interviewees may be low, but that is largely through personal choice rather than outward circumstances. In addition, their expenses are also lower than average due to sharing of resources and a rejection of consumerist values.

The Interviews

My initial intention was to have a group interview of about six residents of Bodhi Farm, the community on the North Coast of New South Wales where I have lived for the last nine years. However, after discussing the matter with several of the people I wanted in the group, I changed my plans. They all seemed to be too busy! The task of finding a time when they could all attend a meeting was too daunting, and so I decided instead to conduct individual interviews.

ultimately this was more time-consuming, and did not allow an exchange of ideas which could have proved to be extremely fruitful. However, it probably enabled each person to talk about their relationship with time and busyness in more depth than would have been possible in a group discussion. Two of the interviewees, Grace and Cindy, had read some of the material contained in this paper. The other two, Deborah and Geraldine, were familiar with my hypothesis that busyness was related to environmental degradation.

These are the people I interviewed. The names are fictitious.

Grace

Grace is 34. She has been a resident of Bodhi Farm for four years and is the mother of a three-year-old son. She has for the last six months been starting a small business selling vegetarian food at local markets. She has also worked at the Rainforest Information Centre for the last five years.

Cindy

Cindy is 43. She has lived on Bodhi Farm for eight years and is the mother of two sons, aged nine and fourteen. She is studying for a Ph.D. in alternative economics and teaches part-time at the local Southern Cross university and TAFE College. She was a candidate for the local council elections and at the time of the interview was in the midst of the election campaign.

Deborah

Deborah is 42. She has been a resident of Bodhi Farm for sixteen years and is the mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter. She works full-time in Lismore as a public servant.

Geraldine

Geraldine is 43. She has lived on Bodhi Farm for nineteen years and is the mother of a twelve-year-old girl. She is the director of a welfare organisation in Lismore.

All the people interviewed were women. The effect of gender on attitudes to busyness is one of the aspects of this issue that I would have liked to investigate. Unfortunately this was not possible.

Each interview took about forty-five minutes. I was interested in each person’s own experience, and also in their observations about the activity levels of society as a whole.

I began each interview by asking each person whether they saw themselves as busy and if so, what motivated them. All those interviewed talked willingly and at some length about this. I did not have any set questions but asked for details as seemed appropriate. I then invited them to generalise about how they saw the lives of other people.

In general I asked only a few questions and encouraged the speaker to talk at length. This worked well in all cases, and I was pleased with the results of the interviews.

By the time I conducted the interviews, I had read and thought about the issues quite a lot, and had already formed some opinions about motivations for busyness. This influenced the kinds of questions I asked. In my account of the research, I have identified common themes in what different people said. In what follows, each heading denotes one of these common themes. Inevitably, the themes I identified, and the issues I chose to stress are a function of my own biases, and anyone else listening to the interviews and writing an account of them would have identified other issues.

The Connection between Busyness and the Environment

As I pointed out above, I make the assumption that busyness is usually associated with increased rates of the source consumption and therefore with environmental degradation. This approach was questioned by Cindy, who pointed out that most of the adults on Bodhi Farm were involved in “people-centred” activities, and therefore would not consume resources excessively. I believe this does not invalidate my approach, however, since I believe that while the types of activities engaged in by the interviewees are not representative of the activities of society as a whole, the motives involved do have a great deal in common. Furthermore, even “people-centred” activities involve resource consumption if one has to travel in a car in order to engage in them. As Cindy pointed out, “I think the main form of consumption is transport… most of the people [we know] are engaged in people-centred activity”.

Grace pointed out that it was not invariably the case that busyness implied environmental degradation:

I mean for instance Geraldine is busy doing a lot of gardening. I wouldn’t say she has a negative impact on the environment by using her time as she does.. .but in the main I’d say you’re right.

Deborah saw a direct connection between her decision to work full-time and the impact she had on the environment:

I run through what does me working mean?’ - It means that I spend 30 bucks a week on petrol and that means carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don’t have time to plant the trees [to make up for this].. .the ethics of it sit not so well with me.

Level of Busyness

Three of the four agreed that their lives were busy. Deborah’s response, however, raised the question of how one defines busyness:

I don’t know if I would describe myself as too busy. I know I’ve got too much too do, that I have too much to do in the time I’ve got.. .I know I have skimped my sleep for years and that was one of the contributing factors to my illness. I know when work gets really busy and I have a whole lot of things on the go as well as answering the phone and dealing with whatever comes up, I start to not function very well.

Who is to say whether Deborah or anyone else is “too busy”? What is meant by that description?

Clearly, people’s values differ and so their perceptions about whether they themselves or others whom they have observed are “too busy”. I have used the term, fairly loosely, to refer to someone who has too much to do in the time available and consequently leads a life that is not as fulfilling as it may otherwise be. A more rigid definition may have limited the range of the interviews.

There are no objective standards here. When Deborah said that her health had suffered due to her levels of activity but that she didn’t know whether she was too busy, I was confronted with how my own values have affected my inquiry. Like the Kikuyu tribesman whom Karen Blixen writes about in Out of Africa, I thrive on having large amounts of time in which I don’t have to do anything in particular. Like him, I would like to “sit down and live”. When I listened to tape recordings of these interviews I noticed that I speak more slowly than most other people, and I believe this is an indication that I like to take things slowly.

I have endeavoured not to allow my own biases to distort the message of the people I interviewed. No doubt I haven’t been entirely successful.

Someone who to me exhibits all the characteristics of excessive busyness may not feel busy. When I asked Geraldine about whether she was too busy, she asked me if I was referring to internal or external busyness, and Cindy pointed out that the experience of being busy was due not merely to levels of activity, but to how the amounts of activity were experienced:

Cindy: I don’t have a sense of it being out of control as I have in the past. I think that’s because of my general good state of health, being settled.. and other external factors. People who seem to get an awful lot done and yet seem relaxed– and they are quite rare – the key seems to be their attitude.

Cindy felt that often, the external situation was mistakenly seen as the cause of the problem:

We’ve been trained to believe that time is this external constraint when I actually don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s your relationship with it that’s the key.

Motivation

A logical question to ask people is: “If you think you’re too busy, why don’t you stop?”. This is one of the key questions this research explores, and it seems that a common, implied answer is, “I can’t stop because I’m driven by inner compulsions”. Here are some of the responses I received.

Geraldine saw her fairly strict religious upbringing as being instrumental:

I feel in my upbringing there was a great emphasis on being busy, on making sure your work was done - and usually there was rather a lot of work.

Grace also pointed to the importance of a religious upbringing in shaping her views. When she had time on her hands, she felt guilty:

I feel like I personally have been brought up with a lot of guilt and I think that’s not to do with time but more to do with religion.

Often, guilt and religion go together, long after the particular religious dogma of childhood has been rejected:

Grace: . . when I spend a day on Bodhi Farm there’s lots of things that come up for me like “I should be doing something” or I feel guilty… it’s not okay to have half a day off specially if its not Saturday or Sunday

Geraldine: It’s almost like I’ve driven myself to work hard to make up for the fact that I’m enormously privileged and I feel guilty about that..so its almost like undermining my own potential for bliss because somehow if I’m a bit more miserable, it might be at least helping other people …I say that laughingly…the last thing the world needs is another burnt out welfare worker.

At the time of the interview, Geraldine was nearing the end of a period of three months’ leave without pay from her job, and she had done a lot of thinking about why she had been so busy before taking this break. Interrupting the busyness of her life seemed to be necessary in order to reflect deeply on what motivated her:

I suppose it’s a combination of being in a demanding and reasonably responsible work position that involves dealing with a lot of people, often with fairly delicate emotional issues and that juxtaposed with living here and having a lot of people I can potentially relate with.. and a fairly high energy lifestyle and a fairly busy persona.

Of course, there are clear and rational reasons for working. For Deborah, as for the other respondents, one of the main ones is money:

If I could earn the same amount of money in four days I’d do it in four days.

For Deborah, being busy was to a large extent a means to an end:

For me part of the reason is I absolutely love the results of it, so that I might not feel like gardening, but because I want the results of it I garden. I never a want to be looking out on my verandah with a bushfire coming knowing I’ve done nothing…I go to some places where it can be really filthy, really run down and people obviously don’t do a whole lot, but I don’t want to live like that so therefore I keep a routine, especially living in the bush….

For Grace, the need to make money was a basic reason to work, and a busy life was the inevitable result of the intention of making money:

John: Would you say that [being busy] has been necessary in order to make money?

Grace: Pretty much, yeah. Very rarely would you not have to be subjected to that in order to make money.

This raises the question of why the money is wanted. Clearly in our society it is not just for basic needs. Cindy made this point but cautioned against assuming that busyness always implied the desire for excessive consumption:

I think there’s many people caught in a survival trap and at the same time they are influenced by the fact that we live in a consumerist society which is saying you have to have more in order to be okay and I think those forces are very strong and it’s hard for people to resist them.

Adopting society’s values in an unquestioning manner was also seen as a primary reason for people’s levels of activity:

Deborah: I think we don’t look at alternatives

John: Alternatives to?

Deborah: The status quo. What you do is you do get married, you do have children, you do have a mortgage. You are still different if you’re a single parent or you are unmarried.. .1 look at other people’s shopping baskets and they produce so much waste and they eat such shit [they have to] work to buy all these things. I notice if we eat fruit and veggies and some dairy foods– if you don’t buy processed food –your bills are so low…. and they work to pay for all this stuff and I think, “Why are people doing this?”

Grace appeared to agree:

They’re part of our schooling, which for most of us has been conservative, they’re part of our parenting which for most of us has been conservative. I really think that there’s few people out there, even in the so-called alternative movement, that are revolutionary thinkers. I think that most of us still have quite conservative attitudes around things that concern our everyday lives, including how we view something like time. I think it’s very much part of what we were brought up to believe.

Cindy pointed out that high levels of activity were part of our culture’s values:

It has a lot to do with the dogma of economic rationalism and … a work ethic that is such a strong part of the ideology.

The Importance of Being in Control

A crucial determinant of whether people experience themselves as being busy is whether they are obliged to be doing whatever they are engaged in, or whether they are doing it because they want to. To use Grace’s term, people are more likely to feel busy if they are “operating on someone else’s clock”.

Deborah: Going to Byron Bay doesn’t feel like relaxation because it’s not absolutely my choice.. it’s not that that’s what I want to be doing. Usually there may be something else arranged or Leah wants to go.. .the part that is rejuvenating is doing what I want to do.

Cindy: I don’t have a sense of it being out of control as I have in the past

I retrospect, I see this as an issue which I would have liked to explore further. Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the value of seeing all time as one’s own irrespective of whether one is obliged to be doing whatever activity one is engaged in (Nhat Hanh 1985). Work is usually something which people feel they “have to do”, and they will have some resistance to doing it. Their experience of the time spent working will be strongly influenced by this.

Busyness as Avoidance

In other parts of this paper, I have suggested that being busy is often a way of avoiding unstructured time. This was supported by remarks some of the speakers made.

Geraldine: The reality of Bosnia and Muraroa. . it feels hard to be awake to the pain and people are encouraged to be busy so they don’t notice.

Geraldine: My sister, even much more than me, keeps busy to avoid dealing with emotional things.

Grace saw the desire to avoid idleness as a reason for some of the hostility directed against the unemployed:

Grace:…part of why society ridicules [not being busy], you know, “dole bludgers are lazy good for nothing ratbags” and so on. For me it’s part of the whole conspiracy. It keeps the lie alive.

John: So its a way of avoiding looking inside yourself sometimes?

Grace: - and looking at what you’re doing. Absolutely. It sustains environmental degradation and inappropriate attitudes about each other and our lives.

Busyness and Age

Cindy pointed out that age is a strong determinant of how busy an individual is:

It’s no accident that you’re looking at this issue at this time of life [I am forty-two - JR]. It’s the time when people are consolidating the areas of work or interest they’re involved in. When you’re younger I believe people have a sense of, ’there’s more time ahead’…It’s about making meaning and feeling worth while and this is the time of life that we do this and if people get to our age [forties] and they haven’t figured out what they want to be active in, then there’s a sense of desperation or concern about that and I think that’s what the midlife crisis is about. There’s a sense of ‘I’ve got to get it done now’…

I asked Chris, one of the teenagers on Bodhi Farm, whether he thought adults were too busy and he said that they were:

John: Do you think you’ll be like that when you get older?

Chris: I hope not.

John: Why do you think they are so busy?

Chris: Because they want to make a difference in the world, but when they’re so

busy they don’t have time to reflect on what they do.

Grace talked about the differing views of time held by children and adults – and about how early

the conditioning starts:

Grace:…But what is very interesting about this question of time is when I try to explain it to my three-year-old son. You know, he has such a different concept of it and I’m basically teaching him bit by bit this very vulgar economic.. “come on Tane we’ve got to get to Preschool”, getting pissed of cos he wants to look at a flower or a hole that an insect’s dug and he’s dawdling and I’m often trying to hurry him up. I get really pissed off when I find myself doing that–with him, with myself, with the world–it’s usually when I’m participating in the system that everyone else is involved in. On the Farm I can chill out to a large extent …it feels like a tempo thing. If 100 is the units of speed in Lismore and zero is not giving a fuck about how much you get done, then when I’m on Bodhi Farm I’m maybe around sixty and Tane is zero. He’s got very different concepts. He’s starting to realise its a very important thing. He talks about time and he wants a watch even though he doesn’t understand it. He sees that it’s important and it’s precious.

John: So many parents talk about the frustration of trying to get kids off to school in time and it’s like the meeting of these two different ways of experiencing time.

Grace: That’s a good example

The Impact of Busyness

Geraldine, Deborah and Grace spoke about the negative impact of busyness on their lives, particularly with respect to their relationships.

John: Another thing I’m interested in is how this busyness affects relationships. Do you see it as having an impact on your relationships with your friends and the people you live with?

Grace: Absolutely. It really disappoints me, really disappoints me…

Grace talked about how being busy made her feel:

I feel like I’m not in control, not empowered, that there’s something greater that is forcing me to rush around, something that is pretty stressful, not carefree. It’s very obvious when you go to town that people are operating on someone else’s clock.

Grace talked about the influence of busyness on our consciousness and how we relate with the natural world:

I feel like if we don’t pay too much attention to things we will abuse them. And time is very much a facet of that. If we don’t pay too much attention to the beautiful forests that we could be breathing every night and walking in and sitting in and becoming part of, it’s much easier to abuse them. If we could sit in the abattoir for twenty minutes and just listen to the noises and see the blood it’d be a lot harder to push the bullet into the steer’s head. It seems like speediness allows little time for reflection about things.

Deborah also felt that busyness had affected her relationships:

My job erodes into my communal life enormously.. Can I re-establish it when my job finishes?

Geraldine felt that her busy and demanding working life reduced her capacity for intimacy with the people she lived with:

My work is about family support and all that, but sometimes I’ve felt so unrelated when somebody here has been having a bit of a hard time and wanted to talk about it. I guess [I have been] almost feeling problem-saturated and in a way being saturated with difficult things.

What Happens When You Slow Down?

For Geraldine, slowing down was sometimes a painful experience, because it caused her to see the busyness which is such a fundamental and destructive aspect of our culture:

Partly as a result of having this slow time, I have seen far more acutely than I have seen before it’s really like a disease. It’s so common people don’t know they’ve got it and it’s really easy to feel stupid or redundant if you don’t have that disease, so [I am] almost seeing it more and more as the dominant paradigm.. the idea of “you have to do more and more” as the whole basis of how the culture keeps turning .. sometimes I find it deeply sickening… I’ve been doing a bit of weeping and the weeping is about my own frailty and occasionally feeling like, “why am I going back to my work?” I don’t feel like I even have anything to offer sometimes.

Grace spoke about a powerful experience she had of experiencing time in another way. This different experience of time was accompanied by changes in the way she experienced her body.

John: Can you Say something about the experience you had driving home the other night?

Grace: Yeah, that was amazing. What was so classic about it was I’d put my name down for some counselling and someone had actually wiped my name off because the counsellor was going away on holiday and she hadn’t had the time to ring me and tell me my appointment wasn’t happening and I had a sense of “well shit, I can’t wait another month. I’ll have to do something for myself”, and I’ve been incredibly anxious about time. I think a lot of it’s to do with some programming that I allowed myself to encounter around my work at RIC [the Rainforest Information Centre], around the urgency of the Earth dying, around the urgency that I felt of me doing something about that. ..so I feel like I’ve been anxious about time for a long time. I don’t like wearing a watch but I’m still entwined in the system that requires that sort of information and I’m often running late and I speed in my car because I’m trying to get home to my family and the other night I was driving home in my car and the road was straight in front of me, so it was quite visually impacting on me. It was linear and it had two borders around it, it was narrow and it was functional. .

John: Lots of straight lines in our society.

Grace: Yeah, and it kind of reminded me of a time line basically, and along that road I saw I had to get to The Channon by a certain time to pick you up, I was anxious that Tane was asleep and not hassling Kilty, I had to get to The Channon shop by a certain time and that was just in the next half hour. After that there was getting up at six in the morning and cooking for the market and getting everything together to take to market, but… couldn’t see beyond the next 500 metres which was representative of the next two hours and I noticed I was speeding and it was great, it just came to me . . . that this internal flutter that I sometimes have, it’s anxiety-producing, this anxiety that I’ll never get enough done and I’m always racing against this thing that’s in front of me–i.e., the road, you know, and this image came to me of instead of the road being vertical and in front of me, and bordered by these two sides of the road, reasonably narrow, I actually viewed it as horizontal and what happened was the line which made it narrow dissolved and it was basically this encompassing vision of the moment and its beauty. It’s hard to describe but all of a sudden I dropped ten kilometres in my speed, the moon was up, the stars were up and I didn’t have that border any more. It was like it was expansive. My moment was expansive and um. .

John: Physically you felt different?

Grace: Absolutely, and it was an amazing vision that I hope I can use a bit more – make that line horizontal and the edge dissolved. It didn’t exist and all that existed was that I was driving home and all I had to do was drive that road and it wasn’t a race that I could never win. It became an experience that I was involved in. I like that: not a race I could never win but an experience that I was involved in. That’s not bad is it? Did you get that?

Cindy pointed to the importance of treating each moment as it comes, rather than thinking about the future:

In the last few weeks I’ve had a sense of not being rushed, even though I’ve got a lot to do. If I actually take more notice of each moment and feel less worried about how I’m going to have enough time to do the next thing – because a common feeling I have is that whatever I’m doing, I’m thinking about the next thing I have to do, or all the things I’m not doing while I’m doing this thing. That really impinges on your experience…When you focus on the moment you don’t have that sense of there not being enough time

Deborah and Geraldine stressed the importance oft heir relationship with nature in slowing down and relaxing:

Deborah: I’m going to try a fortnight’s holiday by the beach and see what might change if I’m actually on the ground, really in nature. The best feeling lever get is out in nature. There’s no other way. Every morning I go out in the forest and I’m clearing leaf litter. It is like a different sense of time.. .and it’s not complex bush. I just wonder what it would be like if we lived in real nature.

I asked Deborah about a remark she made that when she was working in the forest near her house, she experienced the passage of time differently:

Maybe it’s more a completely different experience rather than a different experience of time.. very much like I’m watching the ground, the plants. I’m looking at things in detail I’m watching which birds come around … it’s probably more that its quality of experience is very different… and I have to wear a watch or I’d still be there at sunset… it could be that I just like a habits d call it my meditation. Its renewing, a lovely thing to do and I don’t like stopping it. Maybe some people meditate like that. I’ve never been in meditation like that…

When working in this way, she was less pressured by time constraints:

Deborah: Time not being like a time line any more. It’s not so much a problem any more.

Geraldine said she experienced a deep joy and relaxation when planting trees and clearing away weeds:

Geraldine: When I’m out hacking about in the forest with trees I planted 12 years ago and are really big now and there’s a sense of being god’s handmaiden and there’s a sense of us breathing each other that I find quite intimate and quite wonderful

Time and Education

Deborah on education and our perception of time:

I really think our concept of time is distorted by our education system.. .my experience was: be a good student, work hard, don’t think about whether I like it or not, go to school every day, 5 days a week, bus in and out– do that all through primary school, then go to high school, then go to university, then go to teachers’ college. I’ve had 19 years of producing things for other people, and not a lot of experience of learning that I’d organised for myself– a little bit, not a lot. I still have a sense of– I’ve two things from that: One is I almost need a deadline to get stuff done and the other thing is an enormous sense of relief not to have time deadlines. To me the greatest pleasure in life - one of the best times in life – I think this is why holidays work - is not to have to do anything by a particular time and as soon as a time frame starts to come into things I start to panic a bit… I don’t understand it. I wish we could understand it better but I really think school sets some patterns there that I don’t like.

John: By putting deadlines?

Deborah: It’s possibly quite comprehensive. By the fact that we’re doing stuff that isn’t our choice, by the fact that we’re regimented. The fact that we’re going to the same place every day, that we have timetables. If you look at the experience of a hunter-gatherer or people in other indigenous cultures, they have a very different experience of life in these years…and I don’t know where to go with that, but I’d really like to see some studies done on the impact of education and the way it’s set up on our view about life and time and the way we get things done, because I’d say most people in our society do things by a rush at the deadline–the exam style–which is probably the worst way to do things and I grapple with that one – not to put myself in the exam deadline mode.

Deborah pointed out how long it had taken her to realise what her education had done to her:

Deborah: I’ve been out of school for twenty years and I’m only just starting to understand…

She did not want Leah, her daughter, to suffer from the same kind of conditioning:

Deborah: The thing I’ve tried to teach Leah is, if you’ve got homework to do this weekend, do it Friday night. Her view of herself and whether she’s enjoying life is according to whether she’s got stuff to be done…

It seems clear from these interviews that the feeling of having too much to do in not enough time is a common and major problem in the lives of many people. It also seems clear that people feel they would like to change this situation but for various reasons, feel unable to do so. Due to their conditioning and societal pressures, they feel trapped in their busyness.

One of the explanations I had for some people choosing to be busy was that having a full schedule and being in a hurry can make people feel important. These interviews did not confirm this, but I still believe it to be a possibility. I could have asked specific questions about this.

The reasons for busyness which did emerge in these interviews included: the influence of upbringing (particularly religious), the desire to earn money, pressure from the rest of society, unquestioning conformity to social norms and the desire to avoid unstructured time.

Another thing which appears to emerge from these interviews is that for some people at least, their most intensely fulfilling experiences involve a release from their usual ways of experiencing time. In the cases talked about) a close connection with nature played a part.

It is also fair to say, based on these interviews, that many people find that their relationships with others suffer as a result of their own and other people’s busyness.

5. Inconclusion

5.1 Personal Reflections

I have worked at the Rainforest Information Centre (RIC) for the past several years. Much of my time has been spent editing the RIC’s quarterly magazine, World Rainforest Report. My work has been an expression of my concern for the Earth, but only rarely has it been an expression of my inner processes. In general it has seemed that there has been little opportunity for my personal expl6ration to find expression in my work, and this lack of integration has been a source of some disappointment.

Writing this paper has to some extent connected these two areas of my life, and may provide me with a way of integrating them more fully in the future.

The key is that in this project I have been looking at experience rather than just behaviour. It is the quality of my own and others’ experience that brings things to life for me. And it is only through looking at human experience, and what shapes it, that we can truly come to grips with the global ecological crisis, For lasting change to occur in the world, there ultimately have to be basic changes in the ways that human beings experience the world.

How we perceive the passage of time is crucial to how we experience the world, and I hope I have shown that it also plays a crucial role in determining how we treat the world. A greater understanding of this relationship between our experience of time and how we treat the Earth can help free us from patterns of behaviour which degrade the Earth and diminish the quality of our experience.

I invited friends to read and comment on drafts of sections of this paper. I also discussed the issues involved with people that I know. I received some criticism of my suggestion that busyness was compulsive in our society. It was pointed out to me that for many people, this is simply untrue. Its easy for someone in my position to make such judgements, but many people have little choice about how busy they are. I live on a community where collective ownership of land and infrastructure reduces costs significantly, and where the consumerist values of the dominant culture have to some extent been rejected. Many people, due to circumstances they have little control over, do not have such freedom and I came to realise that I had not been taking enough account of this. It was a reminder of how easy it is to make questionable generalisations based on one’s own experience.

I enjoyed doing the cartoons. Our relationship with time is a fertile ground for humour, because it has paradoxical and ridiculous aspects to it. The cartoons highlight some aspects of the issue, but not all the things I consider significant. This is simply because I had ideas for cartoons about some things but not about others.

Most of what I have said in this paper has been negative in the sense that it is an attempt at analysing what could be described as destructive behaviour, driven by motivations of which we are insufficiently aware. Yet in another sense, it is positive, since its aim is to increase my awareness, and possibly the awareness of others. Through greater awareness of what motivates our actions, we achieve greater freedom.

It may also seem from reading this paper that I see little of value in modern industrial society. Such an impression would not be entirely inaccurate. While some of our culture’s scientific and technological

achievements are impressive, I find it hard to be kindly disposed towards a way of life which threatens the survival of every species on Earth, and inflicts great deprivation on its own species.

However, I see my feelings on this as being largely beside the point, since the continued existence of industrial civilisation is not dependent on whether or not I approve of it. My intention here is not to convince anyone of the evils of our way of life. Rather, my aim has been to identify one aspect of our culture – our valuation of time – that could be changed to the great benefit of the Earth and of human beings.

The call for a slower pace of life is implicit in what I have to say. This can occur, both on an individual and a collective level, without a blanket rejection of our civilisation as a whole.

There were many other aspects of my topic which I would have liked to explore if I had had enough time. Here are some of them:

The connections between television, how we see time and how we treat the environment is one such issue. David Suzuki in his book Time to Change writes about the environmental implications of television’s effect on our perceptions (Suzuki 1993).
How gender affects time valuation.
What is time? I have not looked at what physicists and spiritual teachers have to say about this question. Rather than look at what time actually is, or whether there even is such a thing, I have concentrated on how people experience it. A deeper investigation of time would have been productive but more time consuming – assuming time is a thing which can be consumed – which I could only have established after a lengthy investigation.
An investigation of the relationship between Right Brain/Left Brain theories and our perception of time. Our culture tends to emphasise left-brain activities, which deal in symbols and logic. The right side of the brain, which deals with motor skills, creative thinking and intuition, is not as highly valued. I suspect that one’s perception of time differs depending on which hemisphere one is operating in, and that our preoccupation with line& time is linked to our tendency to gravitate towards the left side of the brain. In my work as a calligraphy teacher, I have often heard, at the end of a two-hour class, remarks like “Wow ! Time’s up already!” or “Where did the time go?”. Calligraphy is a predominantly right-brain activity, and it appears that while practicing calligraphy, time perception is altered.
I have looked very briefly at some indigenous cultures and how they experience time. Opposed to this I have talked about “our culture” and “the dominant ideology” without explaining myself I have been referring to western values found in Europe, North America, Australia and other former European colonies. More recently, Japan and other Asian countries have adopted similar attitudes in their efforts to emulate the west. I have not examined Asian attitudes towards time, and this would have been another rewarding area of study.
I would have liked to conduct more interviews. Initially I was reluctant to do first-hand research because I found the process of reading and thinking about the issue so absorbing that I didn’t want to do anything else. I also thought that conducting research would restrict the range of my inquiry. I avoided this simply by researching only one aspect of the things I wrote about. Further research could have explored the relationships people have with the future.
Most importantly, what do we do about the issue? I deal with some possibilities below. but this could be an area for much more in-depth study.

Looking for solutions raises the question: If positive change is to occur, will it come about as a result of structural changes in society as a whole, or as a result of changes in the values of its citizens? If, as appears likely, both types of change are called for, which is more important, and how are they related? Attempting to answer these questions raises another one that I am often confronted with in various forms:

Who is responsible for the way things are – individuals or society? Are people helpless victims of the social forces which shape their circumstances and values, or are individuals responsible for the state of society as a whole, since it is the sum total of individual choices which determines the nature of a society? I don’t know of any simple answer to this question.

If one considers the behaviour of an individual, her choices may be perfectly rational, given the circumstances in which they are made. If however, one steps back and observes the end result of numerous such choices by all the members of a society, one is likely to find that the collective impact is far from rational. Structural changes are therefore needed, because they affect the conditions under which individual choices are made. Currently, people often find themselves in situations where the only way for them to act with environmental sensitivity is to disregard their own self-interest. A sustainable society will remain a dream if its creation is dependent on such self-sacrifice.

Individual choices, on the other hand, will in part determine the kinds of structures adopted by a society. Ecologically sustainable structures will not survive unless they are socially sustainable as well, and they will not be socially sustainable unless they have solid support from most individuals in society.

While writing this paper, I listened to a radio interview of the American author of The Soul of Politics (unfortunately I did not record his name or any other details of the interview). He talked about the need for societal change, and the level of discontent that many people had with their lives. The interview was followed by a talk-back session and one listener phoned in with a challenging question: Yes, she said, many people on the fringes of society were dissatisfied with their lives, but what about people with secure incomes? How does one convince the people who are “just cruising” that social change is necessary? The author’s response: they ain’t just cruising. They may give that impression. They may have plenty of possessions, but they are short one essential thing. And the lack of it makes them as desperate as everyone else. They are short of time.

A shortage of time doesn’t just cause global impoverishment. It causes personal impoverishment as well. In choosing to be less busy, people will not only be helping the Earth. They will be helping themselves and each other.

5.2 Towards Solutions

It has been claimed that one should not point out problems unless at the same time one points towards solutions to those problems. I don’t accept this view, since I think that achieving true understanding of a problem is a necessary first step to solving it. Simply exploring the issue, therefore, is a positive step.

However, I would like to explore briefly some steps that may help change both our experience of time and our relationship with the Earth. I consider two types of change: personal change and structural change. As I have attempted to show above, the relationship between these two types of change remains unclear to me.

Structural Change

“Our resource decisions should be based on a time span that Suits ecological processes “, writes Joe Friend (1995 p.1).. “Instead we are basing them on political terms of3 -4 years”. To address this problem, Friend calls for the adoption of the principle of Intergenerational Equity - the principle that “our present generation should maintain the health, diversity and productivity of the environment or enhance it for the benefit of future generations’ ‘(ibid p.2).

Friend believes that in Australia, this principle should be enshrined in legislation on a state and federal level. This has already been done elsewhere:

In 1994 the Republic of Namibia drafted its Constitution with the guiding principles of ecosystems maintenance, ecological sustainability and Intergenerational equity. The Philippines Supreme Court also accepted Intergenerational Equity in a ruling to stop all unsustainable logging in 1992 [Friend 1995 p.2].

The next election, rather than the next generation, is foremost in the minds of the politicians who make decisions affecting such non-renewable resources as soils, old growth forests, oil and other minerals. This means that we respond to short-term crises rather than consider the long-term impact of our actions. One possible antidote is to lengthen the term of office of governments, so that they do not continually have the prospect of an election looming over their heads. Such a change could have its down side, however. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in office for quite long enough.

Another suggestion for structural change comes from Joanna Macy. She calls for the establishment of a “House of Spokespersons for the Future” in the United States:

Though without the power to pass laws, it would speak for the rights of coming generations. Its members, or “Spokes”, would be high-school seniors.. The House of Spokes would convene for a week three times a year, say in early January, spring and summer, evaluate Bills before Congress and suggest new legislation (Macy 1991 p.224).

But legislation will not by itself be enough to change our relationship with time. Politicians are capable of making short-term decisions and justifying them on the basis of lofty principles. Public awareness of the issues is essential if this is not to happen. For this reason, personal change is also essential.

Decentralisation also seems to me to be important. While thinking about this I imagined a community to be like a revolving wheel. The bigger the wheel, the faster it moves, and the more an object on the circumference is likely to fly off. The bigger a community, the faster it moves, and the more its members fly off in different directions. By living in smaller communities, the bonds which busyness tends to weaken will be made stronger, and the costs involved in busyness will be more apparent.

Personal Change

By this I mean change in the values, attitudes and perceptions of individuals. It can be achieved largely through a questioning of the forces which shape our decisions and attitudes, and through experiencing time in new ways.

There appears to be an unseen bias in the ways we make decisions about how to spend our time. We do so in ways which do not take enough account of what we lose. Any course of action involves a loss, because so long as we are engaged in that action, we are unable to engage in any of the other activities we could have chosen. By choosing to operate at a rapid pace, we are choosing not to nurture relationships. We are choosing not to operate at a speed which is in tune with the cycles of nature. We render ourselves unable to respond spontaneously to whatever comes up. By moving too quickly, we choose not to relax, or look within, or be in tune with our emotions. Yet, we are unaware that by choosing to be busy, we are choosing to renounce these things.

The loss of wilderness does not enter into the cost-benefit analyses that economists use to decide whether a proposed development is worthwhile because wilderness does not have an economic value. Similarly, when we make decisions that increase our level of busyness, we generally do not take enough account of the things we will lose. This is because we are thinking in ways which make no allowance for the things we are likely to forego. The money and other benefits gained through busyness are somehow of a different order to the things we lose through busyness, and so it does not occur to us to balance them against each other.

Economists have tried to attach monetary value to such things as clean air and wilderness, so that they can be compared with things such as cars, televisions and clothes. Their attempts have been unconvincing, because some things don’t lend themselves to being valued in this way. The situation with respect to decisions about our use of time is similar. I am sceptical about whether assigning monetary values to these things would be of any use. Other ways of making these decisions need to be used, and they need to make the non-monetary costs more obvious. I don’t know how this can be achieved; I do know that we need to take more account of the things we lose through busyness.

Next year, if there is sufficient interest in the idea, I plan to launch an International Day of inaction for the Earth. Briefly, it is based on the understanding that to stop the war now being waged against the Earth by the human race, fundamental changes are necessary in how we live. Doing things to “save the Earth” is not enough. We need to stop doing the things that are causing the problems in the first place (see Appendix).

The case against consumerism is made strongly in books such as Ted Trainer’s AbandonAffluence (Trainer 1988). This case needs to be made as strongly and as often as possible. It would seem that anything that encourages people to question their own motives for choosing to spend long hours earning money is a good thing. However, Ivan Illich cautions against promoting anti-growth views in an inappropriate context:

A well organised elite, vocally promulgating an anti-growth orthodoxy.. would be highly undesirable. By pushing people to accept limits to industrial output without questioning the basic industrial structure of modem society, it would inevitably provide more power to the growth-optimising bureaucrats and become their pawn (Illich 1973 p.1221.

This is another example of the complex relationship between personal and structural change, since Illich’s statement implies that some forms of opposition to the growth-fixation of our culture could actually strengthen industrialism.

Part of our problem appears to be that we become trapped into habitual ways of viewing things. We have become accustomed to thinking in extremely short periods of time. Joanna Macy, one of the few people to have stressed the connection between time perception and environmental issues, runs workshops on what she calls Deep Time. Participants imagine they are present at the Big Bang where it all began, and move through our evolution into human beings. One of her meditations in Deep Time concludes in this way:

You speak not only as yourself or for yourself. You were not born yesterday. You have been through many dyings and known in your heartbeat and bones the precarious, exquisite balance of life. Out of that knowledge you can speak and act. You will speak and act with the courage and endurance that has been yours through the long, beautiful aeons of your life story as Gaia (Macy 1991].

Anything which widens our outlook in this way is a valuable contribution to enriching our lives and making us more sensitive and compassionate, both with each other and with the Earth.

6. Appendix:

International Day of Inaction for the Earth

We are accustomed to react to problems by doing things to solve them. This can be used to avoid facing the fact that it was our actions that caused the problem to begin with.

In the conventional response to environmental problems, a preoccupation with taking action leads to the belief that in order to “save” forests or other threatened ecosystems, we need to initiate expensive, large-scale projects. This is a continuation of the kind of thinking that has caused the problems in the first place.

Consequently, I intend this project to have a practical outcome: to launch what will be called an “International Day of Inaction for the Earth”. The underlying assumption will be that threatened ecosystems are quite capable of looking after themselves, and that it is our intervention that causes them to be threatened. Basically, what we need to do is leave them alone.

Often, people are urged by many organisations to do things or donate money in order to help stop environmental destruction. Instead, supporters of the International Day of inaction will be asked to do nothing, in recognition of the fact that it is our actions that are the problem. An underlying assumption is that there is a fundamental flaw in an approach which advocates action to “save” threatened ecosystems, but allows a continuation of the behaviour which is causing the problem.

My initial task will be to contact individuals and organisations in several countries and ask them if they like the basic idea and whether they will help promote it. This will require sending them draft promotional material for the Day of Inaction. The subsequent course will be determined by the’ response to this initial contact.

A major attraction for people is that they will not be asked to do very much at all. Rather, they will be given a reason to feel good about doing nothing. Another advantage is that the Day of Inaction can be seen as an antidote to the seriousness of the public discussion of environmental issues.

Problems:

This is not an excuse to sit back and watch the Earth being ravaged. Nor it is a criticism of the many people who are working so hard to counteract the destructive actions of others. Rather, it is an invitation to look at the underlying causes of destruction. This needs to be made clear in any promotional material.
Millions of people may accept the invitation to be part of the Day, but how will I or anyone else know? It is not much use making a statement if nobody hears it. I need to come up with some easy, striking way in which people can register their support and involvement in the Day of Inaction. In the movie, Network, thousands of people regularly open their windows and yell at the top of their voices “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” That’s not quite what is needed here, but maybe something like that….

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Essay: Don't Just Do Something; Sit There – By John Revington

TIME AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Contents

A New Myth of the Fall

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

1. The Past:

A New Myth of the Fall

2. The Present

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 and the Environment

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. The Future

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

4. Research

Assumptions

The Interviews

Grace

Cindy

Deborah

Geraldine

The Connection between Busyness and the Environment

Level of Busyness

Motivation

The Importance of Being in Control

Busyness as Avoidance

Busyness and Age

The Impact of Busyness

What Happens When You Slow Down?

Time and Education

5. Inconclusion

5.1 Personal Reflections

5.2 Towards Solutions

Structural Change

Personal Change

6. Appendix:

International Day of Inaction for the Earth

Problems:

References