Sustainability: It's About Time

The notion of "sustainability" is, at its essence, about time -- an intergenerational Golden Rule that promises that today's actions will ensure tomorrow's prosperity -- but most people's notions of "time" aren't particularly sustainable. We waste time, run out of it, and try futilely to manage it better. "Time is money," Benjamin Franklin declared in Poor Richard's Almanac, and many of us seem hellbent to maximize time's value, producing -- and consuming -- more and more along the way.

A new book brings the many linkages between time and sustainability into sharper focus. About Time: Speed, Society, People and the Environment is a collection of very readable essays compiled by the U.K. think tank Forum for the Future. Collectively, they explore the issue of time and its relationship to the environment, the economy, and society.

Only a relative handful of trends explicitly address linkages between the temporal and the sustainable -- time banks, slow food, and land trusts come immediately to mind -- and it's always a bit sobering to be reminded how out of synch we've become in our just-in-time, multitasking, everything-on-demand, 24/7 lifestyles. (And how dissatisfied: "Ironically, both the overworked and the unemployed share the sense that their position is involuntary," writes Geoff Mulgan in his essay, "The Arrival of Time Politics.")

Jay Griffiths' chapter called "Living Time" drives this home. Griffiths contrasts the modern Western mindset and its reliance on clocks and Greenwich Mean Time with culture where time is more flexible and associated with the environment in which people live. Indigenous peoples' approach to time, for example, is "unpredictable, demanding flexibility, fluidity, and quick coordination."

The Karen [people of Thailand] always know where they are and when they are, how far they are from sunset or home: for time and distance are connected in the Karen language: d'yi ba -- soon -- means, literally "not far away." Sunset, therefore, could be expressed as "three kilometers away," because the only way of traveling is to walk, which takes a known length of time.

A central theme running through many of the essays is the importance of individual choice in determining our relationship with time. "Our experience of time is very much conditioned by how much choice we feel we have in the way we spend our days," writes Vidhya Alakeson in the book's conclusion.

The chances are that an employee whose boss bombards him with email at five o'clock on a Friday evening feels very differently about the efficiency of the technology from a freelancer who has greater say over when to respond and when to shut down his computer. The freedom to choose whether we live our lives in the fast or the slow lane and the freedom to move from one to the other as our lives change is the real issue underpinning our fraught relationship with time.

Could it be that our relationship to sustainability is similarly constrained by a perceived lack of freedom to make choices? Perhaps it's the assumption that "becoming sustainable" limits our options that's gotten so many of our leaders stuck on maintaining a status quo that nearly everyone intuitively senses can't last.