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Sustained Temporal Development
Sustained Temporal Development
Sustained Temporal Development
‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present with-
out compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’
(WCED, 1987: 43)
TIME & SOCIETY copyright © 2001 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), VOL.
10(2/3): 351–366 [0961-463X; 2001/09;10:2/3;351–366; 019373]
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related political debate are focused upon grasping this very new way of thinking
in a world in which we are trained to separate issues and to specialize.
It is the intention of this article to demonstrate that we may gain a better
understanding of, and improve, the concept of sustainable development by
explicitly utilizing a temporal perspective. Specifically, a temporal perspective
is a prerequisite for the main task of understanding the linkages and networks
within and between the three dimensions – ecological, economic, social. To
realize the full potential of time research for the concept of sustainable develop-
ment I will utilize arguments from some of the first contributions to address
sustainable development through a temporal perspective (such as Grove-White,
1997; Hofmeister, 1997; Vercelli, 1998). Understandings of time as linear,
homogeneous and even reversible have hindered the realization of this poten-
tial. The concept of sustainable development needs temporal diversity to be
taken as a starting point. Thus, I will use the timescape framework Barbara
Adam has elaborated (Adam, 1998) since it allows a whole array of diverse
temporalities to be understood.
The Brundtland Report’s definition of sustainable development is promin-
ently linked to an underlying normative rationale of intergenerational and intra-
generational equity. There is consensus on this normative framework across the
broad range of different authors and lines of sustainable development within
economics known as the soft versus hard sustainability controversy (Ecological
Economics, Special Issue 1997; Held and Nutzinger, 2001) and in the public
debate (Enquête Commission, 1994a, 1994b, 1998).
Agriculture has not only formed the large-scale spatial landscape, but has also
changed the basic way of life and reshaped timescapes. Consider, for example,
the beginning of agriculture in central Europe. The rhythm of seasons on farm-
land is different from that in forests; new species had a chance to spread with
their specific eigenzeiten; cattle and other domesticated animals gained a bigger
share of the cycles of nature; storing food changed cultural rhythms, etc. But
still the timescapes were basically structured by the interplay of natural
rhythms, specifically day-and-night, moon-cycles, seasons of the year and the
corresponding religious and other cultural rhythms, rhythms of generations, etc.
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narrow spectrum of seeds, are used world-wide – degrading and finally destroy-
ing the long inherent times of evolutionary processes of local varieties (Lahmar
et al., forthcoming). Growth hormones speed up the growth of pigs, cattle and
other livestock (Postler, 1999). Agriculture is now close to the linear clock-time
of the industrialized parts of the economy, which so successfully changed other
parts of the economy and modern ways of life.
This type of agriculture nowadays looks like ‘normal’ agriculture and is,
accordingly, labelled as conventional farming; but it has been shaping agricul-
tural timescapes for no longer than two to three generations in the industrialized
countries. It is basically a non-sustainable type of economy and way of living,
since using more energy from outside the system than natural energy from the
sun is in contradiction to authentic primary production and is non-sustainable. It
produces a broad range of related effects, usually described as ‘side effects’ but
which are actually an integral part of this type of agriculture and food pro-
duction which tries to control time and space. Let me illustrate this with three
examples.
First, conventional farming uses a broad range of chemicals. Farming cannot
keep these chemicals in closed cycles, whereas in other industrial processes they
can be contained to minimize interference with the environment. Instead, it is
the direct intention to apply them to the fields and to animals and plants. This
implies a potential for a broad spectrum of risks. Elaborate methods of risk
analysis and management are intended to keep risks within specified bound-
aries, but these methods usually ignore temporalities and use linear time as their
rationale, seeing time basically as a homogeneous entity. This is the main
reason why hormone-disrupting effects of chemicals are overlooked. Very low
doses, considered harmless by conventional wisdom, may have severe effects if
they interfere with sensitive times in breeding cycles. These endocrine effects
cannot be detected with standard procedures since they typically do not show up
directly in the newborn offspring of the respective species. Instead, impacts are
often time-delayed, affecting fertility only in the next generation, or causing dis-
orders of various types even in the second and third generations. So long-term
impacts are passed down from one generation to the next (see Colborn et al.,
1996, a book which represented a break-through in bringing these phenomena to
attention and boosted research on the topic). Even after a heated debate on how
the narrow scope of normal risk-analysis levels out the potential effects of tim-
ing by using average numbers, the related shortcomings are not well understood
in the community. For example, an overview of the state-of-the-art by a leading
German expert on eco-toxicology totally ignores the core of the timing argu-
ment (Greim, 1998).
A second example (see Adam, 1998: Ch. 5) is how within an industrialized
time-perspective all times are seen as equal – homogeneous, linear, even
reversible – and the rhythms of nature can be ignored. Then practices of feeding
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farming masked the effects of soil degradation which was widespread at the
very same time (Norse et al., 1992; Pimentel et al., 1995). Productivity is still
increasing so that the effects of soil degradation will be visible only after a very
long time lag. This delays reaction to the degradation process – and therefore,
further worsens the eventual situation (Pimentel et al., 1995; see the analogous
effect of the use of chlorofluorocarbons [CFCs] and their impact on the ozone
layer in the higher atmosphere/stratosphere, Kümmerer, 1996). Compensation
for losses in primary soil fertility is non-sustainable in itself since it is not based
on the regenerative influx of solar energy but is heavily dependent on the use of
fossil oil and its derivatives. This process not only degrades soils directly but
also degrades their regenerative potential and thus changes regeneration times.
Soils are easily degraded within decades, but it takes hundreds and thousands of
years for them to be renewed (Kümmerer et al., 1997).
Actors in agricultural systems cannot acknowledge these effects ex ante if
they see agriculture in a decontextualized perspective. They tend to react when
negative ‘side effects’ accumulate in time and can no longer be ignored. In
such a perspective it is difficult to work according to the criteria of sustainable
development (Enquête Commission, 1994b: 42ff.). A timescape perspective,
however, emphasizes a dynamic view that also takes long-term effects into
account and that can help to improve the institutional framework in order to
foster sustainable use of soils (The Tutzing Project ‘Time Ecology’, 1998;
Odendahl, 2001; German Advisory Council on Global Change, forthcoming).
Human activities shape not only landscapes but also timescapes. How does the
timescape framework advance our understanding of sustainable development?
Do we have ideas on the temporal features, the specifics of timescapes of sus-
tainability and their characteristic markers and signposts to guide us?
Perception of time is usually dominated by the measurement of time through
clock-time, to the point where the measurement of time is seen as time itself. In
this perspective time is one ‘entity’ to be understood according to the principles
of mechanical time, each bit of time homogeneous, in a linear succession and
even without direction and reversible. Sustainable development is not seriously
relevant in such a view. If a problem happens it can be reversed, since time does
not really matter: time-scales, changes in quality as a consequence of path-
dependencies, latency, changes in regeneration potential and the like are not
covered within this perspective. Each negative effect can be reversed or com-
pensated for with resources and effort. So, in principle, there is no basic
problem of sustaining the prerequisites to meet the needs of generations yet to
come; there is merely a trade-off between costs and benefits.
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(1) Energy Coal, crude oil, natural gas and atomic energy allowed a high-
density energy path to be established. This stimulated a development in which
context is either ignored or plays only a marginal role. Architecture, infra-
structure, transport, settlements, farming, tourism, in short the whole fabric of
society in industrialized countries is adapted to that type of energy use. There-
fore, patterns of timescapes in industrialized countries have specific features –
like the dominating levels of speed, de-contextualized architecture, etc. – com-
pared to other countries. Within the industrialized part of the world there are also
differences in the level of use of non-sustainable energy resources.
At the start of a transition from the short period of a high-density energy path
to a more sustainable energy path we have to innovate timescapes in which the
use of the rhythms of sun, wind, water, biomass production and the like will be
normal at the level of modern societies. This will not be just a technical affair in
which we pay specialists for their professional, efficient work to invent and
apply the technologies needed for this transition, just like switching light on and
off. It is not a question of applying isolated technologies while everything else
goes on along the former path of development; we also have to think in terms
of context-dependent, embedded technologies and societal structures at an
advanced scientific and technological level. It will be a major change in the
whole of the ‘hard’ infrastructure as well as in the ‘soft’ infrastructure of habits,
modes of thinking, institutional arrangements, etc. It could give us a chance of a
soft landing, since current efforts for such a change have time for an intense
trial-and-error process. Perpetuating the still dominant non-sustainable energy
path could lead to a situation in which we will run short of time for a transition,
increasing the probability of a hard landing.
Traffic signs can show us the direction on our journeys in the landscapes and
cityscapes. Likewise, insight into the dual capacity of the sun – being the basic
sustainable provider of energy and its basic rhythms (Adam, 1990: 72 ff.) – can
guide us in the Great Transformation (term taken from Polanyi, 1957) ahead to
paths of sustainable development and their timescapes.
(2) Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) On the one hand we are experi-
encing the first efforts to develop a sustainable energy path. At the same time
we know that the promises of a de-contextualized, monotemporal perspective
are still quite strong since the potentials of this kind of science and technology
are far from reaching their limits. Green GMOs are just one prominent example.
Knowledge of the basics of life at the micro level can be used within an evolu-
tionary perspective. In doing so it may be very useful to improve our under-
standing of biodiversity as an integral part of temporal diversity, but these
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Taken together, we know that a timescape perspective will help us to gain a new
understanding of context. For everything in the world there is a time and a place,
as the old saying tells us; and this is true of the transformation to a sustainable
culture at the beginning of the 21st century. We can see the first signs of such a
transformation within the political sphere. Reading the somewhat strangely
gendered phrasing of ‘man-made inputs’ as ‘human-made impacts’, the follow-
ing general rule for sustainable development is such an indicator, written by an
Enquête Commission of the German federal parliament:
There must be a balanced ratio between the time scale of man-made inputs to, or
interventions in, the environment and the time scale of natural processes which are
relevant for the reaction capacity of the environment. (Enquête Commission,
1998: 46)
02_T&S articles 10/2 2/8/01 12:00 pm Page 364
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