The Time of Progress and the Times of the Planet

During the covid pandemic (now endemic) many people experienced a different sense of time than that of the 24 hour GMT. This is a good starting point for understanding and experiencing non-chronological time (or the time of progress). Many religious traditions and rituals help to focus us on alternative understandings of time: sabbath practices, meditation, yoga, and rituals that involve psychoactive substances, just to name a few. It is also the case that chronological time does not map on to human embodied experiences of the world, nor that of other earth bodies. Might we turn the “slow down” into an opening for experiencing planetary times: the times of seasons, of rivers, of forests and of other animals on the planet? Perhaps such thinking and acting can help us to mitigate the problems caused by the current climate crisis.

Whitney Bauman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University in Miami, FL. He is also co-founder and co-director of Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, a non-profit based in Berlin, Germany that holds public discussions over social and ecological issues related to globalization and climate change. His areas of research interest fall under the theme of “religion, science, and globalization.” He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Humboldt Fellowship. His publications include: Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (Columbia University Press 2014), and co-authored with Kevin O’Brien, Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty: Tackling Wicked Problems (Routledge 2019). He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively entitled, Developing a Critical Planetary Romanticism: CPR For the Earth.