Redesigning Time: Exploring Natural Rhythms and Political Calendars

David Farrier examines how “wild clocks”—the biological and ecological rhythms that living beings use to coordinate their lives with the greater cycles of the Earth—are falling out of synch with each other in our age of ecological crisis. Traversing the Future Library in Norway, Sami reindeer herds in Scandinavia, and oyster colonies in Scotland’s Firth of Forth, David considers the different ways time is made between people, more-than-human beings, and place—and wonders if the disordering of our wild clocks offers an opportunity to understand anew how time can be an expression of kinship.

Read the essay. 

Discover more stories from our latest print edition, Volume 5: Time. 

Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath.

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