The Anthropocene invokes the multiple temporalities through which organisms, ecologies, and environments unfold—from the immediacy of the present moment to the sedimentary timescales of the geological record. Viewed from the perspective of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation, these organisms, ecologies, and environments, including the planet’s human occupants, would benefit if we took a view of time that was more-than-human in scope and scale.
This paper demonstrates how design, creative practice, and technology can be used to make legible human and more-than-human timescales through local, planetary, and celestial imaginaries that are congruent with the Anthropocene term. It first discusses the various anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic phenomena that are used for time keeping, both human and non-human. It then goes on to describe a pilot project in Leighton Moss RSPB Nature Reserve in Cumbria, which included the design and installation of a network of unattended light sensors and a timepiece that uses observations of environmental light to imaginatively situate the day-to-day life of the reserve within various temporal scales, from embodied, diurnal, circalunar, and annual to the sedimentary timescales of the geological record. Through this, the paper proposes a hybrid form of timekeeping that brings together human time standards and environmental observation could help align the temporal imaginaries of human societies with ecological and planetary processes, while highlighting the presence of potentially damaging anthropogenic processes, such as artificial light at night.
Such hybrid forms of timekeeping may help foster meaningful relationships between people and the environment, facilitate day-to-day awareness of the presence and extent of disruptive anthropogenic processes in our environments, and provide an imaginative framework for thinking about time and life in an Anthropocene context.