The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
national parks, and legislative protections for wilderness and the environment. The past is always alive in our present, but, because the clock calls us to our next appointment, we rush right past it.7
Future Time
American presentism also keeps us from a careful consideration of the future. College is, of course, a preparation for what comes next, and—despite the immediate demands of our clocks and watches—college students worry about the future a lot. But that future is usually individual and instrumental: We’re more concerned about preparation for graduate school or a career than about the quality of our communities or the fate of the Earth. Like other Americans, college students aren’t very skilled at imagining the long future, or making collective plans for the world they want to live in as adults, partners, parents, and citizens. Most Americans tend not to be very mindful of future generations, and when we are, we often ask, as devout utilitarians do, “What has the future ever done for us?” This shortsightedness makes it difficult, if not impossible, to confront systemic issues like urban planning, poverty, environmental degradation, or global weirding. That’s why, as Robert Paehlke says, “Time horizon may be the most important distinction between environmentalists and others.”8
As a consequence, we don’t think much about the future as something we create today, both in our activity and our inactivity. We don’t notice that we are making history with each of our everyday actions. As a result, we collectively create a future that few of us really want to live in. Like it or not, what we do either reinforces ideas and institutions today, or transforms them for tomorrow. When we approach our studies as tools for civic engagement, we learn how to change the world. When we explore possibilities for environmental responsibility in our own lives, we provide possibilities for future citizens, and so we create a future with our examples as a part of its usable past. Alternately, when we settle for a present so stressful or unpleasant that it drives us to waste time with escapist TV, we create a future with more commercials and commercialism and couch potatoes, reinforcing images of people and society that often contradict our deepest values.
Nature’s Time
Even if our alarm clocks located us in a stream of historical continuity, they still wouldn’t connect us to biological or ecological time. Clocks ignore nature’s time—the slow time of geology and evolution, the long cycles of prairies and forests and oceans. When we plan our lives only by clock time, we forget nature’s rhythms and begin to assume that our time is the only time. Even though most natural rhythms are cyclical, Americans believe in linear progress with practically inevitable human improvement. In nature’s time, it’s progress when the sun comes up each morning, and progress again when it goes down; progress when spring sprouts every year, and once again when bright colors announce fall. In nature’s time, efficiency isn’t measured by speed, but by sustainability and regeneration—the ability to extend the extravagant generosity of life to another generation. When the human time line meets nature’s time circle, however, it increasingly results in extinctions, which are literally killing time for other species.
In nature’s time, minutes and seconds don’t mean much. We think we’re on time when we arrive at the appointed hour, but nature might think otherwise. It takes nature about five hundred years to make one inch of topsoil, so when we live in a way that depletes soil faster than that (and we do), we are not “on time,” no matter how fast or productive we might be. When we live in a way that threatens the ecosystem services that our descendants will need, we’re more out of time than on time.
Sacred Time
Whether or not gods exist, people and cultures feel a supernatural relationship to the natural world. It may be Allah or Yahweh, the Corn Mother or the Rainbow Serpent, but many people believe that something supernatural creates the world, and that our time on Earth is a divine gift in a purposeful cosmos. For example, the Bible suggests that the universe is the work of a creator, and that time is God’s gift, so that an individual’s time is not just hers, but God’s as well. If that’s true, perhaps Thoreau was right when he claimed that you can’t kill time without injuring eternity.9
Many religious traditions structure time to point to such supernatural connections. In earlier Christian cultures, people told (and literally tolled) God’s time with Angelus bells, which provided a religious frame for the day by calling people to prayer morning, noon, and night. In contemporary Islamic cultures, people orient themselves toward Mecca and pray at appointed times. All over the world, people are called to recognize the holy at traditional times in everyday life. But when bells ring at American colleges today, few students turn to prayer or contemplation. Sacred time used to be a moment for people to consider how to “redeem the time”—how to make ordinary time extraordinary, luminous with possibilities for good. Calls to prayer and holidays made time for people to listen to the sacred, and to apply the wisdom of holiness to their everyday lives. Although many religious Americans—and some college students—still take time for prayer and church services, we often see these rituals as perfunctory obligations, rather than as an opportunity to imagine a better world. For most college students, Sunday is just the second day of the weekend. On campus, it’s the day to recover from Saturday’s bacchanalian rituals and—in the evening—to start reading for next week’s classes. But it could be different.10
We could break out of our commonsense construction of time to discover new connections between past and future, nature and culture. Alarmed by the presentism and parochialism of America’s culture of time, we could begin timely conversations that would help us reshape our personal and cultural perspectives on how to live sustainably for all time. Such a movement to consider time—the past, the present, the future, the natural, and the sacred—in its entirety, could literally save all time.
Shit Happens: The Call of Nature
In the morning, after the alarm sounds, nature calls. The bladder and bowels fill and send nerve signals to the brain, saying, “Do something!” It’s one of the few times in a day that Joe and Jo College are conscious of nature’s influence on their lives. So college students creak out of bed, shuffle into the bathroom, and relieve themselves. Flushing the toilet, we put nature behind us, and we don’t think much of it. But the toilet is a place where the body’s plumbing meets the plumbing of culture and nature, so it’s a rich ecological niche.
Nature’s Free Lunch: Ecosystem Services
| Provisioning | Making stuff so people can make do. |
|---|---|
| Sunshine | Nature’s furnace and lighting system—good for tanning, but also for photosynthesis: the conversion of sunbeams to food. |
| Plants | Nature’s alchemists, converting sunshine to food (and spices and pharmaceuticals) by a process of photosynthesis, which also releases oxygen—a substance that is handy for our breathing. They also generate other useful materials (cotton, wood, etc.) and energy. |
| Animals | Nature’s meatpacking plants, converting plants—some of which humans can’t digest—into protein. |
| Rain, snow, etc. | Nature’s cleanser, soft drink, and liquid recreation—also habitat for aquatic plants and animals, and a necessity for land-based flora and fauna, too. |
| Oceans |
Nature’s primary habitat—from phytoplankton to fish to great blue whales. Source of most of the seafood we eat.
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