Barbara Leckie
Barbara Leckie is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. She is the author of Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time (Stanford UP, 2022). She is also the Founder and Coordinator of the Carleton Climate Commons and the Academic Director of Re.Climate: Centre for Climate Communication and Public Engagement.
A week ago the world outside my window in Ottawa was covered in snow. But today—in the month when people make resolutions, seek to realize resolutions, or reject resolutions—it is raining. I can hear the rain as I write. It would be a soothing sound if it did not also sound like the chronicle of crisis foretold. The sidewalks have come into view again, and beside them patches of grass and dirt are emerging between the pocked snow.
I’ve noticed how often in recent years commentaries on climate begin with a reflection on the weather where the writer is. Typically, one word captures it: unseasonable. And yet of course my weather, and yours, is irrelevant to the larger question of anthropogenic earth-system disturbance that is called climate change or global warming or, in some Inuit communities, uggianaqtuq. This earth-system disturbance upsets my sense of time and place and my desire to anchor what I know by reference to where I am.
Of the many ways to grapple with this issue, the one I have been thinking about recently has been time. Beyond the obvious rhetoric that we now hear almost daily with respect to its lack (we’re running out of time), its urgency (will we act in time?), and its deadlines (will this or that accord be signed before the final hour?), the idea of linear time that informs life in the Global North is often treated as a given. This point strikes me with particular force as resolutions, coupled with aspirations about productivity and improvement, serve to bolster the notion of progress that underpins linear time.
I have been trying to think about how progressive and linear ideas of time might be interrupted and how practices of interruption—in writing, thinking, action—might work toward reconfiguring that time. Which brings me to occupying time: living in time otherwise, against the grain of current temporal models. Consider a protester called Ann Cognito who walked from Calgary to Ottawa and set up a tent across the street from the Canadian Parliament to protest the government’s inaction on the climate crisis. Cognito’s action borrowed the Occupy Movement’s strategy of using space as a form of protest. Could time, I wondered, be leveraged in a similar way? That is: to live with, stay with, the refiguration of temporality that the climate crisis itself brings into view and “to imagine responses to the crisis calibrated to a different experience of time”?
The climate crisis, despite its challenge to prevailing understandings of time, has not, for the most part, generated new temporal thinking. If anything, linear time and ideas of progress are more entrenched than ever. What would it mean to change the time? What would it look like? What would it mean not to understand time in terms of past, present, and future? What difference would it make?
To be sure, temporal models are indelibly connected to the structural and infrastructural systems of which they are a part. Even as you read these words, you are being woven into a temporal model that I shape, yet cannot control. When I started working on climate about a decade ago, people were often baffled, saying to me: aren’t you an English professor? But for everyone—for scientists and engineers and policymakers, and for me—in addition to being a scientific fact and often a lived experience, climate is a story. And it is through stories that climate disruption becomes real to us. How those stories are told matters. Stories not only occur in time but they also shape our understanding of time. And time—the materiality of time, the malleability of time, the multiplicity of time—is crucial to climate action. What would happen if I were to interrupt the story you expect in ways that I have not done here? Could I make you more aware of the temporal forms that shape most of us who read blogs like this?
I have tried to imagine new ways of occupying time that depart from the clock, the deadline, the too-late, the not-enough-time, the hurry, and the constantly ringing alarm. These concepts make the climate crisis vivid, and I certainly don’t dispute the urgency. But I’ve come to be wary of the forward rush, the dreams of technological breakthroughs, the apocalyptic future-gazing. Instead I prefer to pause before I write. Look out of the window. Notice the rain. And ask myself: how might I live and write differently in time?
Barbara Leckie is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa. She is the author of Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time (Stanford UP, 2022). She is also the Founder and Coordinator of the Carleton Climate Commons and the Academic Director of Re.Climate: Centre for Climate Communication and Public Engagement.
CALL TO ACTION:
Think about how time might be occupied differently. What might Occupy Time look like? What might it accomplish?
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