Temporalities of living with the climate crisis


Angeline Letourneau, University of Alberta

One of the increasingly recognized impacts of climate change is the threats it poses to human well-being, but not all climate change impacts emerge in the same way or at the same time. Some climate-related events emerge abruptly, others occur slowly over time, and there are increasingly multiple impacts that occur concurrently and in different combinations to create compounding risks. Acute disasters like forest fires or hurricanes tend to occupy headlines and overshadow public conversation about climate change. However, disasters can also be chronic, occurring over longer timelines like melting permafrost, shifting vegetation and wildlife ranges, rising sea levels, or coastal erosion. The different temporalities of simultaneously occurring disasters complicate efforts to address their impacts through adaptation and mitigation. Furthermore, the mismatch and interaction between these multiple and complex temporalities of the biophysical and sociocultural worlds further perpetuates catastrophic environmental changes. The theoretical separation of biophysical and sociocultural time reflects more of the ontological and epistemological traditions of sociology than any real divide between the two in practice. The ontological conceptualization of time is intimately tied to the discipline’s ontological understanding of nature, which frequently sees the natural world as static and tangential to the social. Introducing our theoretical understanding of time back into nature is essential to fully understand the social causes and consequences of climate change and how these are related to natural temporal scales. Perceptions of day-to-day weather, severe acute events, or long-term climatic change have been the primary focus of social science research on climate change. Perceptions of events occurring on temporal scales between these two extremes (e.g. annual-to decadal-scale variability) are less understood. This reflects the dominance of a primarily sociocultural approach to conceptualizing time in sociology, a tradition that has yet to fully reconcile with the temporal scales of the biophysical world, where much change occurs between these two temporal extremes. This paper seeks to reconcile this gap between sociocultural and biophysical understandings of time. We extend the recent theoretical interventions by Coleen Ruwet and others on developing a socio-ecological theorization of time by examining the interplay of different temporalities and social understandings of addressing climate change and other ecological crises. We draw on insights from various studies of northern Canada and Atlantic Canada to develop a conceptual scheme of intersecting temporalities of climate change that can help guide further research and discussions about climate action. This paper advances new avenues through which climate change and its impacts on human well-being can be understood and better anticipated. By moving beyond our social tendency to ignore the full temporal complexity of Earth’s natural systems, we offer new strategies for climate change sociology that incorporate this complexity.

Non-presenting author: Mark C.J. Stoddart, Memorial University

This paper will be presented at the following session: