Source: https://www.noemamag.com/a-clock-in-the-forest/
Highlights
In the winter of 1999, the botanists James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schlusser published an article in which they observed that students tend to pay more attention to animals than plants. Arguing that “plant blindness” is detrimental to scientific literacy and the well-being of flora, they followed up with a campaign to overcome this cognitive bias, distributing more than 20,000 posters to schools across the United States. Their efforts resonated with the popular media and inspired dozens of academic papers that sought to explain the phenomenon in terms of human biology and culture.
Research has shown that we don’t consider plants to be important mostly because they grow close together and don’t appear to move. As Wandersee and Schlusser wrote, “Static proximity is a visual cue humans use to group objects, so individual plants and different plant species tend to be de-emphasized.” A vine takes hours to turn toward sunlight, a bristlecone hundreds of years to mature. Each organism’s clock — its sense of time — is so different from ours that we can’t even sense it.
In other words, what we call plant blindness is really time blindness: an obliviousness to temporal frames of reference that deviate from our own.1
Considered in these broader terms, the temporal mismatch has profound implications not only for plants but also for nonhuman animals and ecosystems. In our blundering time blindness, we recklessly disrupt the rhythms of most life on Earth.
Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves. We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way. (Mumford astutely described clocks as “power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.”)
Synchronization is failing and species face extinction. Light- and temperature-sensitive organisms are migrating, hatching or maturing when other species or conditions they depend on are out of sync with them. Driven by the master clock of human civilization, we are wreaking havoc on the myriad clocks that sustain the biosphere.
This problem is exacerbated by human impatience. To increase the rate of food production to a level that can sustain our rapidly growing population, we have been clearcutting old-growth forests and loading soils with manufactured fertilizer for many decades. Ecosystems made resilient by biodiversity are replaced with monoculture farming.
In many Indigenous calendars, traditional lifeways and environmental phenomena are explicitly identified. For instance, when the Haida talk about the time corresponding to January/February on the Gregorian calendar, they speak of hlgidguun kongaas, or “Canada goose moon,” referring to the geese flying down the coast. February/March is known as taan kongaas, or “black bear moon,” commemorating the time when bears emerge from hibernation.