Urgency Across Cultural Timescapes Informs Climate Change Vulnerability

This chapter approaches time as a cultural construct that co-constitutes space and takes on scale, geometry, rhythm, and direction through societal narratives about change. Humans derive a foundational sense of security – ontological security – from telling stories that can remember, predict, and provide concepts to produce desired change. Across cultures, efforts to hypothesize, test, and verify causal processes have led to the emergence of a multiplicity of cultural narratives of time, each with their own distinct temporal-spatialities. The Australian Everywhen, the Mayan calendar, the geological timescale, Biblical time, and a multitude of such cosmological narratives each express a kind of large-scale coordinate system which people derive a sense of security from knowing the present and the conditions and trajectories along which change happens. In the multiple possible geometries of space-times across cultures, there is a need to understand that the scaling of time and space to navigate rapid and global processes of change happens within particular cultural narratives. In the meeting of diverse cultures under global change, there is a risk that one spatiotemporal narrative is imposed over others. Finding transformative pathways involves listening to, remembering, and developing new narratives for urgency.