Introduction: Time, Earth and Globality

There never was a historical time in which geological accretion, seasonality, diurnal cycles and earthly life unfolded harmoniously. And, for most of the last 200,000 years, humans were enmeshed, often precariously, within cosmological and ecological worlds without linguistic designations for “time”. Where time has been a nameable category of existence, within human migrations, settlements, societies and civilizations, it has been constructed, imposed, disrupted and essentially contested.