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Michelle Bastian argues that humanity’s execution of time and coordination causes society to lose focus on the long-term nature of the environmental world. She mainly investigates how our concept of time undermines the perceivied harm of long-term but urgent issues like climate change, and how might it be changed to better reflect the truth? Bastian proposes a new concept of time that is centered around an ever-changing visible reality to show the world what is truly going on around them.

Bastian begins by portraying how the performative nature of “clock time” (Bastian 24) may be preventing humanity from seeing the true struggles of both society and the ecological world. Most people see time as a "quantitative measurement” (Bastian 25), a tool used to gauge the performance of a specific action or task. In this way clocks and “clock time” are a tool to coordinate life and relations. One of humanity's biggest strides in time-keeping is the introduction of “universal” time. A homogenous time system that the whole world uses with offsets for different zones. This allows everyone, even those continents away, to be coordinated with one another. This feat adds to the illusion of the complete performative nature of time, life is scheduled down to the minute or even seconds in some cases. This makes people prioritize items that must be completed or taken care of within a set window, this is where our sense of “urgency” comes from. Importantly, this sense of urgency doesn’t take into account the importance of the action, only that it exists.

In Bastian’s words “clock time emphasizes continuity and similarity across all moments and projects an empty and unending future.” (Bastian 33). With the amount of decisions of where to put our time into everyday, our long-term issues particularly the climate crisis fall into the background as something that can always be done later. In reality, a lot of these long-term tasks have an interest, the longer we wait to work on them the longer it will take to fix them than it did if we started earlier. Take personal hobbies, you almost always have a ton of ideas but most don’t have the time to actually execute on them. However this should not be interpreted as being unable to complete a task rather “Our conventions for coordinating ourselves—for telling the time—are thus simply not adequate in the current context.” (Bastian 24) This is where the illusion part comes into play, very rarely do we ever stick to a set-performance. As a society we tell ourselves that we will perform up to a certain standard but we never actually meet it.

Bastian also argues that time is giving us positive reinforcement for our misplaced sense of urgency. In multiple instances Bastian quotes philosophers and environmentalists to emphasize the “demonic fast-forward.” (Bastian 23) We as a society think that we are moving extremely quickly with technology and productivity. But in the context of the environment and the ice-caps melting we are moving glacially slow while nature is moving rapidly.

With all this in mind she proposes a “clock” based around the lifespan of leatherback turtles. Although this is unconventional, it checks all the boxes for what the ideal condensed clock should look like. She bases this clock off of Derrida’s “originary performatives” where we have to rupture a system in order to show and inspire other, potentially more sensical, methods. The turtle clock works by tracking natural indicators of the turtles from population, nesting behaviors, lifespan and others, This turns the turtles into “storytellers” (Bastian 42) of nature. Because they usually move slowly, rapid changes in these indicators would spike a new sense of urgency that is missing from our current time system.

Further this system brings together multiple worlds, if a government change was to impact nature it would immediately cause alarms since our time keeping system would become extremely unpredictable, and people would notice. More importantly, it’s not something that could be ignored or cheated anymore. Although this system of time may not be entirely sensical, this “rupture” will hopefully inspire others to integrate how nature reacts to our actions into their lives. Bastian herself says that turtle time may be incommensurable to regular time, in that it is almost incomparable. However it is this incommensurability that allows society to break out of the illusion we’ve caught ourselves in. All the problems of time have gone unnoticed because they’re relative, having a new system to compare to will finally allow us to see the problems of the old one.

Although Bastian herself notes that clock-time is one of the most vital systems of humanity, it is important that we reflect on even the most integral concepts to ensure that they are truly representing reality. Time is unfortunately a system of promises that can be skirted, and in most ways doesn’t represent the world outside of humanity. By complementing our current system with one centered around the true reality of our multi-species and diverse planet, we can better represent and stop the harmful changes we are causing.