Waking Up to Nature

So let’s think about some of the environmental impacts of your new life at college, some of the ways that your everyday life will both reflect and affect America’s ecological designs. On a normal day here at St. Olaf, you’ll wake up in a bed in your own room. If you’re like most college students, you’ll need an alarm clock to rouse you. The bed and the room and the alarm clock are designs. They’re among the ways that Americans shape nature for their own comfort and convenience. They seem “natural,” because we’ve always lived among rooms and beds and clocks. But they’re not, in fact, natural. They’re cultural—a part of America’s culture of nature.

An alarm clock, for example, reflects the social construction of natural time. A day is, naturally, the time it takes the earth to complete one rotation on its axis. It’s planetary and it’s solar, including a period of light and a period of darkness. But there’s little reference to this natural phenomenon on the face of our alarm clocks. For all practical purposes, an American day is more cultural than natural. The digits on most alarm clocks run in two twelve-hour sequences, with a tiny red dot denoting the difference between forenoon and afternoon. We are a culture of clock time; we live, as we say, by the clock.

Nature doesn’t. In nature's time, the minutes and seconds of an alarm clock don't mean much. Nature's time includes the long cycles of prairies and forests and oceans. And in nature's time, efficiency isn't measured by speed, but by sustainability and regeneration—the ability to maintain the extravagant generosity of life over a long time. As a measure of biological time, therefore, we might take the amount of time it takes to make an inch of topsoil, roughly five hundred years. And we might consider that when we live in a way that depletes soil faster than that, we are not "on time," no matter how early we rise in the morning.