Cycle Time

It has become a commonplace observation that many people, especially younger ones, operate on much more rapid time cycles than previous generations. This is to some extent both a product of new technologies such as the Internet, and a result of changes in content, as everything from music to video to television comes to rely on much shorter, intense bursts of information to communicate. Its effects can be subtle.

For example, language structures intended for written and linear, primarily textual, communication are now evolving – by, for example, dropping the use of capital letters and punctuation in email, increasing reliance on phonetic spelling, and resorting to abbreviations for common phrases – to meet new cultural conditions. Just as oral traditions have over millennia been replaced by written traditions, so the latter are now in transition to new forms of communication in advanced economies.

And one of the key characteristics of the newer systems is that they embody a different, in many ways more compressed, sense of time. This is a complex phenomenon about which learned tomes are already written (indeed, this is an important area of study for many postmodernists). But I wish to highlight just one aspect of it: the implications of this cultural trend for environmentalism.

This is not just an academic exercise. About a year ago, I had a long discussion with the director of a major metropolitan zoo (such facilities are a major mechanism by which urban citizens interact with “nature”). He lamented the fact that children used to be fascinated with the zoo’s animals, but no longer were: many would watch the animals for a minute, then become bored and begin wandering or roughhousing. The tentative conclusion we reached was that the cycle times of the animals in their real lives, which for many consisted of sleep and lounging punctuated by occasional bursts of energy, were simply too long to connect with the children’s cycle times.

In particular, if the children watched nature programs on cable and television, they had become used to animals that were always active: mating, preying or being preyed on, fighting. There are no three-hour naps on Nature or The Discovery Channel. More generally, they had gotten used to the rapid, high-impact media world they lived in, from 15- and 30-second advertisements, to the fragmented presentation of information on “Sesame Street,” to instant messaging. Patience is not a virtue in such a world; rather, it is an inefficiency, selected against in a culture where extracting and managing information from an ever more complex and overwhelming environment becomes a critical skill.

But natural systems, of course, have cycle times that cannot (at least yet) be significantly altered by whim. Seasons, lunar cycles, the patterns of animals’ activities within days and years – all of these are fixed. Real animals, even in zoos, are not going to be performing 24/7, regardless of what the denizens of the information society are conditioned to expect. More fundamentally, working with natural systems, from individual organisms to swamps or forests, requires understanding and adjusting to their implicit time cycles.

To some extent, the widening gap between the cycle times of modern cultures and what might be called the natural world can be managed through innovative use of technology. Thus, for example, zoos can provide interactive information next to exhibits, or make exhibits more experiential, as with walk-through butterfly, bird, or desert exhibitions. But in some sense this is a reluctant capitulation to modernity, and it may not be sufficient to compete with the intensity of modern media.

Indeed, I suspect that the real challenge is far more profound, and requires some innovative thinking by those of us interested in environmental issues. Simply reprogramming those who are unable to value (perhaps even to perceive) natural systems and rhythms may work in some individual cases, but is unlikely to be effective against powerful cultural trends. After all, if “nature” is what one is surrounded by and must learn to function within, then “nature” for many moderns is much more cyberspace than open space.

Obviously, as the popularity of outdoor activities remains strong, this is not the case for all. However, even outdoor activities are becoming more intense, as hiking, cross-country skiing and canoeing are replaced by “xtreme” versions of these sports as well as by fast, noisy, and motorized alternatives. Adapting environmentalism to these fundamental trends means paying much more attention to them -- only a first step, but one that should be started on immediately.

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Brad Allenby is professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business, and previously was AT&T’s vice president of environment, health, and safety.