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It is that time again.
Time to Wonder: Why Do We Turn? watches Back and forth twice a year? Academics, scientists, politicians, economists, employers, parents — and just about everyone you talk to this week — are debating the many reasons for and against Daylight Saving Time.
But the reason is in the name: it’s an effort to “save” daylight hours, which some express as an opportunity for people to “make more use” of the time when it’s light outside.
But as an Indigenous person who studies environmental humanities, this type of effort and the debate about it misses a key ecological perspective.
Biologically speaking, it is normal and even important for nature to produce more during the brighter months and less during the darker months. Animals go into hibernation, plants go dormant.
Humans are closely connected, interdependent and interconnected with non-human beings, rhythms and environments. Indigenous knowledge, which, despite its complex, diverse and plural forms, is surprisingly consistent in reminding humans that we too are an equal part of nature. Like trees and flowers, we too are creatures who need winter to rest and summer to bloom.
As far as we humans know, we are the only species that chooses to fight against our biological presets, regularly changing our clocks, dragging ourselves frantically in and out of bed at unnatural hours.
The reason, many scholars agree, is that capitalism teaches humans that they are separate from, and superior to, nature – like the point at the top of a pyramid. That, and I argue, is that capitalism wants people to work the same number of hours all year long, no matter what the season. This mentality is contrary to the way indigenous people have lived for thousands of years.
Nature of time and work
Indigenous views of the world are not the pyramids or lines of capitalism, but the circles and cycles of life.
Directly, time is related to terrestrial and astronomical changes. Historical records and oral interviews show that in traditional indigenous cultures of the past, human activity was determined according to recurring patterns of nature. For example, a meeting might have been scheduled not for Thursday at 4 pm, but for the next full moon. Everyone knew well in advance when it would arise and could plan accordingly.
Such intense sensitivity towards nature’s calendar also has a symbolic meaning. Looking up and seeing the moon in the night sky is like looking at the same moon that someone saw centuries ago and hopefully someone else will see centuries in the future. Time is linked to nature in a sense that transcends Western understanding. It encompasses past, present and future all together. Time is life.
In this indigenous context, Daylight Saving Time is meaningless – if not downright ridiculous. Time cannot be changed in any way, just as the hands of a clock can catch the sun and change its position in the sky. The Sun will continue to cycle as its gravity dictates for generations – and economic systems – to come.
Like time, the indigenous approach to work is also broader than that of a capitalist economy. They recognize and value all life-sustaining activities as work. For example, caring for ourselves, the sick, the elderly, the youth, the land, or even simply relaxing are equally valuable activities.
This is because most indigenous economies are not aimed at increasing economist-invented measures of output by working from 9 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday. Rather, their goal is to find and generate overall well-being for all.
About the author
Rachel Wilson Tolemar is Lecturer in Spanish Ecocultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons license. read the original article,
Daylight Saving Time is specifically designed for 9 to 5 workers. It attempts to boost economic activity by giving them, and them alone, more light. Think about it: care workers, who are predominantly women, work beyond daylight hours year-round. Where is their temporary residence? Although perhaps not malicious or purposeful, the political interference of daylight savings ignores the vast workforce working on the periphery of the mainstream economy. In some ways, this reinforces the discriminatory idea that only certain workers are worthy of economic recognition and housing.
In this sense, daylight saving raises the question: does the economy really need that extra hour of sunshine and worker productivity? Traditional economic philosophy would probably answer ‘no’ in principle; They may view daylight saving as a violation of the biophysical, ethical, and sacred boundaries of the world ecology by encouraging cultures of overwork and overconsumption.
work of time and nature
Since the invention of the clock, capitalism has treated time as an inanimate object largely independent of the environment.
While the rest of nature wakes up and sleeps according to lunar and solar cycles, humans work and sleep to reset their artificial clocks.
In their 2016 book “The Slow Professor”, humanities scholars Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Sieber links this commodification of time to the dehumanizing culture of work.
Modern workers, he writes, are being expected to treat time as a numerical asset that can be managed, measured, and controlled. There is no count of time for rest and relaxation in the capitalist economy of life.
There are certainly practical benefits to using time to measure and monitor economic activity – such as knowing the exact time a meeting starts and ends. But Berg and Sieber’s work shows how that reasonable pragmatism has been subverted to hold workers hostage to an unsustainable, unnatural and exploitative environment. Work time and life time have blurred and become one.
In capitalism, work is expected to grow infinitely, despite existing within a finite world inhabited by finite beings. At a time when human activity is degrading the world’s ecology – instead of maintaining it as before – this approach of working around the clock is completely incompatible with nature.
In short, daylight savings reproduces the same destructive logic that has plunged humans and non-humans into the current socio-ecological crisis. Disobeying and dominating the laws, rhythms and shapes of nature, as seen in the seasonal exploitation of human energy and labor through daylight savings, perpetuates the unique social and environmental degradation that is characteristic of the current capitalist era.
looking back, moving forward
In contrast to the relatively recent beginnings of capitalism, indigenous knowledge supports a set of philosophies equally old in time. It reminds humans that there are other ways of interacting with time, work, and the environment – ways that existed before capitalism and that may continue to exist after.
In my view, people might be better off if the discussion about changing the clocks in the fall and spring was not about how much time we can “use” or how much daylight we can “save,” but instead about reducing the number of hours we are expected to make useful – and profitable – to secure a more just and sustainable existence for all.