IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

32 Chapter 2
burn as much fossil fuel as the Earth has stored up in a period of nearly a
million years. At this rate, we’ll use up all of the planet’s fossil fuel reserves
within the equivalent of a second in geological time. The acceleration of
the speed of human population growth means that in a single human lifetime,
the Earth may lose half of its living species, species that it took tens of
millions of years for evolution to create through the process of speciation. 11
The collision between industrial and biological time is most evident in
agriculture. ‘‘It is the same story over and over again,’’ says Sachs; ‘‘natural
rhythms of growth and maturation are considered much too slow by the
industrial and post-industrial mind, and an enormous amount of resources
and ingenuity are deployed to squeeze out more output in shorter periods
of time.’’ 12 Cows, chickens, rice, or wheat are selected, bred, chemically
treated, and increasingly genetically modified, in order to accelerate their
yield. But the imposition of industrial time on natural rhythms is achieved
at a heavy price. Animals are kept in appalling conditions, disease spreads,
pollution advances, soils degenerate, species diversity is narrowed, and evolution
is not given enough time to adapt. A host of ecological problems in
the area of agriculture derive from the fact that the rhythms of nature are
displaced by the demands of a higher-speed economy.
Another break with natural speed came with the invention of powered
vehicles—and in particular, the railroad. From the time of Caesar to that
of Napoleon, there had not been much progress in speed. It was only
when fossil energy reserves deep under the surface of the Earth were
tapped, in order to obtain fuel for the propulsion of vehicles, that the gates
to the new age were thrown open. The combustion engine made possible a
transformation of the Earth’s treasures into vehicle speed. The mission of
successive armies of transport technologies was nothing else than the reduction
and gradual abolition of duration and distance. With the arrival of
the railroad, the speed of engines supplanted the speed of bodies, and vehicular
space gradually settled upon natural space. This radical break inaugurated
the age of acceleration.
From Event Time to Clock Time
Lewis Mumford declared in 1934 that ‘‘the clock, not the steam engine, is
the key machine of the industrial age.’’ 13 Before the clock was invented we
lived time, but we were not regulated by it. We were regulated by nature