It is in the gap between present and future, where outcomes are not yet determined, that Jenny Odell enters with her paradigm-destroying new book, “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock.” This grand, eclectic, wide-ranging work is about the various problems that swirl out from dominant conceptions of “time,” which sometimes means history, sometimes means an individual lifetime and sometimes means the future. That’s not really how we encounter lived history, but it’s often how it’s told history is usually written by the victors, and things typically get better for them, at least for a while. We are hurtling into the future at a breakneck pace, only to be outrun by the distortions of nature we have unleashed by rampant extraction and consumption.Īll of this makes it harder (if not impossible) to believe in a Whiggish interpretation of history, in which life constantly improves. All of our fossil-fuel burning is accelerating or rewinding all kinds of natural phenomena, mixing geologic eras and warping the previously well-defined strata of Earth history. The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there were trees at the South Pole.

Last year, ancient Roman ruins emerged from the Tiber as extreme drought parched the river, revealing history in the shallows. SAVING TIME: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, by Jenny OdellĬlimate change is doing strange things to time.

How to do nothing by jenny odell