Time, Cycles and Tempos in

Social-ecological Research and

Environmental Policy
Charles H. Wood

ABSTRACT. The execution of successful social-ecological research

and the formulation of effective environmental policies crucially
depend on a deep knowledge of the temporal complexity of the
interactions between social and biophysical systems. To promote a
keener awareness of the relevance of time, cycles, and tempos, this
study assembles examples drawn from a range of disciplines to
delineate the ways temporality enters into human behavior, resource
management, and the conduct of social-ecological research. Anthropological and historical studies document the culturally embedded
temporal subjectivities that shape the way humans exploit or
conserve natural resources. Analyses of environmental policy show
how temporal considerations enter into intervention strategies via
such concepts as discount rates, property rights and the precautionary
principle. The centrality of temporal assumptions is further evidenced by the time-dependent foundations of disciplinary specializations. The likelihood of temporal mismatches between the
specializations that participate in interdisciplinary research and
between the scientific findings and environmental policy can be
mitigated by giving attention to temporal grain, temporal fallacy and
temporal extent. KEY WORDS environment; hierarchy; interdisciplinary; precautionary principle; social-ecological system; temporal
extent; temporal fallacy; temporal grain

Time & Society copyright 2008 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
VOL. 17 No. 2/3 (2008), pp. 261282 0961-463X DOI: 10.1177/0961463X08093425
www.sagepublications.com

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Introduction
The social and ecological sciences have struggled mightily to extricate themselves from an entrenched tendency to treat society and nature as separate
entities, and to adopt, instead, an integrative approach that recognizes the coconstruction of human and biophysical systems (Gellert, 2005). Bridging the
nature/society dualism requires an integrative process that blends the concepts,
theories and instruments that are the foundation of diverse disciplinary specializations (Newell et al., 2005: 301). The plea for interdisciplinary strategies
increasingly heard from many quarters (e.g. Brainard, 2002; Rhoten, 2004) has
turned attention to the obstacles that impede cross-discipline collaboration
(Newell et al., 2005). Key among them are fundamental differences in the pace,
cycles and tempos that characterize processes within the social and biophysical
systems, and that shape the interactions between them.
Temporal factors are of paramount importance because the degree to which
society and nature operate in consonance or dissonance profoundly influences
the health of the natural environment, the structure of the social system and,
hence, the prospects of sustainable development. The significance of temporal
considerations may not be lost on practitioners of a particular specialization, yet
the sensitivity to temporality is commonly blunted in the design and execution
of interdisciplinary social-ecological research, the precise context in which
temporal co-ordination is imperative. Inconsistent assumptions about time,
cycles and tempos can be so thoroughly embedded in the theories, methods and
instrumentations intrinsic to particular specializations that multidisciplinary initiatives are often hobbled or defeated despite concerted efforts to establish a
common agenda.
In research that targets the interplay of social and natural systems, the relevance of temporality is so ubiquitous that an attempt to provide an exhaustive
summary is impracticable. In the face of this limitation, a productive initial step
is to assemble examples from a broad range of literatures, each designed to illustrate a consequential facet of the issue. The treatment of specific examples is
necessarily cursory, yet together they promote a keener appreciation of the
multiple, often unexpected, ways that temporality enters into human behavior,
into the conduct of research and into the formulation of environmental policy.
Hence, the purpose of this study is to gather examples from a wide range of disciplines to illustrate the varied ways that temporal considerations matter with
respect to social-ecological research.
To demonstrate the importance of time, cycles and tempos in the analysis of
social-ecological systems, I begin with a review of selected anthropological
studies which illustrate ways that culturally embedded subjectivities shape and
are shaped by the way humans interact with the world of nature. Observations
about the temporal premises of human behavior provide the basis for the sub-

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sequent discussion that notes how temporal considerations enter into the formulation of environmental policy via such concepts as the discount rate, property
rights and the precautionary principle. The third section delves more deeply into
the centrality of temporal assumptions by showing that disciplinary specializations in the social and natural sciences are largely predicated on a preferred level
of analysis and associated time-dependent theories, concepts and instruments.
Cognizance of these fundamental differences is vital to interdisciplinary
research agendas, as summarized in the conclusion.

Subjective Time, Human Behavior and the Environment

Anthropologists attention to culturally embedded notions of time has produced
a wealth of data that amply document the variability in the perception and treatment of time among societies (e.g. Nilsson, 1920; Evans-Pritchard, 1940; Gell,
1992). Typical of this approach are studies that show how temporal subjectivities and durational expectations in non-western cultures are often tuned to the
cycles of nature and to the rhythms of social practices and economic activities.
An example in this classic tradition is Evans-Pritchards (1940) ethnography of
the Nuer of Africa, a society of pastoralists who calibrate the time of day and of
the passage of time mainly in relation to the round of tasks involved in tending
to cattle. Thus conceived, time is treated as process-linked rather than something
abstract and transcendent. Taking his cue from Durkeims Elementary Forms of
the Religious Life (1915/1964), Evans-Pritchard along with virtually all contemporary anthropologists of time rejected the notion of time as an immutable
and external fact in favor of a perspective that treated time as a social construction, something that human beings create in the course of their material
existence (Gell, 1992: 4).
The relevance of subjective time to the environment is illustrated by Oren
Lyonss (1980) study of the Iroquois who share a worldview that compels them
to make decisions in a manner that institutionalizes the future into their present
choices. Jeremy Rifkin (1987) cites an interview Lyons carried out with an
Iroquois chief, who explained: We are looking ahead . . . to make sure that
every decision we make relates to the welfare and well-being of the seventh
generation to come (p. 78). The Iroquois thus appear to have long embraced the
principles of sustainable development as the form of development that does not
compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (WCED,
1987: 43).
Other ethnographies show how backward-looking creation myths can similarly promote a conservation ethic (see Peterson, 2001). Among the Koyukon
who live in the north-western interior of Alaska, creation narratives look to the
distant time when animals were human, lived in human society and spoke

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human language (Peterson, 2001: 104). The oral history of tribal origins instills
among the Koyukon a conservation view that endorses restraint, humility and
respect for the world of nature.
Group-held conceptions of time can just as easily undermine the resilience
societies display as they contend with external threats and environmental challenges. Among the Aztecs, it was a deep commitment to time as a cyclical
phenomenon that disposed Moctezuma, at least in the beginning, to see the
Spaniards not as a threat from the outside but as god-spirits who heralded the
end of one cosmic period and the commencement of another (Paz, 1985).
Emboldened by Moctezumas indecisiveness, Cortes marched his small band of
warriors into Tenochtitln and changed the world forever (Chasteen, 2001).
Sanguine interpretations of Iroquois and Koyukon culture may well reflect
the much-criticized tendency to romanticize the ecologically noble savage,
thus eliding the uncomfortable findings of studies that have documented many
instances in which indigenous peoples are known to have over-exploited natural
resources (Redford, 1991; Krech, 1999). In a similar manner, social and natural
scientists alike are rightly wary of just so stories wherein the existence of an
observed phenomenon is explained by its adaptive function. Just so reasoning
was the premise of Rudyard Kiplings whimsical childrens stories, published in
1902, about the origins of curiosities like the leopards spots and the camels
hump. As with Kiplings stories, but in a more serious vein, Lyonss (1980)
account of the Iroquois, like the ecological interpretation of Koyukon culture,
may be overly tendentious. Conclusions from a wealth of data are nonetheless
consistent with the notion that the temporal orientations of indigenous societies
often promote cultural traditions that preserve native species and natural
resources in the course of protecting human subsistence (Peterson, 2001).
Rifkin (1987) was quick to note the striking contrast between the expanded
time horizon invoked by the Iroquois and the shortened lens of modern political
leaders whose concept of decision-making responsibility barely extends
beyond the four-year period that marks off each new general election (p. 79).
Because the consequences of decisions made today will be experienced by
present generations and by generations to come, futures are being constructed
and foreclosed with political tools that are unresponsive to citizens who live
beyond the temporal boundaries of the deciding governments term of office. A
conspicuous example is the decision to construct a nuclear power station. The
mere four- to five-year time horizon of a governments accountability is insufficient to cover the plants building phase, let alone its period of decommissioning, and even less the time span of radioactive materials (Adam, 1998).
Like the cultures of which they are a part, temporal orientations are subject to
historical change, often in ways that reflect fundamental shifts in how people
interact with nature. A well-known treatment of the timenaturehistory relationship appears in E. P. Thompsons (1967) influential essay on the demise of

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feudalism. In that text, Thompson documented how peoples temporal reckoning once based on the agricultural calendar was supplanted by notions of time
dictated by industrial capitalism. Intimately tied to Newtonian physics and to
assumptions about linear causality, irreversibility and objectivity, the new
temporal foundation constitutes the deep structure of the taken-for-granted
knowledge associated with the industrial way of life based on notions of certainty and control (Adam, 1998: 97). Divorced from the periodicities of nature,
our clocks and schedules allow us to impose science and technology on the
tempos of the biological, physical and social worlds.1 As the steam whistle
replaced the tolling of church bells that once signaled the hours of work and
prayer, the associated values and ideologies, driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation in competitive global markets, increasingly promote and
reward short time horizons and the immediate exploitation of nature in ways
profoundly antithetical to long-term conservation. If the implied dichotomy
between traditional and modern time orientations is often overstated as
critics have argued (Adam, 1995; Bluedorn, 2002), the transition to industrial
capitalism has clearly reorganized the cognitive and material bases of the interactions between humans and the natural environment.
Indifference to the long term may have received an unintentional boost in
recent years from the growing popularity of some evangelical Christian views
that endorse the finite quantity of remaining time before the return of the
Messiah. The attitude is especially manifest among those who endorse the
Rapture credo vividly expressed in the best-selling Left Behind book series
authored by Tim LaHaye. When droughts, floods and ecological collapse are
treated as harbingers of an imminent, inevitable and even desirable apocalypse,
conservationists like David Orr (2005) and E. O. Wilson (2006) note that people
are not inclined to overly worry about the future state of the environment. In
David Orrs (2005) view, the apocalyptic tendencies of evangelical theology
make believers complacent and therefore complicit to environmental degradation. The argument is sufficiently troubling to conservationists that it is the basis
of the first chapter in E. O. Wilsons book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life
on Earth (2006), in which Wilson, in an Open Letter to a Southern Baptist
Minister, concludes that the widespread conviction that the Second Coming is
imminent and that the Earth is therefore doomed is a gospel that plays down our
responsibility to conserve nature.
Evangelical Christians are not of one mind on the matter, as is clear in the
exchanges published in the pages of Conservation Biology, a leading journal in
the field of environmental studies (Cobb, 2005; Henderson, 2005; Orr, 2005;
Stuart, 2005). Responding to Orrs less than flattering picture of evangelical
Christianity, one contributor (Van Dyke, 2005) noted that there are more than 40
evangelical organizations that explicitly include environmental conservation in
their mission statements. Competing perspectives in this discussion are unlikely

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to be reconciled any time soon. Still, the debate and the other examples noted in
here underscore the broader idea that subjective perceptions of time have consequences for the environment and that temporal orientations are mutable and subject to historical forces in ways that both reflect and produce fundamental shifts
in how people interact with nature.

Temporal Foundations of Environmental Policy

Environmental policies that seek to alter the trade-off between current consumption and future welfare explicitly rely on the behavioral consequences of
subjective temporal orientation. Temporal dimensions enter into the formulation
of environmental policy via concepts such as discount rates, property rights and
the precautionary principle.
Social and political discount rates
Discounting is a key component of cost-benefit analysis, a procedure that
requires that future benefits be expressed in monetary form. Discounting is
based on the principle that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the
future. Investors and policy makers therefore assess the current value of a future
sum of money or a future benefit to society by depreciating its value backwards
in time. In the realm of environmental policy, both the costs and benefits of a
project are discounted. The difference between the two yields the net present
value (NPV) of a particular initiative, a figure that provides the basis for policy
decisions. If the NPV has a positive sign, then benefits exceed costs and adoption of the policy is encouraged. If the sign is negative, costs exceed benefits and
the NPV counsels against adoption (Farber and Hemmersbaugh, 1993).
Discounting is controversial because no agreement exists as to the correct discount rate. More generally, discounting can seem to give insufficient weight to
future benefits. With the passage of sufficient time, the future is rendered worthless regardless of the discount rate (Adam, 1998). Critics thus contend that discounting reduces even large benefits to present values that are insignificant
(Farber and Hemmersbaugh, 1993). Others counter that when discounting is
judiciously applied and thoughtfully interpreted, the method provides indispensable information to make sound choices (Goulder and Stavins, 2002).
The trade-off between the present and the future, enshrined in the discount
rate, suggests a form of reasoning that has been applied to the political arena,
albeit in less formal terms. In the political context it appears that the greater the
elapsed time between todays decision and its manifest consequences, the less
future consequences count in present considerations (Adam, 1998). In this sense
we can speak of a political discount rate to refer to the present political value

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of the future benefits of a given action. In an institutional and historical context

in which security in office is unpredictable, the rational ruler will forgo investments whose benefits he or she may not survive long enough to reap. The more
doubtful the outcome, the higher the relative value of alternative activities that
yield immediate dividends, even if the expected return of those activities is low
(Goldsmith, 2004). The principle has been used to explain the highly predatory
style of political rule often seen in African countries (Goldsmith, 2004) and can
be easily extended to address the politics of environmental regulation.
Uncertain futures, property rights and land degradation
Whether couched in social or political terms, discounting provides one basis for
conceptualizing the relationship between present and future. Other approaches
to understanding inter-temporal choices have been applied to a broad range of
phenomena. In the case of land resources, the manner in which the future insinuates itself into present is evident in the way property rights, land titles and
tenure security influence the likelihood that people will take steps to conserve
land.
In the case of agricultural land, it is the rate of degradation relative to the pace
of regeneration that decides the effectiveness of conservation strategies.
Because the quantity of land available for agriculture took millions of years to
form, it can, from the human temporal perspective, be treated as a fixed supply,
a non-renewable resource. Even so, agricultural land has a regenerative capacity
and can be made continuously productive with investment, maintenance and the
replacement of nutrients. Effective land management occurs when the rate of
regeneration keeps pace with the degenerative consequences of agricultural use
(Wachter, 1992). Whether land is a non-renewable (stock) or a renewable (flow)
resource is therefore contingent not only on the technologies applied to the
management of land but also on the time-frame invoked.
The likelihood that land managers will engage in long-term investment, and the
probability that they will defer the immediate exploitation of natural capital in the
interest of long-term conservation, is enhanced when people can be sure that at
some point in the future they can reap the benefits of present investment and conservation (Wachter, 1992). Confidence in the ability to claim ownership over
future outputs is promoted via the official, but sometimes informal, establishment
of clear and enforced property rights. In rural areas this usually takes the form of
land titles, the provision of which is assumed to create a predictable future and
thereby improve the stewardship of land and natural resources (Alchian and
Demsetz, 1973; Feder, 1987; Larson and Bromley, 1990; Beaumont and Walker,
1994).
The predictability of the future and the degree to which people have confidence in their hold over land are cognitive orientations that are influenced by

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economic and political contexts, as was readily seen in frontier regions of the
Brazilian Amazon (Schmink and Wood, 1992). Poor migrants who initially
trekked into the lowland tropics during the 1970s and 1980s were acutely aware
of their tenuous hold over land and their vulnerability to more powerful ranchers
intent on converting forest to pasture. Under the circumstances, smallholders
found that their only option was to deforest with the explicit expectation of selling their improvements to the land as quickly as possible, then move on to
repeat the cycle further down the road. The result was a process of rapid and
extensive deforestation unrelated to the agricultural potential of the land. When
settlement areas on the frontier became more consolidated and when the transience that marked the early days gave way to more secure land tenure and to the
possibility of longer time horizons, the stage was set for collective action on the
part of individuals and communities to resist dispossession and to invest in land.
Changing subjective assessments of the future thus played a significant role in
promoting social mobilization and encouraging the adoption of less predator
forms of land use.2
A variation in the analyses of the behavioral consequences of temporal orientations comes from Bryan Roberts (1995) use of Robert Mertons (1984) concept of socially expected durations. Roberts invoked the concept to explain the
fate of different immigrant groups to the United States (US). In a manner similar to the studies that noted the land use consequences of short time horizons
among migrants to the Brazilian Amazon, Roberts found that group differences
in the probability of becoming a naturalized citizens, the likelihood of buying a
home and the probability of investing in a business could be explained by
whether immigrants thought of their presence in the US as transient or permanent.
We can conclude from these observations that microeconomic explanations
based on discount rates, as well as numerous other explanations of the human
causes of environmental degradation, including predictions derived from the
property rights paradigm, are special cases of the behavioral consequences of
subjective temporalities. The idea that culturally embedded temporal notions
and socially expected durations can exert a significant influence on behavior of
individuals and social groups further points to a connection, largely implicit,
between subjective perceptions of time and leading issues within the social and
environmental sciences. As the various examples suggest, group-held ideas of
time and the transitory or permanent character of peoples perception of their
present situation can affect the likelihood of social movements (see Foweraker,
1995), the development of social capital as a development resource (Putnam,
1993; Portes, 1998), the degradation of the natural environment (Wachter, 1992)
and the feasibility of community-based conservation efforts (e.g. Agrawal,
1997).

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Future damages and present caution

Assessments of the future damages caused by present action and attempts to
mediate inter-temporal costs and benefits through environmental policies are
especially difficult to formulate when the effects are drawn out over long
periods of time and when the processes involved are marked by contingencies,
time lags and periods of invisibility. Global warming comes to mind as does
damage to the ozone layer and the extra skin cancers created by the higher levels
of ultraviolet radiation penetrating a normally protective ozone layer. Additional
examples include the health consequences of genetically modified organisms,
the manifestation of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle (mad
cow disease) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, and mesothelioma caused by the inhalation of asbestos dust.
The uncertain outcome of present actions has prompted some to insist on
caution first, science second. Although there is no agreed definition of the idea,
the concept is often labeled the precautionary principle. The principle is
invoked when there is a need to act to reduce potential hazard before there is
strong proof of harm, taking into account the likely costs and benefits of action
and inaction (Harremes et al., 2002: 4). Ardent advocates of precaution
contend, for example, that governments should immediately ban the planting of
genetically modified crops even though science cannot produce definitive evidence that they are a danger to the environment or to consumers. The precautionary principle shifts the burden of proof by requiring those who would
intervene in the environment to demonstrate that their interventions will not
cause harm (Lee, 1993: 173). Skeptics counter that adopting the principle will
stifle trade and limit innovation. If someone had evaluated the risk of fire right
after it was invented, remarked Julian Morris at a conference on the precautionary principle, they may well have decided to eat their food raw (cited in
Appell, 2001: 18).
Introducing long-term considerations into present choices is particularly difficult when a proposed action threatens the privileges or profits of powerful interests, when the environmental or health consequences are far in the future, and
when the real or perceived costs of action are large and immediate. Precautionary policies are further vulnerable to the very culture of the scientific enterprise
that militates against anticipatory action. In the absence of strong evidence,
experts habitually express scientific results with utmost prudence. Caution is
formally enshrined in the fear of committing a Type I error rejecting a null
hypothesis that in fact is true. The colloquial expression for a scientists trepidation is a strong penchant to endorse the principle of presumed innocent until
proven guilty.
In most cases, avoiding Type I errors is desirable, but not in all. Firefighters
who receive notice of a blaze in a wooden building and police who receive a tip

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about an abandoned package in a public place respond with dispatch, as though

the fire were actually burning and a real bomb ticking. The high cost of not taking
immediate action means ignoring the danger of committing a Type II error
accepting the null hypothesis when it is actually false. If the fire turns out to be a
hoax and the bomb a fake, so be it better safe than sorry, as the saying goes.
A strict aversion to Type I errors endorses a logic that waits for clear evidence
of harm before taking action presumed innocent trumps better safe than
sorry. The problem is that decades may pass before reliable data become available. By then the damages inflicted on the environment may be irreversible.
Faced with this dilemma, Kai Lee (1993) has usefully suggested that we should
be prepared to recognize those circumstances in which Type I errors are to be
avoided and situations in which Type II errors are a problem: Their differences
in logic suggest that it might be possible to sort out situations and to design institutions to apply the appropriate burden of proof (p. 75).

The Treatment of Time in Social and Environmental Research

Sensitivity to the inter-temporal implications of Type I and Type II errors
clarifies key aspects of the relationship between the conduct of science and the
enactment of environmental policies. However, limiting discussion to hypothesis testing focuses only on the mechanics of the scientific enterprise and
therefore overlooks the potential consequences associated with the temporal
underpinnings of disciplinary specializations. At a more underlying level, it is
evident that the very logic of the theoretical models that drive the scientific
process can, by virtue of their temporal premises, incorporate or neglect critical
considerations. An example is the equilibrium model at the core of neoclassical
economics, a framework that occupies center stage in the field of environmental
economics.
Temporal foundations of models, theories and disciplines
In the equilibrium model, time must pass for competitive markets to clear
obstructions in the long run. But the model itself is timeless in that it does not
pretend to represent changes in the relationships between variables over time.
Such changes are treated as disturbances in the ceteris paribus assumptions
surrounding the model as an ideally isolated system, not as features of reality to
be described by the model itself. (Gell, 1992: 176)

Historical contingencies that produce results at variance with the predictions of

the abstract model tend to be relegated to the category of transitory disturbances
on the road to an as yet unrealized equilibrium state.

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The theoretical (and surely political) utility of a timeless horizon is not

limited to neoclassical economists. Analysts in the Marxist-Althusserian tradition, in their attempt to secure the materialist framework in the face of contradictory observations, are fond of asserting that, despite short-term anomalies,
the economic is determinant in the last instance (see Roxborough, 1979).
Ironically, the timeless long run in neoclassical equilibrium models becomes the
timeless last instance in neo-Marxian historical materialism. Faced with evidence that contradicts theorized expectations, what remains standing is the conceptual framework rescued by the invocation of the last instance (or the long
run) a mythical future when all shall be revealed. In the meantime, all manner
of environmental degradation may have occurred and countless species may
have been lost forever.
The broader point is that the theoretical models that comprise different
specializations vary with respect to the manner and the degree to which they pay
overt attention to temporality (Wood, 2005). Some fields owe their very existence to the discovery of a new temporal horizon as in the case of geology, the
development of which was entirely contingent on the discovery of deep time
(McPhee, 1980). Prior to Lyells Principles of Geology in 1830, the earth
sciences were cramped by the temporal compression imposed by the biblical
chronology. It was only with the postulation of deep time which envisioned a
nearly incomprehensible temporal immensity measured in thousands of millions
of years that geologists were conceptually positioned to interpret the slow and
steady operation of erosion and other ordinary processes as the cause of such
geologic marvels as the Grand Canyon (Gould, 1987).
The temporal specificity of disciplinary specializations is further illustrated
by the distinctions biologists make between molecules, cells and tissues, and the
observation that each analytical focus gives rise, respectively, to the specialized
fields of molecular biology, cytology and histology. Each field poses different
questions, the answers to which rely on level and temporally specific theories
and methods. In this way, the models and methods that distinguish one discipline from another implicitly channel its practitioners into largely predetermined levels of analysis (Gibson et al., 2000) and, as a result, instill in them
an associated temporal horizon.
Because every specialization has a preferred object of inquiry that is associated with a particular level of analysis and temporal horizon, disciplines
typically periodize events in very different terms. Meteorologists observe oscillations in temperature and precipitation that take place at virtually any scale, yet
the distinctions they draw between microclimate, weather and climate connote phenomena that are witnessed over increasingly larger areas and longer
time spans (Urban et al., 1987). Historians speak of eras, epochs and stages.
Economists concerned with prices and production talk of fluctuations that are of
varying length or, as in Kondratievs (1925) classic study, of cycles that endure

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half a century. In common parlance, people refer to the short, medium and long
term, conveniently leaving aside the precise length of time each expression
invokes.3 The spans of time that depict a given periodization scheme thus make
sense only with respect to some prior conceptualization of the process at hand.
The idea that treatments of time are entirely constructed by a theory, conceptualization or instrumentation within a scientific discipline has profound implications for interdisciplinary research. As anyone who has attempted to design an
integrative study can readily attest, establishing effective trans-disciplinary
communication between experts in different fields is burdened by theories that
are incompatible, concepts that have different meanings and methods based on
different techniques. Less palpable but potentially more pernicious divergences
stem from the largely implicit temporal bases of competing approaches. A conversation between, say, a wildlife ecologist, a forester and a political scientist is
therefore likely to be derailed not only by their disparate vocabularies but also
the fact that the languages spoken by the various participants, like their respective orientations to the object of study, are implicitly grounded on conceptual
clocks that tick at different paces. The frequent result is a temporal mismatch
between the theories, methods and instruments used by various disciplines
involved in an integrated study. Mismatches similarly occur between the temporal boundaries of conclusions derived from scientific analyses, the formulation
of intervention initiatives and the time horizons of the institutions charged to
implement environmental policy (Cumming et al., 2006).
Temporal hierarchies in ecological systems
The conscious treatment of time and scale is present in many fields but is
notably advanced in landscape ecology among researchers who developed hierarchy theory to analyze complex systems (Allen and Starr, 1982; Ahl and
Allen, 1996). Hierarchy theory is worth noting in the present context because the
conceptual approach makes explicit a number of pertinent issues, especially the
relationship between temporal frequencies and spatial scale.
In hierarchy theory, a system is deemed complex when it is composed of
observable and relatively stable sub-units that are unified by a super-ordinate
relation.4 Different controls and processes tend to dominate in distinctive levels
of time and space (Wu, 1999). Each level is governed by level-specific processes and temporal frequencies, the causal logic of which cannot be formulated
in the languages appropriate to the lower or higher levels in the system. Hence,
observations made at a single level a strategy common to most research
designs capture only those patterns and processes pertinent to that tier in the
system. Complexity arises when explanations simultaneously invoke multiple
levels of organization and address the cross-scale dynamics by which variables
and processes at one level are influenced by those at another.

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Examples of complex hierarchical systems include studies of the Arctic

tundra in which the lowest level in the hierarchy, and the smallest spatial unit, is
the individual plant. At a coarser grain, plants compose relatively homogeneous
patches. Multiple patches, in turn, compose a landscape (Wu and David, 2002).
The processes characteristic of each level (plant, patch, landscape) function
according to different types of causation, spatial extents and temporal frequencies. The processes that occur at higher levels in the system operate over larger
areas and at slower temporal frequencies, defined as the amount of time it
takes for a cycle to be completed and begin anew (Ahl and Allen, 1996). At
lower levels in the system, the processes operate over small areas and at rapid
temporal frequencies. The properties observed at a higher level in the hierarchy
operate so slowly that they can be considered constant, at least for analyses
cast at lower levels of the system. By the same token, the rapid frequency of
processes that occur at the lowest levels of the system represent little more
than background noise relative to higher tiers of interest. In this way, the
framework recognizes levels of interacting forces so that variables that
appear to be drivers at one scale may seem constant at another (Turner et al.,
1995: 29).
Decades of research on regional ecosystems finds that it is the interaction of
slow and fast processes that establishes key features of ecosystem structure
(Holling et al., 2002). Geophysical controls dominate at scales larger than 10
kilometers. At smaller scales, biotic and abiotic processes control the structure,
volume and pattern of vegetation (Holling et al., 2002). The arenas within which
plant and animal-controlling interactions unfold are the same arenas in which
human activities interact with the landscape (Holling et al., 2002). Terrestrial
ecosystems are therefore linked at critical levels to social systems, which are
themselves multileveled and complex.
Temporal hierarchies in social systems
Hierarchical reasoning is generally less developed in analyses of social systems,
although historians such as Fernand Braudel (1949/1985) and Charles Tilly
(1984) have made good use of the approach. In his magisterial The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip the Second
(1949/1985), Braudel differentiated between la longue dure, conjunctures and
vnements. The first is an inquiry into almost changeless ecological history, a
history that goes on, tenaciously, as though it were somehow beyond times
reach and ravage (Braudel, 1980: 12). Conjunctures concern the tidal movements of history that depict the rise and fall of civilizations and the gentler
rhythms of changing social structures. The third level concerns the activities of
individual people that are attuned to the short and nervous vibrations of daily
life. For Braudel, the third level of micro-history is only a surface disturbance,

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the waves stirred up by the powerful movement of the tides that run at a deeper
and slower pace (Braudel, 1980: 74).
Braudel did not spell out a method for linking one temporal/organizational
level to another (Tilly, 1984). A more successful attempt can be found in Tamara
Harevens (1982) book, Family Time and Industrial Time, in which the author
uses life-course analysis to understand how the relatively slow cadence of capitalism manifest in the rise and fall of profits, employment and technology conditions the faster rhythms of family cycles and individual behavior. A notable
advantage of a multileveled framework be it the Braudel/Hareven approach in
social history or hierarchy theory in ecology is to compel a sensitivity to the
varying spatial and temporal levels that comprise the social and the biophysical
systems.
The conceptual and methodological tools for addressing multileveled temporalities nonetheless remain largely undeveloped. This limitation is particularly
detrimental to environmental research that treats the social and biophysical
domains as components of a single social-ecological system. The daunting complexity of the social-ecological approach makes the need for conceptual clarity
imperative, especially as it concerns the interaction of the social and biophysical
systems across and between different levels of space and time (Wood, 2005). In
the face of such complexity, the concepts that geographers use to depict spatial
properties suggest temporal analogs that can be usefully invoked to identify
potential temporal inconsistencies when multiple specializations are brought
together in integrative social-ecological research.
Temporal analogs to spatial properties
As used by geographers and landscape ecologists, grain (or resolution) refers to
the finest level of spatial resolution possible within a given data set (Turner et
al., 2001). Grain establishes the threshold between the smallest things captured
and those that slip unrecorded through the net of observation (Ahl and Allen,
1996). By the same token, temporal grain is the shortest span of time that is
rendered meaningful within a given theory, framework or instrumentation.
The significance of temporal grain becomes evident in studies which find that
conclusions based on data generated by instruments sensitive to phenomena that
operate at slow frequencies may differ significantly from conclusions based on
instruments sensitive to phenomena that operate at rapid frequencies. The
problem is analogous to research by geographers on the Modifiable Aerial Unit
Problem which found that the conclusions reached at one spatial level change
significantly when the same analysis is performed over different spatial partitions (Openshaw, 1984). Every change in spatial resolution brings forth a
new problem and there is no basis for assuming that associations existing at one
scale will also exist at another (McCarty et al., 1956). The modifiable unit

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problem would apply, by analogy, to studies carried out at varying temporal

grains.
The idea that conclusions based on data with a large temporal grain may
change when analysis is performed on data with a smaller temporal grain further
suggests the notion of a temporal fallacy, a concept akin to the ecological
fallacy first noted by Warren Robinson in 1950. In his study of counties in the
US, Robinson found that the high correlation between the proportion of the
population that was African-American and the proportion that was illiterate
(aggregate-level association) did not mean that Blacks were more likely to be
illiterate (individual-level association), only that illiterate members of both races
tended to live in the same counties. The analogous temporal fallacy of imputing
relationships based on coarse temporal grains to relationships at finer temporal
grains is only beginning to be appreciated.
The temporal equivalent of geographers notion of spatial extent, the size of
the overall study area, is the temporal extent, the length of time encompassed
by a given project. A study of the relationship between phytoplankton and zooplankton abundance in lakes demonstrated the effect of changing a studys temporal extent (Carpenter and Kitchell, 1987). Analyses based on a three-day
sampling frequency found a negative correlation between algal production and
zooplankton biomass but the correlation was positive when a six-day sampling
frequency was used. A broadened temporal extent can thus lead to different
conclusions when processes or outcomes become manifest only after a longer
period of time, as is often the case with biophysical phenomena.
Lobbying for longer temporal extents
Temporal mismatches occur when analyses of slow-paced biophysical processes are based on research designs that rely on time horizons too short to
produce meaningful results (Tilman, 1989; Risser, 1991). An assessment of ecological research in the 1980s found that small spatial and short temporal extents
characterized much of the literature in the field (Wu, 1999). About half of the
experiments published in Ecology were conducted on plots less than a meter in
diameter (Kareiva and Andersen, 1986) and only 7 per cent of experiments were
conducted on a timescale greater than five years (Tilman, 1989). The penchant
for short-term and cross-sectional analyses has also been of concern in the social
sciences, especially among macro-sociologists in the Marxian tradition who
lament the temporal myopia common to contemporary social research (York
and Clark, 2006). Still, concern about short temporal horizons, when it is
expressed at all, occurs mainly at the margin of core debates.
More recent literature in ecology and in the earth sciences indicates a greater
prevalence of studies with wider spatial extents and longer temporal horizons
(e.g. Redman and Kinzig, 2003; Trosper, 2003).The priority given to long-term

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social-ecological research is endorsed by prestigious institutions, including the

National Science Foundation and its support of the Long-Term Ecological
Research (LTER) Network (Redman et al., 2004). In the pages of Conservation
Ecology, Gunderson and Folke (2003) similarly promote a science of the long
view which advocates research projects that encompass broad spatial areas and
temporal horizons ranging from centuries to millennia as a means to understand
how coupled social-ecological systems operate. These initiatives strive to
establish a temporal alignment between the pace of ecological change and the
temporal extent of scientific observation and interpretation.
An inspired if quirky plea for a keener appreciation of longer time horizons
comes from contemporary visionaries who have seized upon the clock itself as a
metaphor to reorient peoples temporal thinking to a slower/better pace.
Stewart Brand (1999), board member of The Long Now Foundation, known to
many as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, contends that the goal is to
design a clock that ticks once a year for 10,000 years, gongs once a century and
cuckoos once a millennium. A working eight-foot high prototype of the Clock
of the Long Now is on display at the Science Museum of London.5 The device
will be accompanied by a library that specializes in charting trends that may be
too slow to notice but transform the environment in the long run. By encouraging long-range planning and thinking, the clock and the library project have
caught the eye of leading ecologists (e.g. Holling, 2001) who find themselves
frustrated by the same short time horizons that The Long Now Foundation
strives to combat.

Summary and Conclusion

The goal of developing an integrative approach that treats society and nature as
elements of a single complex system is a major challenge facing contemporary
environmental research. The observations and analyses presented here suggest
that the process of advancing an integrated social-ecological perspective
crucially depends on a keen appreciation of the temporal complexities that shape
the interactions between social and biophysical systems. This study assembled
examples from a broad range of disciplines to illustrate the varied ways that
temporal considerations enter into human behavior, the construction of environmental policy and the conduct of interdisciplinary research.
The idea that culturally embedded temporal orientations influence the way
people exploit, manage or conserve natural resources has been firmly documented by anthropological research. Analyses have further shown that subjective temporalities are influenced by historical forces in ways that both reflect
and produce fundamental shifts in how people interact with nature. Attempts to
influence the relationship between present action and future consequences enter

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into environmental policies via such concepts as the social and political discount
rate, property rights and the precautionary principle. Similarly, peoples perception of their present and future situations play into leading issues in the social
and environmental sciences, such as the likelihood of social movements, the
development of social capital and the feasibility of community-based conservation. More generally, it is evident that every disciplinary specialization in the
social and natural sciences is largely predicated on a preferred level of analysis,
an associated time horizon and a commitment to time and level-dependant concepts and methods. In this way, the models and instruments that distinguish one
discipline from another tend to channel practitioners into largely predetermined
levels of analysis. These, in turn, invoke a host of time-dependent methods that
register events and relationships which only occur within delimited temporal
frequencies. When the temporal foundations of disciplinary specializations go
unrecognized, the oversight can lead to temporal mismatches between the
theories, concepts and instruments that contribute to an integrated study, and to
mismatches between the findings of scientific work and the time horizons of
institutions that implement environmental policy. The likelihood of temporal
inconsistencies can be mitigated by giving attention to three concepts developed
here: temporal grain, temporal fallacy and temporal extent. These observations
underscore the idea that the process of advancing an integrated social-ecological
perspective crucially depends on a pointed recognition of the way that time,
cycles and tempos shape the interactions between social and biophysical systems.

Notes
This study is a revised and expanded version of a paper presented at a conference that celebrated Stephen Bunkers contribution to sociology called Nature, Raw Materials and
Political Economy, held in Madison, Wisconsin on 2 November 2002. I am grateful for
helpful comments provided by Emilio Bruna, Karen Kainer, Derek Lewis, Peggy Lovell,
Elisa Maranzana, Marianne Schmink, Rick Stepp, Dan Zarin and Ana Siqueira, none of
whom bears responsibility for this version.
1. The punctual integration of social activities into stable and impersonal schedules
became a necessity with the advent of metropolitan life (Urry, 2000). The previous
unimagined need for regimentation and co-ordination of activities prompted the
standardization of time, first initiated by railroad companies frustrated by the local
time zones that stood in the way of sensible timetables. Stations only a few miles apart
set their clocks to different standards such that trains moving down the track would
sometimes lurch backward into the past only to bound forward again upon arriving at
the next platform (Levine, 1997). The four time zones we recognize in the US today
were established in 1883 by the railroads and were put into law by the federal government in 1918.

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2. In a similar vein, John Hall (1978) found that communal groups based on a diachronic scheduling of clock time . . . had difficulty marshaling members commitment
beyond that required for performance of scheduled duties and for this reason group
solidarity was problematic (p. 215). The communities most likely to survive were
those whose members shared an apocalyptic conception of history in which true
believers construed their temporal existence as lying beyond the present in a timeless
eternity. The social temporality of action thus proved to have objective consequences
in objective time (Hall, 1984: 215).
3. Although limited to students at the University of Missouri-Columbia, one study documented the lengths of time that people associate with short-term, mid-term and
long-term time horizons (Bluedorn, 2002). Over half (55.5%) defined the short term
as three months or less. As for the long term, close to half (45.1%) defined it as being
ten or more years ahead.
4. So burdened is the word hierarchy by the common meaning of rigid, top-down
authority and control that ecologists have proposed the term panarchy (from the
Greek god, Pan, universal god of nature) to capture the adaptive and evolutionary
nature of multileveled systems (Gunderson and Holling, 2002: 74).
5. To see pictures and architectural drawings of the clock, go to http://www.longnow.
org.

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CHARLES H. WOOD is a member and former Director of the Center for

Latin American Studies at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida.
His research focuses on the causes and consequences of deforestation in the
Brazilian Amazon. ADDRESS: Center for Latin American Studies,
University of Florida, 319 Grinter Hall, Gainesville, FL 326115530, USA.
[email: cwood@latam.ufl.edu]

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