Temporal turbulence in the polycrisis: Editors’ introduction to the special section

Introduction

It is something of an understatement to observe that the times are turbulent – socially, politically, economically and ecologically. Indeed, there is no question that our current moment is one of intersecting, converging and even sharply accelerating crises (Serres, 2014; Dauvergne and Shipton, 2023; Miller and Heinberg, 2023; Schlosberg, 2023). These crises are so intertwined and numerous that they hardly bear repeating: rising authoritarianism and xenophobia across both North and South; outright fascism in the United States; an aggressive return to imperialist interventionism; an undermining of institutions of international governance such as the United Nations; a shattering of trust in international law in the face of ongoing genocides; increasingly unabashed and explicit white supremacy and settler colonialism; and, perhaps most relevant to this special section, rapidly growing climate instability and biodiversity decline that are upending worlds and communities at record speed. The shorthand term for the cascading disruptions that are increasingly bearing down on human and more-than-human worlds alike is the polycrisis.

Despite ongoing concerns about the relevance, utility and precision of the concept (Cant, 2005), ‘polycrisis’ has begun to be widely taken up by theorists across the disciplinary spectrum to make sense of the rapidly fluctuating intensities of the present. In his short 2022 intervention in The Financial Times, Adam Tooze, who is often credited with resuscitating the concept, notes that while in the past it might have been possible to isolate a single causal vector between events – and thus, to identify a more or less single solution to a problem, such as democratic socialism, anti-neoliberalism or a green state – now such causality and revolutionary certainty feel hopelessly quaint. Communities struggle with one crisis after the next, which unpredictably amplify and redirect each other. Their impacts are emotional, institutional and political shattering, surging as they do in unforeseen and unforeseeable directions over which people exert little control once set in motion. As Tooze succinctly observes, naming an experience that most of us would recognize: ‘In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one's sense of reality’ (Tooze, 2022, emphasis added). This is a sentiment similarly underscored by political theorist Wendy Brown who, writing about the ‘unmitigated disaster’ that is the present, has pointed out that: ‘There is no time to think and yet… we must think’ (Brown, 2019). The ‘polycrisis’ names this existentially disorienting and increasingly unstable set of interlocking ‘shocks’ that take on the appearance of ‘unreality’ – the shocks of rapid ecological collapse, social instability, political fragmentation, economic volatility and technological transformation, all coming at speeds that would have astonished even theorists writing about the space-time compression of late capitalism just a few years ago (Harvey, 1989).

Dauvergne and Shipton (2023) have noted that ‘turbulence’ is a particularly helpful concept to think with because, in a sense, it is the counterpoint to ‘crisis’ in the singular. While a crisis has historically suggested a temporary break from a ‘baseline’ situation to which one will eventually return, turbulence evokes precisely the opposite. In turbulence, there is no normal to which the society, the earth system, a community, an ecosystem or even an individual will return after the crisis has passed. Instead, turbulence ‘suggests a state of constant flux, uncertainty, and volatility as structures, interactions, and temporalities continually shift and realign’ (2023: 2). While all historical periods are undoubtedly turbulent in different ways (one need only think of the World Wars of the last century, the Indigenous genocide of the Americas that began in the late fifteenth century and that has continued throughout colonized lands ever since, or the 400 years of the transatlantic slave trade), the contemporary period, Dauvergne and Shipton argue, is perhaps uniquely turbulent in so far as system-wide turbulence ‘[threatens] to swamp the very political and ecological foundations of our world order’ (2023: 2). By holding ‘turbulence’ and ‘polycrisis’ together in this way, we follow Dauvergne and Shipton in foregrounding the peculiar instabilities generated by the unravelling of the very ecological conditions that have made human existence possible. These instabilities are rendering the planet inhospitable not only to growing numbers of human beings – particularly those who have been racialized and dehumanized by colonial governance systems – but to millions of species that have evolved over millennia.

In this special section of Time and Society, we begin with this clamouring sense of turbulence in the polycrisis, with a particular focus on the temporal dimensions of that turbulence in the face of rapidly worsening climate change and other forms of contemporary ecological breakdown. We acknowledge that there are many other aspects of the polycrisis (and indeed, some of those are addressed, albeit fleetingly, in the contributions to this special section). We also acknowledge the very real risks of overplaying the novelty and extent of the contemporary polycrisis, especially given the centuries of compounding crises that have been felt – and continue to be felt – particularly acutely by Black and Indigenous communities across the world. However, the aim of this special section is to reflect on the many diverse ways that temporal turbulence is manifesting across multiple systems – how it is being experienced, shaping institutions, altering our affective landscapes and relationships with both humans and other Earth beings, changing political strategies, reconfiguring alliances and so forth – in the face of the highly complex socio-ecological challenges before us.

While time and temporality have attracted human contemplation for generations, the overlapping crises of seemingly endless coloniality and environmental collapse lend increased urgency to reflections on the temporalities of this eco-politically turbulent moment. It is worth noting at the outset that many scholars working at the intersection of environmental politics, the environmental humanities and environmental law have recently begun to explore these temporal dimensions (Grear, 2019; Winter, 2020, 2026; Whyte, 2021). In some ways, this is not particularly surprising. Ours is an era characterized, as Andreas Malm has noted, by a ‘messy mix up of time scales’ – a time, as Julia Dehm similarly notes in her contribution to this special section, of ‘temporal disjuncture’, and of ‘strange and chaotic temporalities’ (Carrington, 2026; Malm, 2016). As Andreas Folkers has argued in the pages of this journal, the planet itself is in a time of particularly visible collisions of sharply contrasting timescales (Folkers, 2021). These collisions are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in struggles over how to conceptualize and act on climate change. Over the course of the next decade, slow-moving ‘geological time’ will bump up against the need for possibly the largest and fastest whole-system transformation ever required of humans. The anxiety of climate activists and scientists is palpable as sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic rise exponentially, coral scientists rush to develop new calibrations for measuring the scale and speed of the die-off, and climate models predict unsurvivable temperatures for large parts of Africa by mid-century (IPCC, 2022; Adeyeri, 2026). Our ‘standard’ temporal assumptions are further challenged by earth scientists, who warn of tipping points that will render all linear projections meaningless, since it is simply not known how the changing climate system will work under runaway conditions after those tipping points are crossed (Carrington, 2026). The planet is thus – in a very concrete material sense – entering uncharted temporal waters, having endured the ‘slow violence’ that began to accumulate during the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the past five decades, but now also witnessing the ‘fast violence’ of rapid fire climate events that are the direct result of that exponential increase in resource use (Nixon, 2011; Schlosberg, 2023).

This temporal turbulence of the Earth system is the primary material substrate that anchors our concerns in this special section. Indeed, it is the material context that conditions, grounds and orients the thinking captured here – call that context the ‘Anthropocene’, or any one of the many other -cenes that have proliferated in recent scholarship as ways to name this era of large-scale socio-ecological unravelling (Haraway, 2015; Mirzoeff, 2018). It might also be called, following Christina Sharpe, the Wake, in recognition of the millions of human beings who died as a result of European slavery and genocide and who continue to live on as both ancestors and demands for intergenerational justice, raising persistent questions about whether the eco-genocidal ‘past’ that created this current predicament can in any meaningful sense be said to be ‘past’ (Sharpe, 2018; Ferdinand, 2022).

Beginning from this extraordinarily violent, unstable and morally demanding material ground, we ask: Does the contemporary conjuncture of ‘colonial-ecological crisis’ compel a review of ideas about time and temporality across the disciplines (Hage, 2016)? What might such an interdisciplinary review open up – analytically, politically and perhaps even materially? What relationships exist between the long durée of European colonialism and ongoing environmental collapse in different parts of the world? What temporal assumptions and practices continue to anchor neo-colonial institutions (whether the UNFCCC or environmental law more broadly)? How are dominant actors – legal, political and corporate – seeking to disable and dilute challenges to long-entrenched temporalities, both colonial and capitalist? And why is temporal multiplicity or ‘pluriversality’ so important – not only for conceptualizing the world-historical processes that have precipitated this polycrisis but also for the possibility of new affective orientations and more creative policy innovations?

Exploring these questions is, we think, critically important in a moment of such highly conflicted temporalities – a time when the speeds of climate impacts continue to surprise even the most seasoned earth systems scientists; when many citizens still do not recognize the urgency of effective planetary action (even in the face of the soberest of warnings from the UN Chief and many others); and when corporations and states frequently refuse or even undermine the temporal coordinates necessary for both comprehensive environmental planning and responsibility for past and persisting (eco)-colonial violence. Building on recent work in speculative and moral philosophy, third world approaches to international law (TWAIL), new materialist studies, critical Indigenous studies and the burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarship on multi-species justice, in this special section we consider how different experiences (embodied), understandings (epistemological) and operationalizations (strategic/tactical deployments) of time might productively pluralize approaches to environmental and climate change action at scales from the local to the planetary. It is our hope that subjecting dominant temporal assumptions and practices to scrutiny in this way might invite more nuanced conversations about the inadequacies of most current approaches to both climate change and biodiversity loss. While our contributors shed important light on existentially, institutionally and politically challenging temporal contestations that are fundamentally re-shaping how these socio-environmental realities can be approached, it is worth noting briefly at the outset that there are also some very notable absences in this special section – for example, attention to technology, what AI is doing to diverse people's sense of time, the temporalities of speculative finance and so forth. We hope that others will take up the challenge of exploring these issues with the depth and care they require.

What time is it? Key debates and introduction to the contributions

One of the most contentious issues in recent discussions about the temporalities of climate change is the issue of periodization – that is, how the historical moment facing the planet should be understood and in relation to which temporal coordinates and frameworks. How this period is understood matters profoundly for how different theorists, practitioners and communities understand what is to be done in the face of the climate crisis. While the notion of the Anthropocene has been roundly and rightly criticized for its erasure of the key agents responsible for carbon emissions (not human beings in general but disproportionately white, wealthy, northern human beings and capitalist institutions), the debates about how to better characterize the times continue unabated (Hornborg and Malm, 2014). Is it the Capitalocene? The Plantationocene? The White Supremacy Scene? Or, in a different idiom, the ‘hold’ of the slave ship of modernity that began during the Middle Passage? (Ferdinand, 2022; Mirzoeff, 2018; Moore, 2015; Sharpe, 2018; Tsing and Haraway, 2016). Indigenous scholars have been at the forefront of reminding non-Indigenous climate justice scholars and activists that the kinds of anticipated collapse that are creating such unprecedented anxiety among non-Indigenous publics have already long been endured – and continue to be endured – by Indigenous people. Climate change is little more (though also nothing less) than a direct extension of those apocalypses that have already unfolded; a continuation of the dispossession and destruction of life-worlds that have long been experienced by First Nations (Whyte, 2017; Todd, 2016).

These are socio-environmental catastrophes that were also systematically inflicted on enslaved Africans, whose lands and bodies were pillaged by Europeans for more than four centuries to reap the extraordinary profits that fuelled the Industrial Revolution (and with it, the carbon emissions that have heated the atmosphere to almost 1.5° above pre-industrial levels). Christina Sharpe and Malcom Ferdinand have recently written about the persistence of this racial violence – the ways that the brutality of plantation slavery (which directly financed England's carbon-intensive industrialization) continues to haunt the present in forms that are rarely acknowledged by climate policy makers. As Sharpe explains her concept of ‘residence time’, the components of the bodies of the enslaved who were thrown overboard continue to exist in the ocean today – in a real, material sense. This is a very different ‘present’ than the one that former colonial powers would like to acknowledge. Sharpe continues:

What happened to the bodies? By which I mean, what happened to the components of their bodies in salt water? Anne Gardulski tells me that because nutrients cycle through the ocean (the process of organisms eating organisms is the cycling of nutrients through the ocean), the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today…The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium…has a residence time of 260 million years. And what happens to the energy that is produced in the waters? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time. We, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which ‘everything is now. It is all now’ (Sharpe, 2018: 40).

This opening up of the present, this insistence on the persistence of the past in the present, has profound implications for how scholars and activists both conceptualize and seek to address climate change. It is not just that the future has already come. It is also that the past is always present (Winter, 2020, 2022). The past has never gone anywhere – indeed, it never goes anywhere. Time, like matter, persists: there is no ‘away’ for time or pollution. To effectively address climate change, growing numbers of scholars are recognizing that there must be a more sustained reckoning with these times of colonial oppression and genocidal violence that indeed have not gone anywhere – times that are not in the least ‘resolved’, redeemed or repaired (Wright, 2013). And these temporalities have direct implications for how climate justice movements frame their narratives, construct their strategies of engagement and seek to build multi-issue coalitions.

When these more differentiated understandings of the time/s of the Anthropocene are centred, it becomes possible to hold the weight of the ‘geological’ while simultaneously wrestling with the (still too often unrecognized) genocides of both past and present that formed (and form) such a central part of the colonial projects that continue to exacerbate the climate crisis. Thus, how a society, scholars, governments and individuals think about where they are in time – and who ‘they’ are – matters tremendously for how socio-environmental tasks are imagined, how moral and legal obligations are understood, and how responsibilities both for and to generations past, present and future are enacted.

In his contribution to this special section, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer directly picks up these threads, initiating a conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty about the latter's treatment of geological time. What happens, Bendik-Keymer wonders, to morality – that is, to the sense of obligation both to each other and to the earth – when the ‘objectively’ enormous expanse of geological time is accepted? In his own words, ‘given the vastness, depth of time, and unstable complexity [that preoccupies Earth system scientists…], what meanings can we internalize?’ (2026: 10). And again: If humans are ‘unstable bundles of biochemical processes, [do] we lose all moral anchorage?… How shall we act with integrity and responsibility while squarely facing the deep time of Earth system scientists?’ (2026: 10). As he recognizes, Chakrabarty's work is centrally concerned with provincialising the human, which has too often been treated as the centre and pinnacle of history. But in Bendik-Keymer's reading, in so doing, Chakrabarty creates a ‘socially alienated and purposefully objective sense of deep, geologic time’, inadvertently dissolving or displacing the centrality of human morality. Against this view, Bendik-Keymer proposes a ‘soulful sense of time’ that might allow human beings to continue to find meaning and purpose in their relationships with each other and with the Earth. His philosophical reflections ask readers to consider the moral implications of these different temporal scales and kinds of time – the geological (on the one hand) and what he calls the ‘soulful’ (on the other). He explores how to face the fact that ‘we are always already fossils-to-be’? ‘How should we relate to each other in light of our eventual extinction and the entropy of the planet’? (2026: 13). Bendik-Keymer's answer is that given humans’ fleeting time en route to becoming dust and bones, it becomes even more (not less) imperative to address the historical injustices of the fossil-fuelled empires that have brought the planet to this point. Thus, instead of (or alongside) the provincializing of human history within the mind-bending expanse of geological time, it is not only possible – but indeed, ethically imperative – to challenge the injustices of racial capitalism that are the most immediate drivers of the entropy of the present.

In a related, but distinct idiom, Russell Duvernoy considers the kinds of affective orientations (or, as he puts it, affective ‘constellations’) that might more constructively respond to the current polycrisis at a time when political conversations about climate change are too often unproductively polarized. Unlike Bendik-Keymer, though, Duvernoy is not particularly interested in the ramifications for ‘moral life’ of geological time per se. Instead, he shifts the reader’s attention to two contrasting ‘senses’ of time about which much has already been written – linear or ‘clock time’ and what he calls, again following Whyte, ‘relational time’. While the former is the kind of ‘objective’ time that animates things like the Metronome public art installation in New York City, which methodically counts down the seconds remaining in the Earth's carbon budget, the latter is more fluid, variable, shifting and topological, always changing depending on with whom or what one is in relation. For Duvernoy, ‘relational time’ is particularly important in the current climate when debates about climate change often get bogged down in narrow, singular or exclusionary understandings of ‘origins’ and ‘ends’ – What is the ultimate origin of the world? What are the origin stories that shape the world I have inherited? What is the end, and how close are we to that end? Diverse secular and theological traditions answer these questions very differently, and the result is often sectarian conflict and an intensification of identitarian politics.

One way through this affective impasse, Duvernoy proposes, is to cultivate the more ‘relational’ forms of time that can be found – albeit sometimes only in minor keys – in many of the world's philosophical and religious traditions. He outlines the differences between ‘origins’ and ‘ends’ in clock time versus relational time in the following terms:

For clock time…the conception of end is fixed as a static and final point along a linear timeline. Origins and ends are therefore distanced from the present, even as they enact a powerful affective hold on imagination in the present. This distance implicitly conceptualizes time as a scarce and limited resource in which actions and practices have no qualitative effect other than to ‘use it up’. By contrast, relational time still has beginnings and endings, but they are not distanced in the same way. We can even say that such beginnings and endings in relational time are perpetual, and thus must be cared for qualitatively rather than taken for granted as limits, fixed irregardless of behavior or relation (Duvernoy, 2025)

Not unlike Sharpe, then, he proposes a fundamental re-orientation to the ‘perpetual present’ of always-relational time. He concludes by suggesting not that a more ‘soulful time’ is needed as an existential anchor in relation to the vastness of geological time. Instead, what is needed is, again, a more relational sense of time; a commitment to nurturing specific and always shifting relations in ways that are more closely attentive to the perpetual ‘origins’ and ‘ends’ of the unfolding of those relations – a temporal transformation that might allow a fundamentally different kind of affective orientation to take root. That orientation might, in turn, allow people to both appreciate the ‘affective needs for orienting conceptions’ while at the same time ‘balancing them with an openness to contingency and the opacity of others’ (Duvernoy, 2025). Although Duvernoy does not go on to spell out the potential political ramifications of such an affective shift, it is worth noting in passing the extraordinary importance of such a reorientation at a time of such entrenched political divides in many parts of the world, not least North America, from whence he is writing.

Taking on these political questions more directly, Julia Dehm is less concerned with changing affective orientations or moral responsibilities in the face of geological time. Instead, she homes in on the temporal assumptions, practices and strategies that continue to be encoded in international law, as responsibility for climate change is routinely deflected by being shifted into the future or diluted by assumptions about ‘future profitability’. Shifting registers from the existential to the institutional, she outlines the strategies of ‘temporal deferral’ so routinely practiced by the courts and by the international climate regime as part of efforts to sidestep more radical forms of climate action in the present. As she explains, focusing on two different legal regimes (the international climate regime and international investment law), both ‘technologies of deferral attempt to mobilize specific ideas of the future to both delay the transition from fossil fuels and secure, lock in and maintain belief in a sense of linear, progressive time even as the climate crisis presents a fundamental challenge to this modernist narrative’. As she illustrates, the promise and expectation of future profits that are embedded in notions of both ‘credit’ and the ‘asset’ effectively work to undermine the present, destabilizing the very temporal linearity on which they are premised. Not unlike Duvernoy's call for temporal ‘pluriversality’ and the practice of diverse forms of ‘relational time’ in the service of a less identitarian politics, Dehm concludes by calling for what she similarly calls, law's ability to ‘enliven trans-temporal obligations’ and ‘create just relations between plural temporalities’. Although she, too, does not spell out this ‘trans-temporality’ in any significant detail, she importantly gestures towards the work of pushing law in more ‘temporally transgressive’ directions that better recognize the ‘ongoing, uneven, and destabilizing intrusion of irrevocable pasts into an unredeemed present’ (Dehm, 2026, citing Rothberg, 2019).

Although not confined to the space of international law, Christine Winter's contribution, with which we conclude, provides a recent example of the beginnings of temporal plurality in the settler colonial state of Aotearoa/New Zealand. This contribution links climate change-induced turbulence and the polycrisis with colonialism and the imposition of the Gregorian calendar in Aotearoa, including Christian celebratory events. As British settlers arrived, their impulse was to excise the unfamiliar and create a ‘home like home’, with green pastures and familiar trees, flowers, birds, fish and other animals. As Winter shows, in so doing, they cultivated a violent inattention to the actual demands and rhythms of the land. The familiar annual cycles of holy-days and celebrations ‘force themselves upon seasons where they do not belong: quintessentially colonial and out of place, they subordinate that which is natural to Aotearoa to the seasonality of settler origins, for the sake of maintaining those settlers’ “common temporal reference points”’ (Bremer and Schneider, 2024, 3). Christmas, for instance, is a mid-summer event, while Easter occurs in Autumn/Fall. In this process of importing and imposing holidays from the North, Māori seasonal celebrations and lunar calendars were quashed, even though it was those celebrations that were best aligned with the natural rhythms of the southern hemisphere.

In 2022, the government of New Zealand finally introduced a national holiday that celebrates the rise of Matariki (Pleiades, Subaru, The Seven Sisters), signalling the point of mid-winter and the gradual lengthening of daylight hours. This is the first and only nationally celebrated event that responds to the southern hemisphere's natural rhythms. It is a recognition, too, of Māori and ancient Polynesian astronomy and the depth of their knowledge of the heavens and seasons and the attendant effects on lands, seas, agriculture, navigation, etc. It is the beginning of recognising Aotearoa New Zealand as a pluriversal state in which the knowledges of two cultures can be respected and celebrated. However, this pluriversality is not Winter's key observation.

As she shows, the polycrisis and its attendant turbulence are the products of colonialism, capitalism and the universalising impulse that has spread around the planet from Europe. The untruthful obfuscations of colonialism, coupled with the deliberate subjugation and denial of truths and facts by colonists – that which Charles Mills refers to as ‘epistemological ignorance’ (Mills, 1997, 2007, 2017) – cannot be separated from the will to inaction on climate change and the ongoing despoilation of landscapes with no regard for future generations, or the election of clearly crooked, corrupt and criminal leaders whose lies are touted as truths, and whose misdeeds are tolerated. Matariki – the ‘new’ but ancient celebration ‘introduced’ by the government – ‘is a time for honesty, of shedding illogical settler myths of domination and dominion, of a nation celebrating who it is in the southern hemisphere, a time of cultures meeting in synchronisation with the stars and the waning sun’. It is this wrestling with the legacies of colonialism – alongside active efforts to challenge and unlearn those legacies – that must become a more central part of climate action in the years to come.

Conclusion

Each article in this collection explores ideas about how time is conceived, temporal dishonesties are exposed, and action is either stymied or propelled forth by conflicting temporal assumptions. Taken together, these contributions offer imaginaries of hope grounded in temporal pluriversality and the reclaiming of temporalities that are too often neglected, sidelined, challenged or misunderstood by dominant policy actors. Turbulence is experienced at individual, local and planetary scales. The imaginaries of time that are brought to bear on policies and politics that seek to intervene in this turbulence matter profoundly if workable, sustainable solutions are to be found. One thing that is abundantly clear to even the least observant is that the times are changing rapidly. Despite the persistence of the universalising instinct, these moments, this decade, these coming centuries require less of the same and more of an otherwise – more, perhaps, we have wagered in this special section, of radically transformed temporal assumptions, visions, hopes, and practices. These four articles offer some glimpses of these possibilities. To advance planetary well-being calls for much more openly pluriversal institutional arrangements, scholarship and activism to break from the bounds of the limited and limiting one-world worldview that is catapulting the planet towards social and environmental collapse. New/old ways of thinking about social and environmental responsibilities to both ancestors and descendants – generations past and generations still to come – will become increasingly critical to these transformations.