Wild Clocks

In every living thing, there ticks a clock. “Lodged in all is a set metronome,” wrote W. H. Auden: when May comes round, birds “still in the egg, click to each other ‘Hatch!’” and “October’s nip” is the signal for trees to release their leaves.¹

Once, these rhythms comforted and consoled, orchestrating innumerable ecological relationships and offering glimpses of the greater wheels within which our small lives turn. But as climate breakdown takes hold, more and more species are struggling to keep time as they once did. Biological clocks that evolved an exact synchronization over millions of years are falling out of sync: the beat does not fall where it should; syncopation becomes dissonance. Failing wild clocks are resulting in misalignments in time between predators and prey, herbivores and plants, or flowers and pollinators. The results can be catastrophic, as breeding seasons fail and the long-held relationships that weave species together around shared needs fray. In Australia, mountain pygmy possums are leaving hibernation before the emergence of their preferred food, the bogong moth, risking starvation. Plants are losing touch with their pollinators: warm springs in Japan have led to earlier flowering of spring-ephemeral plants relative to their pollinating bees. One study warns that the timing of phytoplankton blooms could be shortened if the oceans continue to warm, introducing a calamitous mismatch at the very base of the marine food chain.

In a time of ecological crisis, it can be difficult to know exactly what time it really is.

Barbara’s email was timestamped 07.17:

Hi David,

a classic, regarding our definitions of time. I noticed that you specified in GMT. But since you are on summer savings time that would be 11 a.m. local time and 12 in Switzerland. Right?

Talk soon.

Barbara Helm is a “chronobiologist”—an expert in phenology, the timing of life cycles—at the Swiss Ornithological Institute. The Swiss are famous for their mechanical timekeepers, but Barbara researches “wild clocks”: the traits that enable living things to coordinate their way of life with the world around them. I had arranged a video call with Barbara for that morning so I could learn about how our ecological crises are creating a chronoclasm—a collision of different orders of time—but I had forgotten about the shift to daylight saving. Pegged to the prime meridian, my sense of time was stuck in the wrong season.

When she appeared on my screen a few hours later Barbara greeted me with a broad grin and waved away my apology for my poor timekeeping.

There are three components in any organism’s biological clock, she explained, which make up its “chronotype” or temporal phenotype, an expression of time totally distinct to that creature. First, a sense of time that is embedded in an organism’s tissues; second, this “body time” is coordinated with what chronobiologists call zeitgebers or “time-givers”—environmental factors such as daylight or temperature that modulate an animal’s or plant’s body time to a specific tempo. Their role is to synchronize the animal or plant with the world around them. Arctic-breeding birds, for instance, may unite the memory of when snow melted in past years with changes in day length and observations of the behavior of other migrating birds to decide when to begin the long journey north.

An animal might have different clocks in different organs, Barbara explained, one in the skin to coordinate temperature, another in the liver to regulate feeding cues. The same is true for insects: butterflies navigate by the sun, but they also employ “antennae clocks” to compensate for changes in latitude as they migrate. Each cell carries its own timekeeper, precisely tuned to a particular function.

“And so that brought up questions for biologists,” Barbara went on. “How could you get meaningful time information from literally billions of clocks?!”

The answer is by coordination. Time is made in the body, but it is also made together. The third element in a chronotype is the interaction between organisms.

“For example,” she said, “bees make time together as a hive.” Honeybees have a social clock determined by the division of labor. Nurse bees, who remain in the hive to care for the brood, keep to a consistent rhythm that ticks away in their genes, whereas foraging bees manage a complex relationship between circadian rhythms, an oscillating clock gene, and what Barbara called “flower time,” the separate chronotype of the plants to which the bees are drawn. Making time is a complicated negotiation between species.

And wild clocks don’t tick with the steady pulse of a Swiss watch, they swing. Assembled together, they form a vast polyrhythmic score, an impossibly complex arrangement of syncopated beats and pulses, tempo layered upon tempo, in a rich, immersive cross-rhythm that drives life forwards day by day, year by year, season to season.

Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene. It is also a social contract, one we adjust according to different needs, whether for daylight saving or simply setting a watch five minutes fast to avoid being late. Yet, as philosopher Michelle Bastian has recognized, our habitual ways of telling time have their limits. “While the clock can tell me whether I am late for work,” she writes, “it cannot tell me whether it is too late to mitigate runaway climate change.” She suggests that, as our usual ways of telling the time flounder, perhaps other living things might become our “time-givers” instead. As wild clocks fall out of measure, can we recalibrate our sense of time and foster a rhythm by which all life can flourish?

Once again, my sense of time had let me down.

I thought I had plenty of time to spare. I’d woken early and set off through the center of Oslo at a leisurely pace, keeping an eye out for somewhere to buy coffee and pastries and looking forward to reading my notes in the morning sunshine before meeting Ane outside the train station.

But the clock on Oslo Cathedral told me otherwise. My heart leaped unpleasantly as I looked up and saw the hands were not arranged in the neat ninety degrees of 9 a.m. as I expected, but narrowed in the acute angle of 10 a.m.

I had relied on my phone to update the time zone when I arrived the day before, but that particular setting, I later learned, was switched off. I was an hour out of step with the city around me, and more importantly, I was late.

I’d traveled to Norway to visit a forest of books that will grow, unread, for a hundred years. Future Library is the invention of Scottish artist Katie Paterson. Every year a writer contributes a text—a story, a poem, even a novel, there is no limit—that will be held in trust until 2114, when an anthology of the work will be printed on paper from trees specially planted in Nordmarka, a vast forest of pine, spruce, and birch outside Oslo. Each new deposit is marked by a summer handover ceremony in the grove.

The first writer to add their work, in 2014, was Margaret Atwood. “How strange it is,” she wrote at the time, “to think of my own voice—silent by then for a long time—suddenly being awakened, after a hundred years.” Since then, eight more authors have contributed. David Mitchell, the second writer to take part, called Future Library “a vote of confidence in the future”; for the fifth, Han Kang, it was like “a century-long prayer.” Future Library is also an exercise in temporal fine-tuning, calibrating our fraught and anxious present with a future about which no one can be certain.

Even a project that adopts such a long view was not immune to the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic, however. The contributions of the past three writers—Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ocean Vuong, and Tsitsi Dangarembga—had been delayed as time around the world suddenly aligned with the time of the virus. All three were due in Oslo for the first ceremony since 2019, along with many of the other writers, heightening the sense of occasion.

Since I’d first heard of Future Library, I’d longed to visit the forest grove where the books were growing. Each year, as a new writer was announced and their work handed over, I would wonder what message they had left for the next century and what it felt like to assume that responsibility. Now, a few days before the ceremony was to take place, I was on my way—and running late—to meet Ane Victoria Vollsnes, a plant biologist at Oslo University. We would travel by train to the Future Library grove, where Ane would tell me how the forest ecosystem is likely to change in the next hundred years.

I was relieved to find Ane waiting patiently for me in the busy square outside the train station. Quiet and neat, she smiled politely at my bad and slightly breathless joke about our mismatched phenologies, and led the way towards our platform.

Ane tracked how quickly Arctic ecosystems are changing; specifically, she studied the dual effect of air pollution and climate breakdown on plant species in Finnmark, in the very north of Norway. The Arctic is warming three times faster than anywhere else on Earth, she said. The chronoclasm is more fierce and abrupt there than anywhere else on the planet. Still, her face lit up when she spoke about the light and space of the far north.

Our train reached the end of the line, and we set off down one of the many branching paths through the forest. Ane stooped to examine the bank on our left. Dozens of small-leaved bilberries were growing close to the ground, but scattered throughout scorched-looking branches rose up claw-like, burnt orange against the green. Bilberries have evolved to exploit snow cover, she explained, surviving the harsh Norwegian winter under an insulating blanket of snow. But in recent years the winter had been warmer than usual. Primed to expect snow to fall later in the year, the charred twigs had grown beyond the snow line and perished.

We paused by a tall spruce a little further down the track. These trees coordinate their circadian rhythm with sensitivity to temperature so as not to bud in December when it is too dark and cold, Ane said. The new needles had been growing since May and now each dark branch ended in a fat, feathery, light-green tip. As the climate changes it might affect the timing of spruce phenology, she said, or it may be that the spruce get new neighbors like beech, which extend their range northwards.

The forest around Oslo won’t disappear, she said. “One hundred years is not a long time in the life of a forest. But even so, we could see a lot of changes in that time.”

Some plants that can exploit the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may grow more quickly, she went on. But the amount of nitrogen in the soil won’t change, which means they may have more starch but not more protein, a potential problem for herbivores, especially in the breeding season. In Greenland, the caribou breeding season is precisely synchronized with the arrival of spring. Both calving and plant phenology are advancing as the climate warms, but at different speeds. Whereas calves are born, on average, just under four days earlier than thirty years ago, the plant-growing season has advanced by nearly five days. That single day’s difference may not sound much, but for outliers within the range the risk that calves will starve is real and growing starker with each year as the gap widens. Reindeer in the north of Norway face similar pressures. During winter they rely mainly on mosses for sustenance, but in warm winters, when snowfall is punctuated by rain, ice can form impenetrable layers in the snowpack.

The Future Library grove stood off the main path on a steep, clear-cut hillside. Watched over by tall mature spruce, the young trees reached no higher than chest height. Pink ribbons were tied to their upper branches, contrasting with the bright tips of new growth emerging like hairy green caterpillars. In the years since planting, the scrubby slope had also been colonized by bilberries, raspberry bushes, and rowan. Ane pointed out where moose had nibbled the tops of a rowan tree where it had poked out above the snow line the previous winter.

We sat down on a rough wooden bench in the center of the clearing and shared coffee from Ane’s flask, listening to the hushed sound of hundreds of trees waiting to become a library.

How will this scene change, I asked, before the trees are cut and the books printed?

She paused before replying.

One hundred years ago, there were cattle grazing in this forest, she said; maybe wild boar will cross the border from Sweden and settle here, more new neighbors to accompany the northwards-marching beech. The balance between host trees and parasite might be affected. White pine weevils spend part of their lives burrowed inside the trunks of living trees, feeding on the bark and laying their eggs. Their taste is for seedlings and young trees, and without protection up to half the newly planted trees could be chewed to pieces. In years to come, if the warming climate allows the weevils to breed multiple times each year, the children of the Future Library mother trees would then paint the grove in a rainbow of sickly colors mixed among the healthy green. White resinous growths would spot their trunks where the insects burrow; the needles would turn red and fall until all that is left is a grey skeleton.

Climate change increases the risk of other pests as well: warming extends the range of mountain pine beetles, bearers of a type of parasitic fungus that tattoos the wood of fallen trees sky blue.

I had expected the library-in-waiting to feel like somewhere very obviously set aside. But it wasn’t like that at all. Rather than timeless, it was very evidently full of time. One hundred years might not be long in the life of a forest, but Ane was right—so much change would take place in that span. The grove was immersed in the polyrhythmic flow of life, and as the tempos changed so would its sights and sounds (even, perhaps, smells—thinking about those wild boar). We were sitting inside a giant wild clock whose syncopated tick measured the evolution of the whole forest.

A few days later I returned to the grove for the handover ceremony. Hundreds of people had traveled from the city to form a procession through the forest. Beneath the overcast sky there was a cheerful, holiday atmosphere. Children and pets scurried excitedly between the trees while the adults drank thick black coffee warmed on an open brazier. A microphone was set up by the bench Ane and I had sat on, now occupied by Katie and the writers who would deposit their work. As an expectant hush descended, the wind in the tall trees whistled softly in answer.

“We’re standing in this forest, an ordinary forest,” Katie said in welcome. “But it’s a forest filled with promise.” In a message read on his behalf, Ocean Vuong (who had tested positive for Covid and was unable to travel) addressed the readers of 2114. “As a Buddhist,” he wrote, “I believe … that my dying will propel me … toward you, so that I may be one amongst you when these texts are revealed.”

“One billion people believe time runs backwards,” said Tsitsi Dangarembga. Many African cultures think of time in terms of zamani (the past) and sasa (the present and immediate future). “The present exists only to ensure that one moves back into the past well,” she remarked.

“There is no past or future in art,” Picasso once said. But art has always reflected our changing relationship with time. Some of the earliest cave paintings, handprints in red ochre, record our ancestors’ shift from the perpetual present of sensation to time as duration: from I am here to I was here. The locked library marks our shifting presence in time. I once asked my friend, the Australian novelist James Bradley, what message he would leave for future generations. “We know you’re there,” he said.

“What tense would you choose to live in?” the poet Osip Mandelstam once asked his journal, before answering his own question. “I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.’”

The forester who was responsible for the grove stepped up to the microphone. He spoke with the shy pride of a new parent. “Be careful of the trees!” he teased the crowd.

The spruce were now established, he said, their root systems healthy. Other species—rowan and birch—had begun to arrive. “Now is the time to form the future forest—do we clear away these pioneers, or do we let them stay?” Clearing would create a dark stand of only spruce; leaving them would allow light to filter through the space as the trees grew. The decision would have implications for what the ceremony would look like in future. He turned to Katie: “What should we do?”

It is in the nature of rituals to grow and change, as the world they connect us with changes. In years to come, the handover ceremony will adapt to the changing shape of the forest. As it grows, so will the means we use to mark each new deposit in the library. The clear-cut slope we stood in formed a natural amphitheater, but as the trees grew taller they would fragment the space and limit the number of people who could attend future occasions. The number of attendees might shrink to a select few; or perhaps breaking lines of sight will mean that the focus of the gathering shifts, from the authors to the trees themselves.

In the future, the trees will dictate what form the ceremony takes, determining “what ought to be” for those who keep the ritual.

Before I left Oslo there was one more thing I wanted to see. This time, I made sure I wasn’t late.

In February 2016 a pile of two hundred decapitated reindeer heads appeared outside the district court in Finnmark. As snow fell on the raw and bloodied heap, inside the court a Sami reindeer herder called Jovsset Ánte Sara initiated proceedings against the Norwegian state, which had decreed that his herd should be cut to no more than seventy-five reindeer. In 2013, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture had announced the implementation of tvangsreduksjon: the forced reduction of Sami reindeer herds. For decades, southern politicians had worried that excessive grazing by reindeer would degrade pastures, resulting in the collapse of the delicate tundra ecosystem. Herders like Jovsset argued that such small herds would be too vulnerable to survive, placing the entire Sami culture of reindrift, or reindeer husbandry, at risk.

The grisly pyramid was the work of Jovsset’s sister, Sami artist Máret Ánne Sara. She called it Pile o’Sápmi, after another pile o’bones, the infamous photograph of a thirty-foot mountain of bison skulls taken in Rougeville, Michigan, in 1892. The slaughter of North American bison, a holocaust of almost incomprehensible fury, brought the animals to the brink of extinction, reducing a population of sixty million to less than five hundred in just a few decades. The artwork changed shape several times as Jovsset’s case progressed, appearing like a specter outside courtrooms across Norway, until Máret Ánne arrived at the final form: a curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, alternately weather-stained and bleached white, arranged to mimic the pattern of the Sami flag. Pile o’Sápmi Supreme debuted outside the Norwegian parliament in December 2017, as Jovsset finally lost his case against the forced reduction of his herd.

I arrived early at Oslo’s new National Museum, a vast, slate-grey modernist box situated in a sun-drenched courtyard to see Pile o’Sápmi Supreme, now hanging in the museum’s foyer, for myself. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, and then there it was: suspended on the far wall of an immense lobby, the curtain of skulls glowed eerily.

I wasn’t prepared for the scale of it. It seemed truly epic: heavy with the weight of four hundred reindeer, but also evanescent, ghostly. The bleached skulls’ empty sockets seemed to stare back intently; every one of the four hundred heads was perforated by a bullet hole like a third eye. Up close, they were surprisingly singular. Each animal would have been known to its herder, its personality and temperament a matter of simple, intimate knowledge, and even in death they remained distinct, as if the fact of being known had imprinted itself somehow on their bones. Together they flowed down the wall, nose to neck, ending in a ragged hem.

Minutes passed. For a long time, I couldn’t take my eyes from it. I could almost feel the warmth and smell the stink of the herd, close-pressed on the open tundra. But, oddly, I couldn’t hear it. Silence had wrapped around the skulls. In W. H. Auden’s poem, “The Fall of Rome,” a modern empire crumbles. Clock time begins to collapse: the trains stop running and carriages stand abandoned in desolate fields while whole cities are stilled by influenza. And yet, he writes, life and time persist:

Something in the skulls’ silence spoke, still, of the tremendous power that had flowed through them in life. But their place of arrest, on the wall of a museum in the center of Oslo, was also a terrible affront. This, I realized, was another kind of a chronoclasm. The colonization of time has not only deafened us to the rhythm of wild clocks; it has also eliminated, or at least sought to eliminate, the many Indigenous ways of timekeeping that would not coordinate with the priorities of empire-building.

Samantha Chisholm Hatfield, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and a cultural anthropologist, writes of how Indigenous concepts of time can vary widely but are always deeply entwined with a sense of how time is made together with the places in which people live. In the case of the Sami, the government’s official time, with its inflexible concept of “optimal herds,” collided with the herders’ concept of jahkodat, a northern Sami term that conveys the seasonal distinctiveness of any given year. One year, so the saying goes, is not brother to the next. In spring, Sami herd their reindeer from winter pastures on the inland plateau to the warm, green pastures along the coast. But the timing of this migration involves a complex calibration of factors, accounting for the fact that spring or winter may arrive sooner or later in any given year. Climate breakdown is exacerbating this fluctuation, but tvangsreduksjon would impose a limit on reindeer numbers, making them vulnerable to the slightest seasonal variation. And yet jahkodat persists. Pinned to the wall of the museum—a place of preservation, where time is only permitted to stand still—the skulls nonetheless spoke loudly of an understanding that time is made between people, animal, and place.

Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte calls this kinship time, a way of experiencing time in relation to other living things. I’m not a Sami reindeer herder; jahkodat—time made between herd, herder, and the places they pass through—isn’t my time to live by. What we in the West have lost as a result of the way we tell time cannot be restored by repeating history and plundering other cultures. But we could seek out ways to coordinate our days with the biological rhythms where we live. Observing isn’t enough, because kinship time is time made together; we must let wild clocks adjust our sense of connection, particularly where their rhythms are becoming disordered. In practical terms, we might discover this sense of time in ritual. When wild clocks fall out of step, they also shift tense, from the present continuous of “what is” to the imperative of the future passive participle, Mandelstam’s “what ought to be.” This new tense carries with it a kind of temporal ache, an acute sense of loss. But “what ought to be” is also the tense of hope and of ritual. Rituals both mourn what is lost and exhort what is to come. They usher us, writes the poet CA Conrad, into a moment “where all of time is suddenly present.” Ceremonies of What Ought To Be could help us embed kinship time in our social structures and institutions. They could bring past and future into alignment with our calamitous present in a festival of remembrance and renewal.

Each UN Climate Change Conference already includes a Young and Future Generations Day, intended to remind decision-makers of the obligation they bear to people who, yet to be conceived, will be born “out of time” into a world where our presence and influence still shapes the climate. But local versions of this that are tied to the losses and kinships of a particular place would give us all a means to navigate the slippage in time we all inhabit, consciously or not; even where what is remembered is an animal’s total eviction from time.

The Firth of Forth, where I live in Scotland, is a wide estuary that pours into the North Sea. In the late eighteenth century, oysters were so abundant here that three-man clinker-built boats would take thirty million each year. Two would row while one controlled the dredge, a net attached to an iron frame that dragged along the seafloor. To keep the dredge’s mouth open, the boat had to maintain a constant speed: too fast and the dredge would skip and lift off the bottom, too slow and the mouth would close. Fishermen would keep an even pace by singing a “dreg song,” the asymmetric rhythm of which—five syllables sung by the leader followed by three repeated by the rowers—matched the greater effort needed to pull the oars through the water and the lesser effort involved in bringing them round through the air. This lopsided chant, they believed, would charm the oysters from their beds. “The oysters are a gentle kin,” went one eighteenth-century song. “They winna tak unless ye sing.”

The dreg song’s success was calamitous. In the mid-nineteenth century, the annual catch declined by more than 99 percent. Oysters were declared extinct in the Firth of Forth in 1957, by which time the dreg songs had been silent for decades.

A ceremony of What Ought To Be on the shores of the Firth of Forth would recall not just the smothering rhythm of the dreg songs, but also the rhythms they stifled. As a keystone species, the oysters provided clean water and habitat for many other estuarine residents, a kind of bass pulse underpinning the river’s various beats and tempos. Recent research has suggested that oysters are also climate clocks. Their sensitivity to changes in temperature and the flow of nutrients means they act as sentinels of climate variability. Yet, along the Forth, that warning system has been lost (although a small oyster population has tentatively begun to recolonize the estuary, it pales next to the vast beds that once blanketed the estuary floor). The river where I live has slipped into the same strange tense as Greenland caribou and a forest outside Oslo.

“This is a library built by many hands,” Katie had said during the Future Library forest ceremony. A library can coordinate our time with that of future generations; with a forest clock we can synchronize with an entire ecosystem, calibrating our tempo with nature’s intricate groove. In coordinating with wild clocks and composing new rituals, we might also redesign the systems and infrastructures that sustain modern life. We are trapped in cycles of consumption that spin a fantasy of timelessness, of action without consequence, while “forever chemicals” and nonbiodegradable plastics pollute rivers, soils, and groundwater; but forests have no concept of waste. A forest is a loop, in which dead matter is fed back into the system, past feeding future becoming past. Establishing a circular economy would not just involve a radical shift in how we manage materials, it would be a dramatic change in how we think about time. In forests, time is shared; we, on the other hand, tend to hoard it. Industrial agriculture strips soils of their nutrients, robbing future harvests; the drive to pull as many minerals and as much oil as we can from the earth is a kind of temporal stockpiling. But our days could be told instead by forest-time and bird-time; by the hastening of the Arctic spring and the loosening of the bonds by which species make time together. We might even redesign political time. Imagine what could be achieved with a political calendar that was set by the wobble in the jet stream or the faltering migration of butterflies rather than election cycles.

As the minutes ticked by, I began to feel the pull of the clock on my attention once more. With one final glance back at the gleaming curtain of skulls, I picked up my bag and walked towards the exit, and home.