Thick Time – A Relational Approach to Imagining Alternative Climate Futures

Times of significant planetary ecological changes demand that we consider the timings that dominate climate futures narratives. This paper presents a conceptual framework for thinking about the temporalities of the human and more than human as it relates to climate change. It draws on empirical work that explores human-soil relations in the context of carbon farming and brings together expressions of a layered quality or thickness of time. These conceptualizations of what I interpret as “thick time” emerge from futures and anticipation scholarship, and feminist and environmental humanities scholars, and I inquire into how thinking with these concepts supports imagining alternative climate futures by proposing three principles of thick time. I engage in a practice that aims to “tell the time with soils” and propose that the relational focus that this framing bring helps to point to the times that are unseen and marginalized in dominant climate futures narratives. Alternative clocks such as soils invite thinking with thick time and building the capacity to consider what timings are meaningful in coordinating climate action.