Professor David Farrier

And of course, there is always a degree of plasticity in that because, you know, there's always variation in seasons.

But, you know, there's a warp and there's a weft.

We're creating a whole series of pressures, though, that are throwing these

um phanological relationships these relationships um in time yes tell us about the caribou calves because that was devastating it's just an example of what you're saying yeah nature's genius is full of examples of ways in which we are fostering change that is not good and i really wanted to make that point that this is not just a book about nature is going to heal itself it's about what lessons can we learn about how we change and one of the best examples and most alarming examples of these negative changes is in

the way that climate change is distorting relationships worldwide between pollinators and pollinating plants, between migratory species and the food sources that they need when they arrive and they breed.

There's distortion of all of these different relationships that are about making time together.

So the Greenland caribou are just one example.

They're now calving at a point in the year when

I forget if it's later or sooner, that's later than the food source of the plants that they'll need to feed on.

And so that's just creating an additional strain on the new generation, reducing even further the likelihood of success.

Yeah.

You know, making it more difficult for these animals to survive.

There are countless examples of this, you know, as these relationships get thrown out of joint.

And asking that question about how can we foster a greater sense of relationship brings you to the heart of that problem because

You know, we have lost our sense that time is made together, that time is made in the body as well, because these, you know, every living thing has a wild clock in it that is sensitive to particular environmental pressures.

its own wild clock and then our brain has a different wild clock and our whole endocrine system is is basically a clock yes it's amazing it is extraordinary and we have this in ourselves and yet we have lost touch to a greater degree i mean we of course we all you know we know about seasonal affective disorder we know about circadian rhythms but i think conceptually we live in our minds in a in a sense of time that isn't really embodied yeah and there's a so we you know how do we get back to that well a good i think that that question

How do we foster reconnection is at the heart of it.

There's a wonderful idea expressed by a Potawatomi scholar called Kyle White.

It's what he calls kinship time.

It's an expression of time, an understanding of time that's common to many indigenous cultures throughout the world.