Paper short abstract:

"Nature" and "wilderness", whatever their cultural conceptualization across Africa and Europe, have been discussed first and foremost as places, localized in personal or global space. In this paper I investigate the temporal aspect of constructions of nature and wilderness.

Paper long abstract:

"Nature" and "wilderness", whatever their cultural conceptualization across Africa and Europe, have been discussed first and foremost as places, localized in personal or global space. In this paper I investigate the temporal aspect of constructions of nature and wilderness.

The temporal dimension of nature and wilderness is less easy to pinpoint than its spatial dimension, which is often associated with remoteness and distance. Consequently, the first part of this paper is an attempt to take stock of various time frames that we find in conceptualizations of nature and wilderness. For both, Africa and Europe, these time frames can be highly variable. In the European context the link between nature and eternity has been highlighted (Cronon) but also as a-an idealized homeostatsis in sustainability concepts (Radkau). In the African context the relation between nature and culture, bush and town is often one of seasonality, of a rhythmic to and fro as it has been described for agriculturalists (Jackson). African hunter-gatherers, by contrast, seem to grant every non-human species its own time rhythm and life cycle which is reflected in non-homogenized time frames. The second part of this paper looks at examples of what happens when there are clashes of different time frames. How much coordination and standardization of time frames are necessary for coordinated human environmental action? And what is the role of non-human agents in this?