Paper short abstract:

This paper examines an explicit temporal argument that was elaborated in environmentalist contexts from the 1960s and through the 1980s. The argument framed conservation as a matter of protecting the future of evolution through the safeguarding of biological variety yielded by evolutionary history.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to develop Chakrabarty’s concept of the planetary as a contribution to discussion of the Anthropocene as a temporal crisis. In Chakrabarty’s rendering, the planetary refers to earthly processes such as evolution and the climate system. One of the distinguishing features of planetarity is its temporalities, which are generally on a different order of magnitude than those of political and social institutions. One way of approaching the Anthropocene temporal problem is to articulate planetary temporalities and their political potential, and this paper suggests that there are indeed intellectual traditions from the past to draw on in that endeavor. The paper thus examines an explicit temporal argument that was elaborated in different environmentalist contexts from the 1960s and through the 1980s. The argument framed conservation as a temporal issue where the protection of nature was a matter of protecting the future of evolution through the safeguarding of biological variety yielded by evolutionary history. This argument emerged among plant geneticists within the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in the 1960s, and later traveled into the field of conservation biology centered on concerns about the loss of diversity in wildlife. In the 1970s and 1980s, conservation biology became a field of increasingly publicly engaged scientists who cultivated new methods of outreach to gain attention from the general public and build political support. This paper explores this trajectory of the idea of protecting evolutionary time as a temporal idea with political implications, and discusses its relevancy for the Anthropocene discussion.