Soundscape Ecology ::: Bernie Kraus

Endless forms most beautiful…

 

WILD CLOCKS 

by David Farrier

Attentive to the loss of age-old ecological relationships as “wild clocks” fall out of synchronization with each other, David Farrier imagines an opportunity to renew the rhythms by which we live.

Pile o’Sápmi Supreme

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.

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.

Continue reading:

https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/wild-clocks/