Thick Time – A Relational Approach to Imagining Alternative Climate Futures

Introduction–A Need for Alternative Temporal Narratives

In times of significant planetary ecological changes, what are the temporalities that guide collective action to respond proportionally to the corresponding challenges? This is a topic addressed by scholars from diverse fields, which this paper builds on through the presentation of a conceptual framework for thinking about the temporalities of the human and more than human as they relate to climate change and applying it to the context of carbon farming in agriculture. I am primarily interested in bringing together expressions of time as thick, layered, textured, and embodied. This interest emerges amidst the dominance of climate narratives based on urgency, rapid transitions, and goals based on deadlines, such as the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, that are based on flattened timelines which struggle to recognize the vast diversity of more than human temporalities and which have failed to create care-full and equitable responses to these serious socioecological challenges (Adam and Groves 2007; Bastian 2012; Bremer et al. 2023; Fitz-Henry 2017; Kolinjivadi et al. 2020; Whyte 2021a).

This study concerns the creation of futures, and as such I aim to go beyond just critiquing dominant narratives but also try to engage in the work of possibility thinking (Facer 2023). Possibility thinking aims to engage the temporal imagination and is “a form of attention that allows us to become alert to the different temporal frames, rhythms and processes at play in any situation and the possibilities that might emerge from them” (Facer 2023, 62). “Thick time” is a concept that environmental humanities scholars Neimanis and Walker (2014) work with to capture a feminist perspective on climate change that aims to evoke new cultural imaginations where climate is not abstract, but inseparable from our human bodies. In a departure from Neimanis and Walker’s conceptualization of the term, I add layers to thick time using perspectives that emerge from futures and anticipation scholarship, and environmental humanities scholars. These perspectives create foundations for forms of attention which I propose as principles of thick time to inform “thick action” when it comes to imagining and enacting alternative climate futures. Working from my own observations which explore human-soil relations in carbon farming contexts, I then provide examples of what “thick time” looks like in action. In so doing, I engage with possibility thinking to work with this paper’s research question: What is the role of thick time in critiquing dominant climate futures narratives?

To deepen this investigation, I engage in “thinking with soils” (Salazar et al. 2020) enabling a material relational perspective that acknowledges the agency of soils and their part in a relational engagement with climate futures. Much hope is placed on soils to successfully archive our ecocidal pasts and presents, creating a climate resilient and net-zero future. This can be seen, for example, in the international focus on “climate-smart” agriculture focused on adaptation, mitigation, and food security (Chandra et al. 2018), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s RECSOIL (Recarbonization of Global Agricultural Soils) project, the “4 per 1,000” initiative to increase soil organic carbon stocks (Arrouays and Horn 2019), and in the European Green Deal where carbon farming is an example of a business model that aims to reward land managers for increased carbon sequestration in agricultural soils to mitigate climate change and increase soil health (EC 2021). As the practices of industrial agriculture are largely responsible for the devastation of soil ecosystems and a contributor to climate change (Campbell et al. 2017; Clapp et al. 2018), it is this context, rather than other cultural contexts of human-soil relations, that I foremost aim to address.

Soils are thus forming a core context for different kinds of climate and sustainability-related action. Important insights have already been made around attention to soil temporalities as disruptive to dominant linear temporalities (such as universal clock time) as well as insights that help us critically gaze upon human-soil relations, with focus on soil knowledge practices and the onto-political effects of these practices (Holmstedt 2022a; Krzywoszynska and Marchesi 2020; Puig de la Bellacasa 2015, 2017; Salazar et al. 2020). This study contributes an articulation of thick time with soils and farmers that demonstrates a relational approach to imagining alternative climate futures and which can help us formulate speculative openings that create “new habits of attention” (Facer 2023, 62). These habits may encompass the capacity to reflect on and engage critically with multiple temporal frames and practices. For example, reflecting on the mainstream story of why carbon farming is needed which has a particular start point (e.g. the need to mitigate climate change) and even a potential end point (when soils are healthy and we have mitigated climate change) that impacts the times (un)seen. Facer encourages us to then ask how this same situation might be understood from a different temporal frame and the possibilities that may emerge with that alternative reading. This paper thus evokes soils and their farmer companions to explore how temporal monocultures might instead be overgrown by pluriversal possibility (Escobar 2018) and “extend regard to a polyphony of temporalities” (Bremer et al. 2023). Inspired by Bastian’s “telling the time with turtles” (2012, 45), I wonder what we might learn from telling the time with soils as a form of thick time that can inform thicker action.

This paper proposes that the relational focus that accompanies telling the time with soils helps to point to the times that are unseen and marginalized in dominant climate futures narratives and therefore supports possibility thinking. More specifically, by illustrating thick time “on the ground”, this study invites a reimagination of diverse interventions (policy, financial support, and other forms of organizing action) by actors in the agri-food sector. There is a further implication of the need to develop the capacities that support dialogue between different actors about the temporal frames and practices (Facer 2023) in carbon farming and agri-food transitions more broadly. As Environmental Futures takes shape as a field of inquiry, my goal in illustrating examples of the forms of attention that thick time calls for is to demonstrate the political importance of these temporal experiences in vying for alternative – more caring and equitable – climate futures.

Dominant Temporalities of Climate Narratives

Much work has gone into demonstrating the inadequacies of the temporal ecologies (Bussey 2017) such as those created by climate modeling, temporalities of risk and insurance, and economic growth based on a mechanistic reading of time, that serve as the epistemological and ontological foundations of dominant climate and environmental futures narratives (Kolinjivadi et al. 2020). This research, which comes from diverse fields such as science and technology studies, human geography, futures, indigenous studies, and environmental humanities, illustrates how novel and alternative ways of engaging with futures are hindered or marginalized through the continuous reproduction of existing dominant narratives of futures. Dominant narratives coalesce around temporal framings that uphold “linear, industrial, clock time” and attempt to unify and standardize temporal diversity under “hegemonic time” (Milojević 2008, 333). Linear time “means the narration of duration, span, or movement through identical units like years or centuries” (Whyte 2021, 41) and upholds fundamental values of industrialism and capitalism such as “order, promptness and regularity” (Milojević 2008, 333). Presentism and short-termism are also characteristics of dominant climate narratives. The following examples help demonstrate these temporal orientations.

Whyte (2021a) has shown how narratives of climate change perpetuate the masking of many different forms of power such as colonialism and industrialism. Situated in a crisis epistemology, these narratives focus on the present and the unique imminence of ecological crises in ways that favor swift action. Swift action often comes at the cost of more just and ethical approaches to crises that consider relationships built over time and also deep time (Whyte 2021a). Still others have shown how climate change is approached predominantly through measuring and managing, creating timelines aligned around capital accumulation (Callison 2014). Hulme argues that climate change is often reduced to what can be told in “predictive natural sciences over contingent, imaginative and humanistic accounts of social life and visions of the future” (Hulme 2011, 245). For example, climate models illustrating potential scenarios and pathways frame what becomes seen as possible, and which actors are seen as relevant, and which (speculative) technologies are necessary (Beck and Mahony 2018). In this way, climate change policy that depends on negative emissions technologies “mortgages” the future by delaying action in the short-term and creating visions of the future that “legitimize and reproduce the present” (Carton 2019, 764). Research on imagined pathways to net-zero in agriculture (Booth 2023) and optimizing for energy-secure futures (Groves 2017) are further examples of more localized policies that reproduce “empty” futures. Empty futures plot “the future as a space of a single predictable trajectory” and, connected to the examples above, emerge from fears of loss in the present (e.g., “keeping the lights on” or continuing to use fossil fuels) (Groves 2017, 34).

Finally, Kolinjivadi and colleagues (2020) argue that universal time organized around economic productivity has led to the failure to respond to ecological crises and challenges the emergence of alter-temporalities in agriculture (see also Adam et al. 1997). This failure is based on approaching non-linear phenomenon such as climate change, species extinction, and soil infertility with the temporalities of efficiency and optimization that organize capital production. They further argue that universal clock time is not problematic per se, but that the fetishization of this linear timekeeping practice creates abstract representations of lived human-nature experiences and, “We are left with deadened representations of ‘society’ and ‘nature’ rather than lively co-producing socionatures capable of recombining into disruptive, life-restoring resistance” (Kolinjivadi et al. 2020, 911). Puig de la Bellacasa (2015, 2017), too, exemplifies this particular argument through the account of the technoscientific orientation of soil care demonstrating the inability to “make time” for soils in ways that establish mutually caring relationships.

These are just some of the examples of how hegemonic time and a focus on the short-term (Fitz-Henry 2017, 12) has failed to create the kinds of attention, responsibility, and action required to work for more caring and equitable climate futures. As Bastian aptly summarizes, “in the current context of multiple ecological crises, time needs to be more clearly understood, not as a quantitative measurement, but as a powerful social tool for producing, managing, and/or undermining various understandings of who or what is in relation with other things or beings” (2012, 25). Rather than focus solely on what universal clock time does not allow us to do, I follow others (Adam et al. 1997; Bastian 2012; Facer 2023; Fitz-Henry 2017; Fredengren 2016; Fredengren and Åsberg 2020; Terry et al. 2024; Wiggin et al. 2020) in the project to expand our temporal vocabularies and fuel our imaginations. In so doing, I move to attend to the “continuum of relations” between humans and soils in ways that support an “unmaking of soil mastery” (Green 2020, 287). To this end, I aim to work with ways of seeing time that might create the kinds of attention, responsibility, and action required for caring and equitable climate futures. I suggest that rather than universal clock time, we could work with the thick time of embodied, specific encounters for imagining and bringing about these alternative futures.

Conceptualizing Thick Time

Here I bring together six conceptualizations of time with the aim of providing foundations for possibility thinking in carbon farming (and beyond). I suggest that “thick” captures a critical essence in these concepts though without unifying them in the sense that they would all mean the same thing or be interchangeable. I conclude this section by proposing three key principles of thick time.

These first three examples of feminist and environmental humanities perspectives on time mobilize an ethics of attunement and responsibility based on their attention to human/non-human relations. Neimanis and Walker (2014) develop the term “thick time” which invites us to see that human bodies are also “nature” or “environment”. With this perspective, “Our very bodies, thoughts, actions, and behaviors makes the present, past, and future” and “we are made by all the time makers all around us” (Neimanis and Walker 2014, 569). Neimanis and Walker propose that this “thicker” imaginary of climate change has implications for the accountability of our climate actions. Specifically, those of us living in privileged and high-consumption situations can direct our responsivity in ways that are more attuned to thick time. Climate change, then, is not approached through an ethic of “fixing” or solving but instead approached in ways that allows us to see possibilities for creating different kinds of relationships.

Relationships and our attentiveness to the quality of these relationships are also central in Kyle Whyte’s (2021b) conceptualization of “time as kinship”. What kinship time invites us (settler, colonial persons) to understand is that climate change might also be articulated through changes in kinship relationships. Time as kinship is a way that Indigenous persons (Whyte draws on a few different examples) describe change. Kinship relationships are characterized by “an ethic of shared responsibility” (Whyte 2021, 39–40) where responsibility is “mutual caretaking and mutual guardianship” (42). Approaching climate change mitigation through kinship time thus supports a focus on “establishing and repairing shared responsibilities, bringing about an interdependence that could lower carbon footprint in ways that support everyone’s safety, well-being, and self-determination” (54).

Deborah Bird Rose (2012) invites us (humans) to “hold ourselves open to the experience of nonhuman groups” (136) to sense the temporal diversity at work in ecological processes. In characterizing multispecies exchanges, she works with the notion of “gifts” to make sense of energy and information flows across these interfaces. Rose illustrates how flying foxes and trees came into being through each other, through mutual interdependence (gifts), and create possible futures for each other, where, for example, “Forest futures are borne on fur and tongue […] carrying the tree’s possibilities along to other trees” (136). What I take as Rose’s point is that these “embodied knots of multispecies time” are sites of ethical encounter that “sustain the present and work for the future” (136). In this way, she invites the reader to engage with the responsibilities that exist in these ecological flows, the ethics of gift which centers interconnectedness and thus the responsibilities to nourish and be nourished. Multispecies knots thus foreground temporal diversity in a way that asks us to consider our responsibilities toward multispecies others.

Moving into futures and anticipation scholarship provides further anchors for thickening time in three examples which open up conceptions of time far beyond linear time and build new vocabulary for specifying diverse temporalities. First, Christopher Groves (2017) illustrates two modes of anticipation in a case study of energy infrastructure development in which particular ways of knowing about futures are prioritized. “Empty futures” are the dominant mode of anticipation that gives precendence to forecasting and optimizing responses to create energy-secure futures along a predictable trajectory. Quantifiable forecasting around a restricted set of standardized variables and the accompanying socio-technical infrastrucutres are a key source of knowledge in this mode of anticipation. This means that those who have the expertise to interpret and act on this kind of knowledge may be far removed from the actual place that the infrastructure will be built. On the other hand, drawing from a community-owned energy project, Groves invites us to understand the affective and material basis of anticipation as the rhythms of living in that community. Diverse lived experiences that are dependant on specific, embodied histories are thus at the core of “lived futures” narratives. Rather than depicting linear pathways into the future, a diagram of lived futures would be spiral and fractal. Futures are not abstracted, but place-based where “connection and attachment make it possible to deal with uncertainty” (Groves 2017, 35). Lived futures are thick time in that they defy predictability and engage in different levels of experiences.

In the context of exploring different ways to tell stories about young people’s educational experiences and the future, Keri Facer evokes the “richness of the meanwhile” to capture the “multi-layered, entangled, dense networks of activity and experience ongoing at any one time” (2019, 6). Pasts, presents, and futures are all interconnected through the interdependent nature of lived reality and cannot be condensed into a universal narrative of temporality. Paying attention to the richness of the meanwhile offers opportunities to see alternative(ly shaped) realities emerging rather than linear narratives of progress which dominate many social, political, and economic arenas.

Finally, Roberto Poli (2011) works with the hypothesis that the present has both duration and depth expressed in the concept the “thick present”. The thick present represents the idea that “the present can no longer be considered a kind of durationless interface between the past and the future” (71). In a thick present, reality consists of multiple layers (depth) of simultaneous and overlapping experiences (duration). Both living memory and anticipation of the future are part of the thick present. This thickness further includes both natural and social rhythms, which can manifest as visible or latent (or somewhere in between). These latents may be, for example, “seeds” of alternative futures (Poli 2011, 74).

There are clear commonalities, as well as crucial nuances that are not addressed here, in these conceptualizations of thick time. Here, I want to draw out how they together might converse in ways that critique and offer imaginative possibilities to dominant climate futures in three key principles.

First, the thickness of time is made up of and unfolds through relationships and relational exchanges, where pasts and futures of these encounters and exchanges make time. The relational brings into focus interdependencies with the more-than-human, drawing attention to the diverse rhythms, attachments, and overlapping connections that forms these relationships. Second, these relationships and relational exchanges are specific and embodied, rather than abstractable. In these dense relational knots, histories and futures are enfolded. It is therefore not just the present and the short-term that are in focus, but embodied experiences which contain multispecies histories and possibilities of future lives. Finally, attentiveness to multispecies, kinship connections, attachments, and interdependencies invites us to ask questions about how to establish and repair our shared responsibilities. These responsibilities go beyond an ethic of fixing or providing short-term solutions but ask us to consider how to foreground and rebuild diverse interdependent connections for community members’ mutual flourishing.

These principles which might be summarized as relationality, specificity, and responsibility create foundations for alternative habits of attention and a practical reflexivity that are the basis for coordinating climate action around diverse temporalities – a kind of thick action. I now turn to farmers and their soils to put this converged conceptualization of thickness to work with this paper’s research question: what is the role of thick time in critiquing dominant climate futures narratives?

Methodology

The characterization of thick time presented above provides ideas for new ways of coordinating ourselves that might be more appropriate than universal clock time, given the times we live in. Put in terms of Bastian’s (2012) “turtle clocks”, which I briefly describe first, I speculate on how telling the time with soil (soil clocks) can be a way of indicating thick time and better way of coordinating ourselves than universal clock time when it comes to climate futures. In this way, soil clocks can offer alternative readings of the carbon farming context.

With reference to the enormous ongoing planetary ecological changes, Bastian (2012) proposes that we need new clocks or figures for telling the time and argues that these clocks should come from within current conventions but maintain complexity and difference. In other words, these new clocks should help to make universal clock time strange, and Bastian provides the example of turtles as an alternative clock. Briefly, the turtle clock communicates changes in turtle populations and the lack of “timely” action from human behaviors that are driving the turtles towards extinction; it describes and tracks the “inter-meshing” relations of the actors involved, from turtles to conservationists to governments. By doing so, turtle clocks convey the complexities of coordination in a multi-species world and that these very complexities cannot be communicated in universal clock time. Bastian writes:

“Following the turtle rather than the atom, we are led into a complicated world where there is no clear path forward. And yet these are our times, and so this is arguably what we need to coordinate ourselves with. In this way then, the figure of the turtle makes visible alternative temporal conventions that are already at work within the same Western culture dominated by an abstract clock time, and which may better serve us” (2012, 45).

Perceiving time with soil clocks might offer a similar figure as the turtle – unpredictable yet more appropriate for our times because it makes visible alternative temporal conventions. Thinking with and inspired by Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) who speculates on “care time” with relation to soils and permaculture principles, I speak to the different ways that soils make visible different temporal frames and practices by drawing on my empirical work in the context of carbon farming (Barrineau 2025a), where land management practices to sequester carbon in agricultural soils are in focus.

The empirical material for this paper emerges from my doctoral research (Barrineau 2025b) where I visited eight farms piloting carbon farming in Sweden. These farms are located in the southern part of Sweden, and are diverse sizes, practicing different carbon farming methods such as agroforestry, perennial crops, rotational grazing, and cover crops. This research was guided by an interest in understanding if, when and how transformation in agri-food systems could happen through schemes and practices encompassed by carbon farming. The focus was based on the idea that transformations may be perceived through the quality of relationships and changes in relationships, for example, human-soil relationships. The visited farms were participating in a non-profit organization’s project to explore and promote carbon farming for the long-term transition of Swedish agriculture, where top-down leadership has been missing. Farm visits are a key part of the project’s work, the primary purpose being to discuss with farmers how things have been going as well as learn about possible changes in soils since implementing changes in practice. Through these farm visits, where I participated in and observed the soil testing and conversations with the project organization and the farmers, it was possible to learn about the intersections of time and power from the perspectives of farmers. The work of these farmers is tied up in soils, particularly with the focus on carbon farming. As with Bastian’s turtle clocks, we can follow the “inter-meshing” relations of the actors involved through farmers’ experiences where working with soils make different times visible.

The reflections in this paper unfolded during and through the writing of these farm visits through poetic vignettes (Barrineau 2025a) where I detail the methodological approach taken to produce the analysis of this paper. Here I work to thicken and expand on the theme of temporalities that emerged during that writing which I argued can diversify how we come to know about agri-food systems, and which are crucial for alternative forms of climate action to arise. In this way, I use anecdotes from my fieldwork as points of departure that alert us to different temporal relations in this context. The following discussion thus highlights some of the timings visible with soils as clocks and is a practice in thinking with thick time.

Telling the Time With Soils

In the carbon farming context, we see several actors (e.g., farmers, consultants, agricultural non-profits, soil scientists, bureaucrats, food industry representatives) working to make soils legible for a diverse set of overlapping climate and sustainability goals. In one way, soils are being enrolled in the human project of climate mitigation and food security performed in universal clock time. In projects across the EU, soil samples are taken to quantify the results of management changes, so that land managers will get paid and governments and companies can translate these results to climate change mitigation efforts (EC 2021). Yet, it is widely agreed by soil scientists and acknowledged by farmers, consultants, and agricultural non-profits in my research context, that measurement and verification as it is done today is not reliable enough for these purposes (Bradford et al. 2019). Rebuilding soil carbon depends on specific biophysical conditions and is therefore not easily predicted, though a detailed understanding of these conditions can support the tweaking of management schemes to guide suitable place-specific action (Bradford et al. 2019). While soils can tell us things about specific times and places through measuring the impacts of specific management practices (Bergh et al. 2022), particular management changes on farms may not be sufficiently plottable onto climate mitigation goals and into the communication of timely climate action. For farmers in this study, the efforts to change the trajectory of soils are tied to multiple other experiences of time that influence how they navigate diverse relationships enmeshed in rebuilding soils and sequestering carbon.

Farmers experience being “ahead” of their time, by having decades ago already adopted practices to be more resilient in the face of more frequent extreme weather. For example, Eva ¹ reflects on the changing conditions for agriculture:

And [we] saw this long, long before. We also saw that the drought was hitting harder and harder […] And then we got into this with perennials. We’ve grown alfalfa for years and seen through droughts through everything, it stays green and so it must have an enormous root system. […] We started co-cultivating legumes and cereals early, for example. Because legumes alone fell over and needed something to climb on and there were also more plant diseases then when you had, what’s it called, monoculture. So, [we were] there early. We grew cultural heritage varieties 25 years ago - there was no market for it - nothing. Now it’s a hype like this.

Working to repair and maintain soils is tied to long-term practices have not been widely recognized as important or relevant until more recently. Working against the norms of annual crops, monocultures, and modern grain varieties by growing cultural heritage grains, which is considered an important aspect of sustainable food systems in Sweden today (see Jonsson et al. 2025), highlights hopes for futures at work despite the lag of mainstream agriculture. Perennials like alfalfa signal to this farmer a robust root system, which, on the one hand, demonstrates stability amidst unstable new weather extremes and, on the other, the slowness of humans to adopt practices that provide crops that grow green “through everything”. Carbon farming provides an opening for these kinds of practices to become timely, while perhaps even risks creating the misconception of a more stable, controllable environment.

Johan discusses their challenges with being “too early” with implementing agroforestry by planting fruit trees on grazing lands. He explains how having trees on agricultural land was seen as incompatible with growing other productive crops and was therefore not an acceptable method in the regional subsidies scheme. As the understanding of agroforestry’s climate benefits have become more widespread and included in carbon farming schemes, for example, a shift in perspectives from governing bodies has followed.

They are also starting to accept agroforestry. I struggled with that before and just got a “no” all the time. Five years ago, they [the County Administrative Board] had never heard of agroforestry before. […] I struggled. But now they have opened up and become more accepting. I was a little too early.

Being too early meant working with strategies that are less supportive of soil ecologies because doing otherwise is not politically legitimated. As decision-making bodies “catch up”, practicing and communicating to different actors about ecologically beneficial methods, like agroforestry, illustrates a clash of timings. Eva elaborates further on this point in relation to perennials:

And if it’s perennial, they ask “well, will you be able to harvest this 100 years from now?” they say. Probably not. But if it grows for 5 years, it creates great value.

The vision and practice of harvesting a perennial even for 5 years highlights an attentiveness to different timescales where the farmer works to repair soils, for example, beyond the rise and fall of food consumption trends. Perennial root systems and the accompanying beneficial relationships generate diverse values beyond a continuous harvest for common future possibilities that have not been widely perceived or legitimized. As carbon farming methods gain legitimacy, through projects such as this one, “good” (climate-smart) farming becomes taking care of soils, finding ways to recalibrate farming practices to meet political climate goals, meet business’s demand for climate offsetting. The urgency with which rebuilding soils is framed by political bodies (e.g., EC et al. 2020) frames the future as one that is in jeopardy and creates normative demands on how better futures are made by being a “good” carbon farmer. But good farming is also often tied up in farmers’ own desire to care for soils and their genuine interests in producing healthy food and other socio-ecological benefits, as discussed across all the participating farms. On another farm, Herman discusses the incongruous nature of working with soil health today where the focus on carbon sequestration has detracted from the production of food. For farmers who have long been working to repair soils, their practices are strongly linked to responsibilities that go beyond, and are out of sync with, political decision making around what counts as “good” farming. The urgent problems that practices which fall under the umbrella of carbon farming are meant to mitigate are expressed through timescales organized around capital production and empty futures.

Being out of sync also manifests affectively. Burn-out, stress, and a sense of risk in not being able to quantify and thereby legitimize one’s actions, are bodily manifestations of out-of-sync demands and are signals of the inadequacy of political goals and incentives alone to create sustainable change in agriculture. Johanna, after mentioning their own burn-outs, discusses the balance of effort in relation to the longevity of the project of building soil health and changing the food system:

It’s such an incredibly long-term perspective. There are a lot of investments that we’re making now that will remain on the farm to give to some generation in the future. That’s the trickiest thing: you want to learn as much as possible - how can you get a harvest that is acceptable for the effort in work and time?

The balance of relating to and feeling responsible towards far away futures as well as working out acceptable present-day practices illustrate an engagement with multiple temporal frames, stretching from biological ones which go beyond human timescales to timescales of economic systems linked to crop yields. This challenging balance is mentioned by all farmers and expressed by Herman in this way:

The balance – food and sequestering carbon. […] People need food. We have the land. Then you have a responsibility to produce food for the people. […] And then the goal is to be able to produce without a [climate] footprint. That’s it.

Timings that are out of sync thus become apparent in the material effects on bodies and soils. The long-term effects of changing practices on soils are entangled the difficult work of reestablishing relationships and shared responsibilities.

Farmers in this project are interested in measuring and understanding soils to discover the results of the specific changes that they are making. Digging into the soil to learn about the current conditions and health of a plot is then an important way to build understanding of the effects of management changes. Reading soils and the signals of different flora and fauna in these holes by rubbing the soil between their fingers to understand the clay content, smelling if the soil is healthy, checking for worm holes, looking for nitrogren nodules on clover roots, and finding the depth of the plough that tilled that field decades ago. These are all ways that farmers and consultants make time to learn about specific fields, trying to pay attention to the multispecies communities laboring and living in soils.

However, even taking beneficial measures on some fields may lead to negative effects in other fields, according to Joakim, and to balance permanent storage with leakage of carbon occurs over a long time requiring ongoing adjustments to practice. Soils are said to have memory where we can detect “residues of centuries” (Janzen 2016, 1430). Soil memory offers a palimpsest of environmental recording, and is itself formed and carried by climate and diverse biota (Targulian and Goryachkin 2004) that are not renewable on human timescales (Bradford et al. 2019). In these ways, soils are seen as archives, a record of a moment that might be “read”. Reading soils has several nuances however, as Adrian reflects:

But taking soil samples in the fall or spring gives completely different values, completely different values, so measuring is one thing, but what you measure is much more difficult. It’s such a slow process.

While soils might be read to detect changes, soils are not stable backgrounds for political climate goals or simply a resource where other productive economic activity occurs, but agents themselves, tied up in human management schemes, interacting with weather, diverse creatures, and machines. Soils are emergent and dynamic (Salazar et al. 2020, 6), co-produced by multispecies generations, responding also to human actions. Reflecting on the trend of merging farms, Eva reflects on what is being lost – connections to the place and a practice of inheriting and leaving behind land that farmers have always participated in:

That’s how you do it because you have to have a business that makes a profit and so on. But of course, of course nature responds, it does. […] if you’re attentive, you get to follow the changes in seasons […] in a way that I don't think any other business gives. And I’ve felt that these times don't really give you the opportunity for that anymore.

Remaining profitable poses challenges to remaining attentive to seasonal changes and the responses of nature to farmers’ practices. In light of these anecdotes, we gain insight into who is telling the time and how, as well as whose rhythms are required to change (Facer 2023). Following farmers working with their soils in carbon farming demonstrates some of the complexity with coordinating action in a climate changing world, where farmers are required to change according to the abstract temporalities of subsidies, climate mitigation, and economic profitability, yet their attentiveness to soils draws them also to specific, embodied temporalities. The capacity for thick action – understood as coordinating action around diverse temporalities and based on habits of attention that reflect relationality, specificity and responsibility – is continuously eroded.

Efforts are underway to create global soil databases to improve coordinated action to regenerate soils (e.g., FAO nd). But given these accounts of the out-of-sync timings by carbon farmers and following Holmstedt (2022b) I suggest that telling the time with soils points to soils as an “impossible archive”. Holmstedt posits that conceiving of soils as an impossible archive is commitment to pay attention to processes and relationships which may not simply be captured, stored, and “read”. This supports Bastian’s broader notion of clocks as profoundly material “rather than measuring disembodied time” and allows us to make sense of how things are in relation (Bastian 2012, 31). Soil clocks break with the conventions of universal clock time by asking us to pay attention to thick time – to more-than-human timescales, the specificities of particular actions on particular places, and the kinds of responsibilities that might be necessary to repair human-soil relations – the makings of an impossible archive. In telling the time with soils, the ethics of our choices of timings become more visible, and we have to consider what it means to coordinate action around climate change with irreducible uncertainties (Yip 2022) of soils and their ecosystems. Thick action might therefore be read as a commitment to approaching soils as an impossible archive.

Conclusion–Towards Thicker Action

Telling the time with soils is a practice to support Environmental Futurists to engage speculatively with thick time. Telling the time with soils demonstrates the need for thick action, which is doing care-full work across temporalities (from the deep history of soils to the rhythms of diverse soil community members) (Fitz-Henry 2017) that invite us to ask questions about how to establish and repair our shared responsibilities for community members’ mutual flourishing. Time has a thickness, and these are troubling times where impoverished and inequitable conceptions of time(s) delineate action and visions for climate futures. There are no blueprints available for this kind of action, where, instead, “building good soil means preserving room for possibility” (Kimmerer 2021, 192). The observations that this paper puts forward demonstrate some of the thicker action ongoing and hindered in carbon farmers’ fields. Rhythms are calls for thick action (Bussey 2017, 242).

The accounts brought forth here work to thicken understanding (Hulme 2018) rather than create a “correct” story about carbon farming or the experiences of these farmers. Part of this thickening is about building practices that are capable of engaging in deeper levels of complexity and reflexivity – the kinds of complexity that get ironed out in current mainstream responses to climate change. To argue for thickness as a quality of attention in enacting alternative futures is an ethical engagement, a reminder of our inescapable material entanglements and interdependencies – the starting point of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Walker 2014).

So what is the role of thick time in critiquing dominant climate narratives? Alternative clocks can help us broaden our temporal lenses to engage with thick time, helping us to build the capacity to appreciate when different lenses are useful to look through to coordinate meaningful responses. Thick time does not, I think, demand that we are able to consider every connection, relationship simultaneously, but to gently hold the complexity of different situations so that we can shift our attentiveness between the diverse elements that shape them. Bringing together notions of feminist temporalities from futures studies and environmental humanities, we are reminded that “our bodies, our communities, our ecologies” (Walker 2014, 56) are time makers, able to rebalance the relations between a diversity of temporalities (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015) and practice “time multiliteracies” (Milojević 2008, 341). Rather than time acting upon us, time becomes in the interplay of meaning and materiality (Walker 2014). Changes in and movements of soils make time, inviting us to see a “living present” (Walker 2014) that is not fixed, but which disrupts the linearity technocratic productionism. In arguing for thick time, am not interested in establishing binaries (thick versus thin) but presenting and reminding of the always already existing and emerging diversity of times that are more or less hard to cultivate attention toward. The struggle to coordinate action for a changing climate must include a speculative engagement in the times that we choose to follow and when. Thick time is an invitation to do this.