Time and environmental crisis: An exploration with special reference to pollution

The present environmental crisis is gaining prominence on the sociopolitical and scientific agenda. There is widespread consensus about what constitutes the crisis but little agreement about its causes and potential solutions: what is a solution for one person is often considered a source of the problem by another. Focusing on aspects that are normally ignored allows us to sidestep these hardening oppositions and gives us a new access to environmental issues and their analyses. While the spatial dimension has been brought to the fore in a number of disciplines, the temporal equivalent has stayed implicit. Explication of what remains invisible in conventional analyses can shed light on the familiar, agreed upon and disputed.