Eye on Nature

As we struggle to adapt to the abrupt shift in civic time, you, like I, may harbor a complaint of the lost hour or a lament about the shifting sands of time. And maybe your gentle whine escalates to a curse against the political powers that meddle with reality, a grudge against those who mess with the natural order of things. It’s an understandable stance, for time seems so real to our modern minds, a finite resource defined and confirmed by each ticking second. Yet beyond our reactive certainty, an attempt to define time may falter. Ask any physicist, and she will tell you, “A second is only a second on our earth.” Time’s duration is only consistent for objects moving together through space.

Indeed, if pressed, the same physicist may turn philosophical and posit that “time is simply that which allows the perception of change.” To that cosmic view, the biologist will add evidence from the living world. The seconds of our day mean nothing to the creatures living far from light, deep in an ocean trench or in the darkness of a subterranean pool. Time to these creatures is perceived by changes in food availability, is triggered by the random appearance of floating detritus and measured against the slow machinery of protein synthesis and the clockwork of cell division. Equally far from our notion of temporal reality are those whose timepiece is accelerated, whose life cycle begins and ends in mere moments.

For all creatures, whether in the fast lane or the slow, the cycles of moon and sun, ebb and flow, are all that matter, not the rotation of hands on a clock. And while we may feel liberated from the ties of earth–waking as we do before dawn, illuminating our world with electric lights–we are bound to the meter of the cosmos too. For better or worse, on days such as this, our ancient past reminds us that we too are linked to a natural rhythm. Our free-running cycle is just over 24 hours, entrained by light to the length of day at our latitude, shifting forward with changing conditions, with changing patterns of season. And therein lies the rub. We shift forward, not back, and so this legislative mandate to “spring ahead,” leaves us behind, wreaks havoc with our systems, goes counter to our natural way. Just as surely as if we had flown a thousand miles east, this first workday after the end of daylight savings time finds us muddled and lagged. We are, inescapably, prisoners of our past, tied to our ancestors, pulled by cycles deep and ancient, beyond the influence of presidents, senators, judges or political decrees. We ride with the other passengers, speeding through space, held on a planet spinning and rotating, experiencing a world full of change and perceived by creatures large and small, in their own way, on their own time.

Wally Shriner is an MHCC biology instructor and is a Natural Resources Technology program faculty adviser. Eye on Nature is his monthly column.