Notes on the political ecology of time: Temporal aspects of nature and conservation in a South African World Heritage Site

Abstract

While political ecology has long documented struggles over conservation spaces, little attention has been paid to the temporal aspects of these struggles. Conservation areas are often described as timeless, and the protection of timeless nature has been used as an argument to legitimize the dispossession of land from rural populations. Timelessness, however, is not just imposed on landscapes. It is the end result of complex mediations of contradictory temporalities that each establish different relationships between the future, the past, and the present. Drawing on the author’s material on the struggle over the Dukuduku Forest, bordering South Africa’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, this article examines the temporal aspects of that struggle. An examination of the contestation surrounding the park alerts us to the importance of time and temporal processes in political ecology analyses. Specifically, the case shows that the future has repercussions on the present through anticipation, and that political struggles, over which realities are allowed to emerge, are deeply entangled, temporal processes fraught with contradictions. This article therefore constitutes a call for paying closer attention to temporal processes in political ecology analyses.