Retelling Time in Grassroots Sustainable Economy Movements

This article examines the ways that grassroots sustainable economy movements re-tell, or re-story, time as a core part of their activities. I initially set out a typology of sustainable times prominent within sustainable economies literatures, namely (1) long-term thinking, (2) critiques of growth over time, (3) slowing down, (4) cyclical temporalities, and (5) increased discretionary time. Drawing on materials from a field philosophy project that looked at relationships between time and sustainability, I outline some of the ways that project participants drew on this typology. Looking at three specific cases, however, I suggest that rather than conforming to a binary thinking encouraged by sustainable times (e.g., fast-slow, short-term-long-term), time became salient as a mode of operating across disparate values, meanings, actors, and hierarchies. I argue that the work of these organizations would be best served by a greater focus on the role of time in coordinating across unequal power relations.