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BCnature Winter 20223EditorialIt’s a Matter of TimeAuthor - Peter BallinWhen are you? Likely you haven’t been asked this question. Your answer might be, “now”. That’s likely correct. However, now connects to the past and the future (I don’t care that some theorists might argue otherwise). If you have the same colour hair as me, you may be considering more past than future, whereas your children and grandchildren might focus otherwise. How is our concept of time influ-enced by the culture in which we were raised? How does our concept of time relate to our connection to the land and sea and all their inhabitants? If you are a recent immigrant to North America, you may view time through the lens of your and your family’s tenure on this continent. And/or you may follow your genealogy a few centuries back elsewhere. ,You likely were inculcated into a biblical framework of time, so you may bring a couple of millennia into your framework. You may subscribe to a belief system that gives you a creation date, whether thousands of years or 11 billion years. Indigenous people speak of “time immemorial . ”We tend to view the past through important events, but we often ignore the in-betweens. Evolutionary biologists and paleontologists stoke a compulsive habit of always looking for links between the striking events, with a goal of filling in the blanks to establish a continuum. While we may appreciate this continuum in our lives, do we also see it through the last few centuries? Importantly, do we see the continuum with our ancestors? Perhaps you can place yourself within a longer history. Please allow a flight of imagination. If you were a thousand-year-old Western Redcedar in a rainforest, how would you see your past? And how would you use your life’s observations to encounter your future? Or a ten-thousand-year-old glass sponge in dimly-lit local waters? The phrase “time immemorial“ acknowledges the tenure of Indigenous people on the land and sea that we inhabit. Note the connection between time and place, as that connection is essential because changes within a place mold knowledge. I better explain.We speak of history and pre-history and natural history. History and herstory mean that words were written to describe times and places. The deeper story is stored in rocks and written on DNA (and RNA); written into our genomes since the inception of life over four billion years ago. Each writing occurred (and occurs) in a place, and the writing reflects the realities of that time and place. These writings contain the critical knowledge required for survival. With luck these “scriptures” flow ancestries and interactions with to the next generation and on, guiding development and appropriate survival structures and behaviors. Since time is a continuum, those stories reside within us. It’s all natural history, and our natural history is shared with the rest of life, more or less. These molecular “writings” are knowledge. Don’t for a minute believe those 1930s psychologists who would have had us believe that we were born tabula rasa and learned everything that we know in our lifetimes! Our knowledge spans time immemorial.We can choose the constraints on how we perceive time and our place in time, and our time in place. If we limit our perspective to recent years we witness the ,maladaptive behaviour which has pushed us towards ecological collapse, and we risk adopting more such behaviour. If we deepen our time perspective, we’re more likely to connect to past realities that promote survival and influence us to make more sustainable choices. In a period of apparently accelerating time, where more happens in ever-shorter time periods, the imperative to act to apply our knowledge and preserve the knowledge embedded in our genomes and our minds is upon us. You know more than you think you know. We can better choose what knowledge we choose to draw upon by letting ourselves know how much we know!It is written that, in the Garden of Eden, there occurred a separation of the Tree of Life from the Tree of Knowledge. Humans thus gained choice and dominion. But in the same way that all is natural history, so is all the Tree of Life. The choice then, is to connect ourselves in time and place to the deepest of pasts that we can imagine in a time-place continuum. As we unpeel that onion and acknowledge our common our fellow earthlings, we come closer to internalizing our place in nature. And realize that our time to act is now. Ω