This piece is from Anthology, a print collection of old and new stories that marks ten years of Skin Deep’s work in culture and racial justice. Order your copy now.
It can be a challenge to find moments of clarity or pause. We’re always in a rush, on the go, preoccupied with the next project. With the frenetic pace of life in cities, hypervisibility on social media and the expectation of infinite productivity, time has become a scarce resource.
But what if we approached time itself differently? This is the question that brings together two nature-loving community organisers, Maymana Arefin and Evie Muir. As activists and people of the global majority, they wonder: what other timescales and ways of being can we learn from the natural world and non-human life forms? How can we respond to the demands of the political moment and rise to the calls for revolution without burning out? How did the movement builders who came before us organise in a way that resisted constant productivity and visibility?
The following piece is a dialogue between Maymana and Evie as they consider “ecological time” as an alternative model of existence. The authors hope that in reading their reflections, you too feel inspired to resist the demands of capitalist time and encouraged to live and organise toward liberation quietly and out of sight, as needed.
Maymana Arefin is an artist, community gardener and founder of @fungi.futures, a London-based project mapping radical futures guided by fungi and mycelium. Evie Muir is a nature writer, founder of nature-for-healing community group Peaks of Colour, and the author of Radical Rest: Notes on Burnout, Healing and Hopeful Futures.
Evie Muir: When we last spoke, something you said really stayed with me. You described how “even amid the plundering of the forests and the destruction of the soil, the mycelium of fungi can still find connections and create an amazing web to redistribute resources”. This took me down a rabbit hole, and I’ve been thinking about how so much of what is truly transformational in our social justice movements – the crises, grief, rest, joy, care and healing – takes place out of sight.
The pace that’s permitted when we’re not being perceived allows us to reassess what’s actually urgent. I know your work with @fungi.futures has also been considering this. What are your thoughts on how the unseen and underground help us to recognise the importance of slowness, incubation, intentionality, experimentation, pause?
Maymana Arefin: Wow. I really hear you and felt myself needing to take a huge sigh. On my own journey with @fungi.futures, learning about soils, spending time with mycelium, fungi and the underground networks that they weave through forests, I’ve thought so much about their deep, unassuming, quiet ways of being that you speak of here. Even if no one knows of, acknowledges or perceives an action happening, the unseen can still have immense material consequences or resonate in monumental ways.
Mycelium, the fine-threaded networks of fungi beneath and within soil, can grow in stops and starts – largely unrecognised and overlooked but quietly doing the care work that allows whole ecosystems to thrive. In parallel, so much of community organising and activism, equally urgent and fundamental to creating systemic change, happens in stops and starts and out of sight too.
As a chronically ill activist, I wonder how our movements toward liberation could be more successful if we learned from the ways of the underground and from disability justice too. For instance, how can mainstream organising align more with the theory of “crip time”? Crip time is the idea that disabled and chronically ill folks experience time differently to able-bodied folks. Time can bend and become more spacious according to needs, compared to the strict, disciplinary restraints of a normative clock.
EM: You’re so right! So many of us have reached a crossroads regarding how we do this work, and realising that any direction we take next must be paved with an honouring of our bodies. In my own recovery from intersecting traumas, I’ve found crip time to be a permissive framework that does just that.
Reflecting on how the lessons found within the more-than-human can inform our social justice models, I’ve enjoyed playing with the parallels between crip time and “ecological time”, and the way they both centre autonomy and a resistance to the relentless clock of capitalism which, in contrast, shares similarities with “evolutionary time”. The latter refers to how time is measured in generations, with human longevity being central to how we relate to the world. However, this linear model is incompatible with the needs of both people and the planet, and so ecological time offers a framework with more resonance. It introduces us to temporal possibilities where differing ways of being can coexist: a mycelium’s life cycle, which takes a couple of weeks and yet, as you described, isn’t rushed; and soil regeneration which can take hundreds of years, for example.
One way we’ve been experimenting with this at Peaks of Colour is by organising seasonally. We’ve found allowing periods for emergence, abundance, harvesting and hibernation to be truly permissive. We’re also exploring possibilities of acquiring land to be cared for by artists and organisers in the Peak District, with land covenants that secure legal protection for humans and the more-than-human for several generations. Ecological time is a lens that is allowing us to view our work in relation to those who came before and those who come after. I wonder, how do these multiple temporalities show up in your work with @fungi.futures?
MA: Mmm, good question. I think it’s really important to situate ourselves within time and space in this way. As activists, we’re inherently committed to the generations after us, striving to build futures radically different from the oppressive ones that we’re living in at present. There’s a deep, embodied knowing that things cannot and must not go on like this. The genocides, devastation, violent colonisation, planetary destruction. The sense that: “I’m doing all of this exhausting work because what’s happening now is unlivable and I truly believe that things can be better.” So much power exists within that tiny shred of possibility and imagination.
Moving from the future towards our histories, it makes me think about how communication methods adopted by activists have always had to be covert to avoid state surveillance – from the strategies of the Black Panther Party, who circulated flyers in local community spaces, to Operation Vula, the secret communication networks that brought down apartheid in South Africa. In the modern day, this reminds me of the disappearing messages and group chats on Telegram or Signal, which help activists to safely organise disruptive actions, arrange arrestee support or build cop-watch networks against police brutality. Or the exchanging of messages between political prisoners, through letters hidden in envelopes, books or pharmaceutical capsules, as has occurred between those incarcerated by the Israeli state.
Can you tell me more about how the legacies of the movement builders before us inform your work? And what learnings do you take or hopes do you have for the future?
EM: Yes! These are such thrilling examples! Immediately the Underground Railroad also stands out as a movement who practised an “intentional invisibility”, which really speaks to this metaphor of “earthing/unearthing”. During the 19th century, the hidden nature of their work was integral for abolitionists like Harriet Tubman to literally journey between a harmful past and a liberated future. It’s estimated that 100,000 enslaved people escaped as a result. And today, when there’s so much emphasis placed on the visibility of “the work”, it’s comforting to remember that what we nourish underground can usher in the most meaningful transformations.
I find that being fueled by both the legacies of our ancestors and the future generations who we’re in service of offers both a softness and a forceful momentum to keep going. I know it’s this life-affirming connection to past, present and future that we both hope to share with our communities through Peaks of Colour and @fungi.futures, guided by a dream of building an ecosystem of organisers whose ‘care-full’ excavations reverberate through time and space.
Anthology brings together new and old stories to explore time: how we experience it, how it controls our lives, and how it can be reconfigured. For more stories about retrospection, inheritance, archiving, rhythm, pacing and change, order your copy now.