 I have no mobile phone. I have no watch. But I have time. Many have questioned how I dare wonder abroad about the technologies of time measurement and mobile communication. In this post I explain and imply my querying of their necessity. Our modern era, which began when clocks measured the hours of the day, is now measured to the nanosecond by digital machines. Our first great task is to release the escapement that binds us to the machine's time frame. Yet from YouTube fantasies of going wilds in the woods, to lectures bemoaning ecological destruction, few grasp their imprisonment by time. Shifting our perceptions of the world to create ecological change is not simply about abandoning in modern technology. The true challenge people face is breaking free of the instrumental mechanism that binds them to the modern world, machine time. When the clocks change from winter to summertime, birds do not adjust the time of the dawn chorus. We have leap years and even leap seconds because human measures of time don't conform to the natural world. And no matter how clever humans think they are, time's arrow will ultimately reduce their grand schemes to dust. Human devised measures of time hold within them powerful political and economic forces. They track people within the patterns of activity they become habituated to. Machine time, measured and parceled out by industrial society, affects people's frame of reference and how they perceive themselves within the world around them. There's a lovely little, often overlooked aside at the beginning of the film, Easy Rider. Wyatt froze away his watch, which had in any case stopped before they set off on their mythical quest. To find their authentic being, they first had to abandon machine time. It had no meaning or necessity where they were heading. The work ethic isn't simply holding their compulsion to work hard at your job. Industrialism took away people's ability to manage and measure in their own time. It imposed an order of time externally regulated by clockmakers and timekeepers, and with that came the control of labour, which enabled complex industrial systems to evolve, to reach its high point of globalised just-in-time manufacturing. In the modern world, time both dulls the senses and orders people's lives. Deprived of stimulus, people are required to kill time. Yet so often, from work to play, people measure themselves against the clock, rather than against their own unique enjoyment or fulfilment of the moment. The alternative, natural time, is all around you, in the sun, the moon and the stars. To eliminate machine time, you just need to reconnect and work with it. To escape machine time is to become aware of your environment. Let's say I'm walking out one evening, late as usual, searching for a sunset. Most people would consult their time-measuring device to know the time. That doesn't help though, as the time of sunset and sunrise changes almost every day. This requires consulting yet another technocratic authority, the mathematically-derived Almanac, to show when the local sun will set. But what if you have neither? The time until sunset does not mean the same at noon as it does half hour before. It is our direct experience which gives time meaning. I need to know the time of sunset near sunset, not at noon. How do natural beings know the time of sunset? They just look at the sky. Natural beings don't need trigonometry-derived predictions for when the sun will set or rise, and they don't need a clock to know the time in that moment to measure from. Everything they need to know about the time of sunset is available right in front of them, and those same features are there for you to use too. Using just your fingers you can make a good estimate of when sunset will arrive. Knowing the time until sunset is a basic intuitive skill that can be developed by observation. With that skill you can change your walking plans, know when to stop and put up a tent, or guess how much longer you can stay outside. Put out your arms straight with your flat palm facing you at a right angle. Most people's arms and fingers are about the same size, which is how this rough estimation works. Put the line between your little finger and ring finger level with the horizon, where the sun is likely to set. Then move your hands so your fingers are just touching the sun. The sun moves at a constant rate, 15 degrees per hour along an imagined circle called the ecliptic. The angle of this line to the horizon varies with the time of year. Down near the horizon though, the change in the slope of that line isn't enough to significantly change your estimation of how long you have until sunset. Each finger represents about one and two-third degrees of arc. The sun itself is about half a degree wide. It takes the sun 10-20 minutes to drop by that amount. It's not precise because it varies by the time of year and how wide people's fingers are. Count how many finger widths between the top of the sun's disc and the horizon. Multiply by 10-20 minutes and that's how long until sunset. With practice you can be more accurate. To measure the progression of time, you need to be aware of your own movement. If I know how long it is until sunset, I can decide where I want to see it from. Then I can judge how long I want to have to get home again before darkness makes my movement difficult. No watch is required. By knowing where north is you can deduce the time to the nearest hour or so. Imagine a 24 hour clock, or just pointing with your arms if necessary. 6am is east, noon is south, 6pm is west. If you had a compass you could simply measure the sun's angle. But a rough estimate of where the sun is on the clock face is usually enough to get within half an hour or so. Also remember to add the illusory hour for British summer time. Of course there are other factors involved in judging time in daylight, most notably cloud cover. A cloud back on the horizon where the sun is setting might reduce the useful light after sunset by half an hour. That's a matter of experience. I've been able to view the world as it is. Using your instincts to survey the sky will let you know what's happening to the levels of daylight well before sunset. It's not something that a smartphone will be able to tell you. As I walk often I know how far I can move in a particular time. Again though, I don't mean x miles per hour measured by the clock. I mean from one place from the local landscape to another. Having a sense of how quickly I move allows me to vary my route at any time without a map or a clock. After the sun sets daylight fades at a predictable rate. The uncertainty begins half an hour after sunset. Fit cloud will block most of the light. On a clear day you may have enough light to see for an hour. Half an hour to 40 minutes after sunset at civil twilight, street lights come on. If it's not cloudy there's still enough light to see to walk across country. 80 minutes after sunset, nautical twilight, is when the easterly horizon is completely dark though there will still be dim light in the northwest. Only about two hours after sunset does it become totally dark, which in mid-summer nor for the Scottish border it never does. One factor I used to change that and often plan walks around is the moon. By using moonlight you can stay out a little later after sunset or go out well before dawn without the need for artificial light to guide your way. To use moonlight you need to know the phase of the moon. This tells you not only how well you might see to war but also how well you might see meteors or the northern lights because it is not full or bright. On a route you know well with a clear moon you can walk across open country without a torch. The phase of the moon will predictably tell you when it will rise and set. Before full the moon is always up at sunset. After full it rises after sunset and by knowing the phase of the moon you can also use it to tell the time. To get that knowledge just look for the moon each day. Very quickly you can learn to associate time and the phase of the moon. Without making time to sense the world your incidents will not develop. Most importantly to perceive time in your environment you need to slow down. Years ago I worked on a community project in Jamaica. On my first night at the project looking up in the sky I could see just how far I had moved around the globe. All the stars had shifted northward in the sky. I truly physically felt four and a half thousand miles from home. This is the last most difficult phase to become aware of time in the natural world, the stars. It's well worth the effort though. There are many different stars and constellations which methodically move in a pattern over the seasons. Just a glance will tell you the time or the season. It's a skill that's really useful when camping out and you don't want to take a watch of you. Lovers of stone circles like to think about the alignment of the sun. I think the alignment of the stars is of equal significance to how those sites were used. By looking up at the sky and seeing a constellation rise for the first time in the evening you can feel whether winter is coming or summer is nearly here. There are a group of constellations the circumpolar stars which never set. They just go around and around the pole star. The most famous of these the plough or the great bear can also be used to tell the time with good accuracy. The plough is a constellation many people know. It's the saucepan the big dipper. I prefer to use its its usual name the great bear. The two stars at the end the edge of the saucepan point directly to the pole star Polaris. Viewed from the south the apparent motion of stars around Polaris is anti-clockwise. One complete circle every 24 hours and over the course of the year those two stars go in a circle right around Polaris coming up in a different position each night. By using those two stars and the position of Polaris you can work out very roughly where it will be at midnight and so you can use it as a timepiece to know at night what the time is. By sensing the orientation it's easy to read off the passing hours at night just like the sun during the day. As someone has stutely observed you're making a mistake of thinking we are suffering from a problem of a solution. We are suffering from a predicament with an outcome. To change that outcome you have changed the mechanisms that govern how you've lived in the world such as time. You are a natural living being. Natural living beings humans accepted do not wait for the prompting of a machine to tell them when to do or not to do something. They take their cues from the natural world and their own instincts. By sharing those perceptions in common they are free to synchronize our activity of other living organisms over days seasons or years. Standard time is an abstract human created phenomena and is implicit to the ongoing ecological Armageddon as global consumerism itself. It must be dismantled to ensure our future survival. The world needs to function at a much slower pace. Change your externally imposed measure of time and many more things become possible. You are freed of one of modernity's restrictions upon your freedom to choose. For example time is money. Time is a comfort blanket. It anchors us reassuringly in an ever-changing world but standard time is an illusion and one that can be manipulated to influence our lives. That is not the case with natural time. Learning to exist more slowly and less precisely within that natural time frame frees you from the ever-pressing pulse of machine time.