Seasons and the Anthropocene

Abstract

Seasons are changing in the Anthropocene. Seasons serve as temporal frameworks for communities and societies to organize their livelihoods and activities around the expectation of recurrent environmental, social, and cultural events. In this article, we make an original case that the scale and rapidity of changes to our planet's biogeochemical cycles profoundly impact the sociopolitically interpreted (re)definitions of seasonal rhythms. We propose a conceptually novel typology for collating how new and evolving interactions between human and more-than-human environmental cycles are reflected in the seemingly simple—yet widely relatable—concept of “seasons.” We define emergent, extinct, arrhythmic (changes to timing), and syncopated (changes to intensity) seasons through our typology, to bring together disparate literature on evolving human–nature interactions, environmental knowledge production and deployment, local realities of environmental risk and disaster management, and the uneven spatiality of socioenvironmental feedback loops. Seasonality in the Anthropocene is political as it reflects a diversity of temporal ontologies and unveils unjust manifestations of the hegemony of standardized time and timescales, while the discursive construction of “seasonality” may be deployed for political and economic gains. We set an agenda for cross-geographical research that explores seasonality from place-based, multiscalar perspectives to unravel the complexities of seasonality in the Anthropocene.