Past present: Coal and Hard Times

Climate change is all about the past, and fossil fuel narratives are critical in unearthing this past and providing the conceptual energy we need to survive our crises. The different cultural, geographical, and temporal spaces of coal point to not only the entanglements between human and nonhuman bodies but also to the intersection of different temporalities in the planet’s wider narratives. From this perspective, coal shows how the present only exists through its implications with the past. It brings with it the past. Coal’s overlapping temporalities are on display in the Charles Dickens classic Hard Times, where the insistence of the past in the present is inescapable. Coal, with its ancient subterranean temporalities, fires the flames of the present uni-directional industrial clock, and, despite its intertemporal composition, comes to signify uniformity. This is a direct result of the chronological discipline that factory production requires. Hard Times thus demands that we delve into what time actually is with its global, historical, and industrial networks. We will only be able to fully understand the present by linking cultural practices to the past. Coal is a good place start, and, through it, Dickens reveals overlapping temporalities and the past’s presence within the intertemporal networks of past Anthropogenic climate crises in Hard Times.