Re-reading Biophilia, one of E. O. Wilson’s many seminal eco-
philosophical works, I was pleasantly reminded of an important
quadripartite distinction laid out in chapter three, “The Time
Machine.” The time machine, Wilson tells us, is biological
spatio-temporal thought experiment. Imagine we have the ability
to accelerate and decelerate the passage of time without
restriction, as well as to magnify and minimize the Earth from a
bird’s eye view to any extreme. We could observe every detail of
biological phenomena ranging from nearly instantaneous
microscopic biochemical reactions to the vast evolutionary
manifolds of deep time. Along the spatio-temporal continuum,
Wilson makes an ascending, yet non-hierarchical, four-way
distinction: biochemical time, organismic time, ecological time,
and evolutionary time—each referring to different perspectives
about life on Earth. Start the thought experiment by almost
freezing time at the microscopic level: biochemical time allows
us to imagine and comprehend biochemical r