ABSTRACT
These are troubled times. As I write, the UK beef industry is collapsing, all fishing is suspended off the coast of West Wales and the tenth anniversary of Chernobyl has brought the invisible dangers of radiation back to the forefront of public attention. Surrounded by so much disaster and tragedy it feels almost wrong and out of place to write about issues that I know to be important and deeply pertinent to this current round of environmental disasters. As friends and neighbours face existential crises, their livelihoods as farmers, fishermen, hoteliers, shopkeepers and artists seriously threatened by oil pollution and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), I am forced to confront the relevance of my work not to the academic community of scholars but to the everyday lives of people caught up in the downward spiral of the industrial way of life. The grief and desperation in the area is palpable: a country and people stressed to their limits. West Wales, my adoptive ‘home’, has three principal sources of income: farming, tourism and fishing. All three have been deeply affected, threatened at the core by events that have arisen within one month of each other. Though concentrated in a particular time-space, these events are symptoms of global economic and industrial processes which, in turn, are inseparably linked to specific conceptions and approaches to time and space, the subject matter of this book.
