Editorial: Contesting seasonal orders – polyrhythmic seasons in a time of change

Abstract

In changeable times, seasons can feel like dependable coordinates for dividing up the year and setting order to annual cycles, providing reference points to tell the time and organise society's activities. Seasons have come to be institutionalised temporal patterns and symbol systems, as ubiquitous and taken-for-granted as language, and held in place by history, culture, routines and norms as well as science – to the point they become seen as natural categories. This editorial introduces a special issue that seeks to problematise this understanding of seasons as laws of nature, arguing that it overlooks the cultural origins of seasonal categories, glosses over their contestedness and precludes a meaningful discussion of how seasons are varying and changing for societies. Societies today live by different seasons than they have in history. Facing accelerating global changes – in climate or globalisation for instance – some societies feel they no longer recognise familiar framings of seasons, and some seek to create seasonal categories anew. The seven papers in this issue encourage readers to consider seasons as ‘polyrhythmic cultural frameworks’ – as the patterns people perceive in tangles of multiple rhythms – and as undergoing constant renewal and evolution across different levels of society and at different timescales. The articles give accounts of encounters between different seasonal patterns – how they clash or sync or run in parallel – and how seasonality is renegotiated through these encounters. This editorial draws on the contributions to the special issue to first describe seasons as polycentric cultural frameworks, and using that concept, to lay out 10 ways in which seasons are under-going rapid change.

We need concepts for thinking about and adapting to seasonal change

Many claim we are living through turbulent times, encapsulated in terms like the ‘Anthropocene’ (Steffen et al., 2015), with communities worldwide reporting that processes like climate change are disrupting the timings patterning their lives (Flanagan and Black Elk, 2024). Disturbances to seasonal patterns – as humanity's oldest cultural scaffolds for telling time (Roncoli et al., 2008) – are paradigmatic of this. People claim traditional seasons no longer ‘hold’, with serious consequences (Bremer et al., 2024a; Leonard et al., 2013). Seasons provide temporal reference points that are important for how groups in a community coordinate with each other (social synchronisation) and with the rhythms of their environment (social-environmental synchronisation) (Walker, 2014). Indeed, non-human species too rely on seasonal reference points for settling into ecological alignment. Losing a sense for seasonal timings can introduce temporal arrhythmia and mismatches; crops are sown late, storm water systems flood, trophic mismatches occur or communities lose their identity.

But adapting to seasonal change has arguably been hampered by a tendency to take seasons for granted as fixed and opaque natural categories or blocks. In climate science, for instance, seasons are defined as standardised blocks of time and reduced to climatic variables; mainly temperature and precipitation (Chisholm Hatfield et al., 2018; Venning and Bushaka, 2024). Culturally too, many sectors of society discuss seasons as temporal blocks into which they categorise all manner of natural and social phenomena (Douglas, 1986; Strauss & Orlove, 2003). For example, the category of ‘summer’ in Bergen, Norway, runs from June-August and is presented as a self-evident set of symbols, grouping such diverse elements as the sun, school year, swimming, energy levels, ice cream, roses, plane travel and solstice bonfires (Bremer, 2024; Bremer et al., 2020; Bremer and Wardekker, 2024). Yet, such seasonal categories remain opaque as to the relation between these elements of seasonality: For whom are these elements markers of seasons? How do these elements hold together? How do they change over time, or across different groups and places? How do people actively alter seasonal elements? And what about the season markers of more-than-human communities? The relations between different seasons are also important, because talking about seasons as blocks of time ignores their liminality (Olwig, 2005).

Part of the challenge is that seasons function as what Star and Griesemer (1989) termed ‘boundary objects’. Seasonal frameworks are plastic enough to ‘inhabit multiple social worlds’ while enshrining a robust shared identity. Summer may be symbolised by a sun, but sunshine has a particular, more detailed meaning for a farmer, hotelier or shop-keeper. As Star and Griesemer write, ‘[Boundary objects] are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual site use’ (1989: 393). The problem is that, on the one hand, to be generally applicable and serve a coordinative function, seasons are simplified to superficial symbols. On the other hand, if we engage with what seasons mean in specific social worlds, then we are faced with thousands of interpretations of ‘summer’. To this, we can introduce tensions between the common and the specific. Some societies romanticise common framings as the ‘real seasons’, while dismissing their own lived reality as errant: what can be termed ‘seasonal anachronism’. Bergen's residents do symbolise summer as a sun, yet climatologically the city is quite wet in July/August, so that many say they do not have a ‘real summer’ (Bremer, 2024). Where best to engage with seasons: at the common or specific level, or the relation between them (Birth, 2013)?

We need sophisticated concepts for thinking about seasons, to account for and track variability and change in seasonality and coordinate adaptive efforts. The papers in this special issue suggest re-thinking seasons as ‘poly-rhythmic cultural frameworks’ that people use to order the flow and flux of entangled social-ecological rhythms into recognisable patterns that they name as seasons. It means seeing seasons as stemming from cultures of perceiving and acting; seasons as ‘individuals’ and groups’ perceived patterns in yearly rhythms that they segment into periods meaningful for them, and affect practices that maintain or change these patterns’ (Bremer and Wardekker, 2024: 16). The authors in this issue show empirically how conceiving of seasons as polyrhythmic has purchase for analysing and effecting change in seasonality. Descriptively, this perspective untangles the constituent rhythms of seasons to reveal their shifting relations to each other, and what shifts mean for seasonal synchronies and asynchronies. Normatively, this perspective provides a map for re-calibrating seasons. It shows where rhythms intersect, to help adjust social timings.

This special issue arose out of interdisciplinary collaboration under the CALENDARS research project, around an edited volume titled ‘Changing Seasonality’. The special issue was an opportunity for authors to develop their shorter book chapters into deeper scholarly pieces. Contributors to this issue settled on ‘polyrhythmic cultural frameworks’ as a common model of seasons that tied together the articles. I start in ‘Features of seasons as polyrhythmic cultural frameworks’ section by illustrating five features of polyrhythmic cultural frameworks, and how they help understand and adapt to seasonal change. ‘Ten ways that seasons change’ section goes on to unpack 10 ways in which seasonal frameworks are changing, made visible through using this conceptual frame.

Features of seasons as polyrhythmic cultural frameworks

Authors in this issue circle around five features of seeing seasons as polyrhythmic cultural frameworks. I briefly define each feature and situate it in diverse literatures, illustrating each with examples from the issue and commenting on their usefulness for informing and effecting adaptation.

Seasons as polyrhythmic assemblages

Seasonality has a physical basis in the earths tilt and variable insolation, and this can be described and tracked rhythmically in the cycles repeating each year (Kwiecien et al., 2022). As anthropologists (Munn, 1992) and geographers (Edensor, 2016) are quick to note, seasons are not reducible to any one rhythm but read in a polyphony of environmental and social rhythms (Adam, 2005). Krause (2013), for example, describes seasons on the Kemi River relative to rhythms of hydrology, fish migration, indigenous practices and hydro-dam activities. Moreover, these multitudinous seasonal rhythms relate to each other and over time – through small affordances – settle into patterns, the way Gan and Tsing (2018) describe the entwined seasonal timings of trees, mushrooms and human activities in a Satoyama forest. As such, we can say that multiple rhythms, over history, become entwined in seasonal assemblages that ‘hold’, and as the examples above show, these knots tie together human and more-than-human worlds in mutual dependencies. As Staupe-Delgado et al. (2024) in this issue emphasises, to understand the patterns of annual seasonal rhythms it is essential to see how they are cogged into rhythms at longer (e.g. the El Niño Southern Oscillation) and shorter (e.g. tidal) timescales. A storm season may be amplified if it lands on an El Niño year, for example.

A polyrhythmic view on seasonality appears in all contributions to this issue, unpacking the many entwined rhythms of mountain valleys in Norway (Bremer et al., 2024b) and Chile (Carmona et al., 2025), of Danish rivers (Jensen, 2024) and New Zealand coastlines (Staupe-Delgado et al., 2024). As these contributions show, a polyrhythmic view has purchase for making visible and actionable: (a) mutually productive interactions between seasonality in society and the environment; (b) the dynamic and embodied flow of seasonal experiences, and their liminality; (c) the relational links constituting seasonal patterns, and how changes to one rhythm has wider, knock-on effects for a season; (d) a historical account of seasons written in evolving rhythms and entangled multi-species histories; and (e) the cogged rhythms that connect annual seasonal regimes in a place to rhythms at other scales in time and space.

Seasons as culturally perceived and framed

Insofar as polyrhythmic seasons are in unbroken flow and dynamically knotting in endless configurations, it stands that (notwithstanding physical markers like solstices) there is no objective way of bracketing seasonal periods. Rather – consistent with a literature spanning anthropology (Krause, 2013), social theory (Adam, 2005), philosophy (Bastian, 2012), history (Wersan, 2017), geography (Edensor, 2016), sociology (Shove et al., 2012) and indigenous scholarship (Chisholm Hatfield et al., 2018) – we see seasons as culturally interpreted and framed into patterns that make sense according to a groups’ systems of meaning and interaction with their environment. People set order to the cacophony of happenings by discerning seasonal melodies relevant to them. Indeed, seasons form part of groups’ taken-for-granted ontologies – what the world is for them. For example, we see the Pewenche people's cosmology and relation to the non-human world based on their transhumance movement through the mountains (Carmona et al., 2025). Note that non-human species also sense and act on rhythmic patterns – from migrations to phenologies – so a model of seasons as perceived de-centres human perspectives.

Multiple factors mediate how seasons are perceived. Significantly, seasons are sensed for people's activities (‘Practicing seasonality’ section). But the means of perception also has a role. Seasons are often discussed as embodied experience (Lefebvre et al., 1999), but alternative understandings become visible with new technologies, and ways of thinking about seasons; consider ‘remote sensing’, or seasonal forecasts (Venning and Bushaka, 2024). Cultural frameworks also mediate seasonal experience. The ‘common’ view of seasons in wider society affects how groups experience seasons in specific instances (see ‘boundary objects’ above).

The articles in this issue present (and contrast) alternative framings of seasons according to the cultures of particular groups: from indigenous communities to government policymakers, meteorologists, conservation groups, swans or artists. One theme across the articles is how people adopt others’ perspectives; for example, the river manager taking the swan's point of view. op de Beke's (2025) article shows the seasonality of a ‘gamer’ – sweating in front of their console in summer for instance – while they play a host of seasonal experiences; some nostalgic, others catastrophic. This perspective destabilises seasons as natural categories, to be described rather as multiple overlapping seasonal ontologies of humans and non-humans. Overlaps enable us to find what shared references connect seasonal worlds; the hydrology of the river for example (Jensen, 2024; Krause, 2013). A comprehensive understanding of seasonality is a paradigmatic case for transdisciplinary work; creatively assembling temporal competencies or imaginations (Bremer et al., 2024a; Facer, 2023), and rethinking how we sense seasons.

Practicing seasonality

Cultural frameworks of seasons have always served a practical and productive function. A large body of literature in anthropology (McMillen et al., 2014), history (Wersan, 2017) and archaeology (Kwiecien et al., 2022) emphasise seasonal calendars as facilitating timing; identifying when to act to synchronise to environmental and social rhythms (Walker, 2014). Rhythmic patterns serve as templates for action. The earliest seasonal calendars, found in cave paintings at Lascaux, are interpreted as tracking the life cycles of game, presumably to time migration and hunting ¹ . More recent examples range across the literature on Indigenous Australian's calendars for cold-fires (McKemey et al., 2020), to the cycles of city infrastructure (Penn et al., 2016) or the habits of office workers in London (Hitchings, 2010). Calendars are tailored to groups’ specific practices, though they often share reference points with other calendars. Seasonal frameworks are also productive as a source of shared cultural meaning – captured in art, poetry and other forms of symbolism (Macauley, 2024). Importantly, where seasonal frameworks prescribe practice, this comes with normative expectations around right action. But societies do not live passively according to seasons. Humans and non-humans alike are active agents constantly re-interpreting, re-calibrating and altering seasonal patterns.

All contributions to this issue show seasonal frameworks implemented in practice. For example, O’Kane (2025) shows the hybrid seasonalities in a dilapidated greenhouse reflected in his art practice, while Bremer et al. (2024b) draw a calendar with beekeepers to capture distinct periods of activity, of humans and bees. Articles also show groups changing seasonal patterns of activity. Staupe-Delgado et al. (2024) show conservation groups adjusting the timing of dune-planting activities to fit to rhythms of storms, school holidays, wetland hydrology and phenology. Seeing seasons as practiced can inform adaptation. On the one hand, we see how maladaptive practices – from the use of snow machines to plane travel – become stabilised in seasonal patterns. On the other hand, we see opportunities for altering routines and habits to adapt the rhythmic relations comprising seasons (Bremer and Wardekker, 2024).

Contested seasons

If we accept that there are multiple culturally mediated framings of seasons, and that each comes with normative expectations of right conduct, then it follows that seasons will be politically contested. Where calendars and practices clash, then it is a political question of whose timings take precedence, whose temporal coordinates become reference points for others. Fields such as critical horology (Bastian, 2012), political science (Scott, 2020) and sociology (Zerubavel, 1985) have laid bare temporal contestation. Sharma (2014), for example, shows how marginalised workers such as cleaners or taxi drivers fit their workday around more powerful actors. And we see a history of how regimes have sought to control the timings of society by colonising or displacing seasonal calendars (Birth, 2013). Add to this a long history of subjugating the seasonal timings of the non-human world (Bastian, 2012; Facer, 2023).

Contested seasonality surfaces in this issue. We see: the Chilean governments efforts to steer Pewenche communities towards modern agriculture (Carmona et al., 2025); Danish river-dwellers governed by policies from the European Commission (Jensen, 2024); and Ethiopian meteorological science and agricultural policy distorting growing seasons (Venning and Bushaka, 2024), for example. Understanding seasons as contested is relevant for ensuring ‘just adaptation’.

Seasonal change

Seeing seasons in dynamic rhythmic assemblages implies that they are variable and changeable. Variability is an inherent characteristic of rhythms, which Lefebvre et al. (1999) noted ‘repeat with difference’; no two summers are exactly alike, and it is difficult to calculate an average summer when we accept seasons as emerging from the relation between so many moving parts. Changeability refers to processes of long-term change that bring about shifts in seasonal regimes (‘Ten ways that seasons change’ section). Where a keystone species goes extinct, for example, the seasonal pattern of an ecosystem may be qualitatively altered forever (Bastian, 2012).

But how do groups themselves change their polyrhythmic seasonal frameworks? We have already seen some ways this can happen, as groups change their technology or way of perceiving seasonal patterns, change their rhythmic practices or through processes of political contestation (more detail in ‘Ten ways that seasons change’ section). Suffice here to draw a distinction between, on one hand, incremental seasonal evolution, as the accumulation of small everyday alterations to rhythmic patterns (see Gan and Tsing, 2018; van Zandvoort, 2025). Consider processes of urbanisation, and how that is affecting seasonal experience. And on the other hand, the deliberate and organised efforts to instil a new seasonal framework (Jensen, 2024). Decisions by states to adopt or reject ‘daylight savings’ time are an example of this.

Ten ways that seasons change

Adopting polyrhythmic cultural frameworks show seasons not as static categories but rather in constant flux, highly malleable according to the numerous forces constantly cutting, tugging on and retying the temporal knots societies perceive and live by. Indeed, we see societies themselves constantly innovate and recalibrate their seasonal lives, and it is this innovation that provides positive potential for adapting to the societal challenges of today. As such, this framework opens for a more multi-faceted understanding seasonal change, and how people live with change.

Below I raise 10 processes changing seasonal frameworks, which became apparent in this special issue. The list is not exhaustive and processes overlap; they interact to amplify seasonal change.

Climate and hydrology

Insofar as global climate change is a significant matter of concern, one prominent way people think about seasonal change is relative to climatic and hydrological shifts. This may not be surprising, as seasons are largely described through prevailing atmospheric and weather conditions and the patterns of precipitation reflected in hydrology; pulses of water in the rivers, soil moisture and so on (Kwiecien et al., 2022; Krause, 2013; Strauss & Orlove, 2003). Venning and Bushaka (2024), for instance, look at climate change as shifts in rainfall patterns in Ethiopia, and the implications for agricultural seasons. Others, such as Staupe-Delgado et al. (2024) and op de Beke (2025), see seasonal change punctuated by a shifting frequency of extreme weather. Others still look to plant, insect and animal species to signal shifts in climate (O’Kane, 2025), relative to the phenology and animal behaviours (Bremer et al., 2024b; Carmona et al., 2025), and the clashes that can result when temporal assemblages no longer hold (Jensen, 2024).

How people interpret the seasons

If seasons are the polyrhythmic patterns that people perceive, then it holds that seasons change relative to what (and how) people notice and name as seasons. In this way, indigenous scholars (e.g., Chisholm Hatfield et al., 2018; Leonard et al., 2013) lament a shift from complex traditional accounts of seasons, towards a scientific account of seasons reduced to temperature and precipitation. A related argument is that modern communities lose direct contact with their environment, with seasonal experience increasingly mediated through technologies such as sensors or devices (Bremer and Wardekker, 2024). Venning and Bushaka (2024) show how Kiremt rains defined by the Ethiopian Meteorological Institute departs from how farmers practice the season. Bremer et al. (2024b) talked to beekeepers who argued that telling the seasons using beehive sensors ‘replaces 40 years of experience’, and Carmona et al. (2025) showed how an urbanising trend among the Pewenche people disconnects them from seasonality. This noted, several authors (e.g., Bremer et al., 2024b; Jensen, 2024; Staupe-Delgado et al., 2024) showed how techno-scientifically advanced societies do continue to read seasonality as complex patterns. Authors urge us to look for opportunities for modern, urbanised societies to experience seasons in new ways, through computer games for example (op de Beke, 2025), or art installations (O’Kane, 2025).

Built and controlled environments

To the extent people experience seasons in their environment, then the ways communities modify, build out, and maintain environments affects this experience (Larjosto, 2024). Consider how climate-controlled office environments buffer experience (Hitchings, 2010), or how connecting cut-off towns with an all-weather road can alter the pattern of community life (Krauß, 2024). In the issue too, papers looked at seasonality as mediated by controlled environments, whether in a greenhouse (O’Kane, 2025), a beehive (Bremer et al., 2024b) or through a gaming console (op de Beke, 2025). This noted, authors problematised just how much control one has over an environment, with the ‘outside’ often finding its way in, through the broken windowpanes of a glasshouse, for example. Authors also looked at how seasonality changes with infrastructure and its maintenance cycles, from dune plantings in New Zealand (Staupe-Delgado et al., 2024), to the systems of drainage put in place by engineers as part of government efforts to control water environments in Chile and Denmark (Carmona et al., 2025; Jensen, 2024).

Globalisation

Globalisation, as the global movement of people, ideas, technology and media, is altering how communities understand timings and seasons (Axtell et al., 2024; Edensor, 2016). Consider how cultural features – for example, seasonal festivities like Halloween – spread across counties (Bremer and Wardekker, 2024). Or how global (climate) science and policy networks are spreading political models of ‘good governance’ worldwide (Miller, 2004), including standardised definitions of seasons. Several papers in the issue reveal globalisation's influence on seasons. Bremer et al. (2024b) shows how migrant beekeepers bring fresh beekeeping techniques to Norway, and Staupe-Delgado et al. (2024) shows how international tourism shapes conservation in New Zealand. Carmona et al. (2025) and Jensen (2024) show how global (or regional) models of good governance (based on principles of New Public Management) have been instrumental in affecting how communities manage natural resources. These systems have, in Chile for example, seen the Pewenche people detached from their traditional transhumance patterns, towards monoculture cropping. Venning and Bushaka (2024) show how intergovernmental science and policy organisations have defined seasons at such a coarse scale in East Africa that they fail to capture seasons within individual countries.

Economics and the organisation of work

Global market economies are altering the seasonal patterning of activities to meet demands for products and services (Adam, 2005). Bremer and Schneider (2024), for example, show how the lambing season in New Zealand has shifted into winter to fatten lambs for Christmas tables abroad; the icon of the ‘spring lamb’ no longer holds. Papers in this issue likewise show how synchronising to markets elsewhere can bring about temporal asynchronies. In Chile, Carmona et al. (2025) show how state policies encourage cycles of livestock grazing that synch with government programmes in the capital. Similarly, Jensen (2024) and Staupe-Delgado et al. (2024) show how tourist seasons can clash with important moments in the life-cycles of local plants and animals. And Bremer et al. (2024a) show how the timed collections of Honningsentralen – the centralised honey company – affect beekeeping rhythms. To meet market timings, we see communities ‘season-proof’ activities through infrastructures and routines (O’Kane, 2025). Another strategy is towards specialisation and optimisation of work, which can iron out seasonal contours. While an Ethiopian farmer may have a broad repertoire of activities over different moments of the year, the meteorologist has a quite uniform workday, all year (Venning and Bushaka, 2024).

Biodiversity, environmental change and relations to the non-human world

Seasons are read in the natural environment, and the lifecycles of plants and animals humans cohabit with. Changes in biodiversity or landuse – for example, though invasive species – can have knock-on effects in an ecosystem, for example, causing trophic mismatches (Bastian, 2024) or transforming a landscape (Bjærke, 2024). In this issue, Bremer et al. (2024b) show how ‘fireblight’ disease saw biosecurity measures put in place, dictating when beehives can be moved around the region. Carmona et al. (2025) describe how livestock grazing has changed the landscape and erased seasonal markers, while Staupe-Delgado et al. (2024) show how clear-felling forests, can change flood flows and local weather. Yet, O’Kane's (2025) presentation of a derelict greenhouse complex shows us, as others have (Tsing, 2015), that environmental degradation does not mean the ‘end of seasons’, but rather opens for novel seasonal relations, where the windowpane between ‘nature and culture’ starts to crack. Authors also noted how seasons are (re-)created through our relations with non-human species. Carmona et al. (2025) lament erosion in the spiritual relationship the Pewenche people had with other species at over the year, while Jensen (2024) shows an increasingly antagonistic relationship between kayakers and swans.

Institutionalised temporal frameworks

Seasonal frameworks find their way into the institutions structuring social life, and at the same time, shifts (and inertia) in institutions influence how communities enact seasons (Blue, 2019; van Zandvoort, 2025). Policies show up in at least five articles in this issue, often tying seasons to Gregorian calendars and ‘government time’. Carmona et al. (2025) discuss how government policies have incentivised Pewenche people to settle in place. Staupe-Delgado et al. (2024) demonstrate how coastal management activities can exacerbate or mitigate flooding risks. Jensen (2024) reports on a river management process, and how officials struggled to synch the planning process with timings of the river, while considering the timelines of national and European Union law. And Venning and Bushaka (2024) demonstrate how the organisational routines and timings of the Ethiopian Meteorological Institute influences when seasonal forecasts are issued. Indeed, some structures are so deeply rooted that communities feel locked into a pattern of action. Bremer and Schneider (2024), for instance, show the anchoring role of the school calendar on the timings of community life in New Zealand. Religion too exercises institutional influence; to the extent religions come with calendrical timings, shifts in faith may shift a society's seasonal reference points.

Shifting societal roles

In his seminal work, Bourdieu (2020) revealed how seasonality is reflected in how society is demarcated into groups, and the roles and functions (and power) of these groups over periods of the year. But as society's rolls are re-shuffled, this can alter how people practice seasons. For example, Azane (2025) studied the agricultural season in Cameroon and saw that as women – the main labour pool – move to cities to pursue other careers, this disrupts farm labour, timings and identities. In this issue too, we catch glimpses of changes in societal roles. Carmona et al. (2025) implicates this in the radical disruption to Pewenche livelihoods, and Bremer et al. (2024b) show how beekeeping in Norway has shifted from an ‘old man's hobby’, towards a more diverse community, of different ages, genders, cultures and backgrounds. Indeed, a key feature in post-apocalyptic-genre computer games, like those featuring dark seasonality, is a reorganisation of society in dramatically novel ways (op de Beke, 2025).

Historic processes of colonialism, power and control

The seasonal frameworks societies inherit frequently reflect a history of colonialism, standardisation and control (Bremer et al., 2024a). There is arguably a drive to reduce seasonal experience down to a common reference point, reflected in the Gregorian calendar and climatic definitions founded in science and policy (Arnall and Kothari, 2015). In New Zealand, for example, there may have been as many as 43 seasonal calendars in use by Māori tribes, before colonisation subsumed those into the calendars widespread in the United Kingdom (Bremer and Wardekker, 2024). These standardisation processes are stark in the account of the Pewenche by Carmona et al. (2025), in the description of how World Meteorological Organisation displace traditional seasons in Ethiopia by Venning and Bushaka (2024), and in Jensen's (2024) account of European policies that dominate community timings. Yet, as Staupe-Delgado et al. (2024) note, some of these historical processes are being redressed, with Māori tribes in New Zealand – like Ngati Huarere –reintegrating the Māori lunar calendar. And indeed, Jensen's (2024) river management process itself represents an attempt to account for diverse ways of living seasonally.

Seasonal anachronism

Schøyen Jensen & Bremer (n.d.) note a tendency in modern communities to attribute ideal-type seasons to other places in space and time, with an attendant feeling many communities are now ‘seasonless’; what may be termed ‘seasonal anachronism’. Some may claim that they live outside the seasons, but that a researcher could ‘find’ the seasons by looking at agricultural or hunting practices in the past, or travelling to rural or wild settings. This theme arose in this issue too. op de Beke (2025) particularly engages with this theme, discussing how people nostalgically play out traditional agricultural seasons on certain video games. O’Kane (2025) similarly draws a distinction between the nature ‘outside the glasshouse’, and what grows within. But one thing both authors do is challenge seasonal anachronism, by inviting readers to imagine and create new seasonal relations in a post-industrial, even post-apocalyptic world. In this way, we see op de Beke's gamers playing through darkly catastrophic seasons, under unthinkable climate change scenarios. And O’Kane documents an apple tree that protrudes through the glasshouse roof, where its top branches remain barren while its lower branches bear fruit; two seasons apparent on the same tree.