This talk explores how environmentalists conceive of time. There is an urgency to many environmental campaigns that drives and motivates activists and is used as a logic and rationale for the campaigns. Yet part of the contemporary crisis of environmentalism is that the doomsday future scenarios predicted through such campaigns have rarely materialised. This talk explores how environmentalists conceive of time and how such an understanding is useful, problematic or relevant. Using case studies the different and complex implications of environmentalists’ temporal understandings are examined.