Focusing on the 2000 Desert Walk for Biodiversity, Health and Heritage, this paper considers possibilities for countering the temporal logic of economic globalization with a different understanding of time shaped by the politics of environmentalism and anti-colonial resistance. In 2000, a group of about twenty people, mainly Seri and Tohono O'odham Indians, took part in a 12-day, 230-mile walk from El Desemboque, Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona. During the journey, organized in part to draw attention to the growing problem of diabetes in their communities, the walkers ate only food indigenous to the desert, while educating themselves about the complex intersections of desert ecology, human health and culture. This essay reads the Desert Walk as an intervention in a struggle for sovereignty over time – a means of ordering human experience which is currently defined, according to the prevailing currents of neoliberalism, by a tension between the narrative of history, along with its animating ideology of progress, and the non-linear temporality of post-industrial society that has been called, variously, ‘postmodern’, ‘chronoscopic’ and ‘Corporate’ time. The Desert Walk challenges this dominant temporal mode, I argue, not by transcending or resolving its contradictions but rather by self-consciously harnessing them in order to recognize how time is embedded in other practices and processes. Nourished by a particular culture and environment, the time of the Desert Walk is also crucially mobile and progressive, granting its participants a stake in the promotion of a habitable global future.