immanence

The closing panel of this conference featured Winona LaDuke, Tim Ingold, Bron Taylor, environmental epidemiologist Colin Soskolne (who convened the preceding panel on public and environmental health regimes), and myself. We were each asked to provide five minutes of summary comments on the big issues of our concern (related to the conference). The following were the notes I prepared.

We all have issues to concern ourselves with — individual, local, community, regional, national, and global issues — and I don’t want to be the one to tell people that their issues are less important than a global issue defined by a distant group of scientists. They are not. But in some sense, it’s precisely such an issue — climate change and its associated social and ecological disruptions (biodiversity loss, massive social dislocation, and so on) — that is the one that we all face in our near future, and that will serve as a globally unifying issue for decades to come.

The challenge is for those of us who are aware of this to articulate a coherent and enabling, not disabling, understanding of it: a vision of what we can do — politically, economically, technologically, culturally, and spiritually — to deal with it. This involves three things:

1)    Ceasing the activities that create it. Most immediately and directly, this means bringing an end to the profligate and increasingly desperate forms of fossil fuel use. The extreme-extraction phase of carbon capitalism is, as Winona LaDuke argued today, the option of an addict gone haywire. It needs to be stopped.

2)    Enabling the alternatives that will make survival more likely. This means building the infrastructure for a smart, renewable, ecological, humane, and just society. There are plenty of good ideas and practices we know about here; the will to put them into practice is curtailed by the will to stick to business-as-usual.

3)    Enabling social responses to the crisis, specifically through rectifying the social and political injustices and inequities that disable appropriate responses in the world today, and through crafting and communicating an attractive vision of the result.

Those are immense challenges, and it’s up to everyone to determine (and to teachers and academics to help their students determine) what they do well — well enough for it to make for a satisfying life-path — that would be congruent with these three shifts and not run against them.

My own particular interests/contributions run along three lines:

1)    The philosophical, which I would characterize as unthinking the problematic paradigm, which we can characterize in different ways, e.g., as carbon capitalism, Tim Ingold’s History of the West, etc.; and, contrarily, thinking a more appropriate paradigm, one that recognizes and values the agency and relationality of all things and our appropriate place among them.

2)    The communicative, which for me means understanding and developing the most appropriate use of available media: through such things as media democracy efforts, but also through the search for what Werner Herzog calls “adequate images” for the situation, including images of the crisis and images of the possibilities for addressing it.

3)    Action within the specific contexts in which we’re involved — in which we have a citizenly capacity — toward building the political and cultural will and capacity to make these changes.

These strategies, and the images and narratives that would communicate them, don’t really have a name. For the moment at least, I believe that “climate justice” comes closer than any other. I’m not sure that it conveys the sense of hope and vision that is needed, but it’s a start.