I’ve just posted a piece called “Understanding Russia” over at UKR-TAZ, in which I look at some proximate and deeper causes of continued Russian support for the invasion of Ukraine. It’s mainly a review of some recent literature.
The part that may be of greatest interest to readers of Immanence is the concluding section, in which I discuss Sophie Pinkham’s review of Thane Gustafson’s recent book Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change. Gustafson discusses Russia’s economic over-reliance on oil and gas, and its dismal economic prospects in the long term. As Pinkham puts it,
Russia is warming 2.5 times as fast as the world on average, and the Arctic is warming even faster. The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that the country will be a relative winner in climate change, benefiting from a melting and accessible Arctic shipping route, longer growing seasons, and the expansion of farmland into newly thawed areas. Gustafson counters, with a dry but persuasive marshaling of facts, that in the redistribution of wealth and power that will result from climate change, Russia is doomed. After reading Klimat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine begins to look like the convulsion of a dying state.
In my analysis, Russia is not an isolated case of a country that has deviated from some international norm. Rather, it is a variant of something we find reflected in many places — in illiberal, authoritarian responses to looming economic insecurity, such as those undergirding Trumpism in the U.S., Orbanism in Hungary, Bolsonarism in Brazil, and shades of Modiism (India), Xiism (China), Brexitism, and many others. And in an increasingly climate-traumatized world, we can not only expect those to continue, but to also seek common cause with each other.
Big data + authoritarian governance = techno-totalitarianism.
At least that’s the equation we’re most familiar with, and the route that appears to be being laid out in Xi’s China, according to this lengthily researched New York Times piece. (To be fair, the authors only use “techno-authoritarianism,” and the titular and subtitular “-totalitarianism” gloss appears to be the editors’ — which makes me wonder what the authors think of that terminological shift.) The video is worth viewing.
If I was currently teaching a course in media and/or science fiction, the question I would want to raise is whether and how big-data surveillance and analysis technologies might be used for more libertarian and decentralist ends. (We know they are useful for monitoring the state of the Earth, since without them we would hardly know the details of climate change.)
The following post elaborates on some comments I made this week at the Ritual Creativity conference at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Deep thanks to conference organizers Katri Ratia and François Gauthier for inviting me to what turned out to be an immensely rewarding event, and to my co-panelists Graham Harvey, Sarah Pike, and Susannah Crockford for providing the occasion for these comments. Since this particular line of thinking was resonant among conference participants, I’m sharing it here in an extended form.
Some of the best art exhibitions today show that the socially engaged art world is undergoing two shifts that some of us in the environmental humanities have been advocating for some time: they ecologize and they decolonize. An excellent example of this is the second edition of the Toronto Biennale of Art, currently wrapping up at multiple venues across the city of Toronto under the theme “What Water Knows, The Land Remembers.” I recommend reading some of the documents from the Biennale to get a sense of how they do this.
Visiting the biennale has inspired me to continue formulating my “manifesto in progress” (see here, here, here, and here for a few earlier glimpses). Manifestos aren’t the place to be comprehensive or to explore internal contradictions, of which there are many, so this one is obviously formulaic. It is presented on the hypothesis that formulas can sometimes be helpful for orienting ourselves.
Two images came into my in-box this morning from wildly different directions, which in their combination set up a fizzy train of thought in their wake. (No doubt because of my current thinking on images in the Anthropocene, including images of that weird space where we find the religious, spiritual, and divine. And maybe because of a recent brief revisit of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s final, unfinished text The Visible and the Invisible, with its chiasmic interpretation of the phenomenology that intertwines us all with and against each other.)
The first of these was a Ukraine war “icon” from a series shared on NPR reporter Julian Hayda’s “Unorthodox Icons” Facebook page. This particular image shows Mary, the Mother of God, seemingly crushing, or perhaps gently enclosing and redirecting, with her soft, sheltering hands, the firing main gun assemblies of several “Z”-marked Russian tanks.
I was interviewed last week by UC Santa Barbara music professor and KCSB DJ David Novak on his show Selectric Davyland. The hour-long interview offers a highly personal take on Ukrainian music since the 1980s; David called it a “Personal and Political History (and a Playlist) of Ukrainian Experimental Music.” It features an adventurous mix of work by contemporary Ukrainian composers and bands from Kharkiv (The Moglass), Odesa (Kadaitcha), and Berlin (Zavoloka), as well as a piece of Polissian (Chernobyl area) traditional singing by the authentic folk ensemble Drevo, and a few bits from my own late 1980s-1990s Ukrainian-Canadian band Vapniaky, a.k.a. Stalagmites Under a Naked Sky.
One of the points I make in the interview is that a common theme in Ukrainian music is the relationship to land. One finds this in all Ukrainian music, from contemporary classical to black metal, industrial, rave, ambient, and experimental. It’s of course evident in the avant-folk forms that have become popular in recent years (as in Dakha Brakha, Go_A, Folknery, et al.), and is a theme that’s become all the more explicit in the statements of musicians, and some of the music being made right now, in the context of the current war and attempted Russian invasion.
I have been hesitant to follow up on my post of last summer on “Reindigenization and Allyship” because of the complications surrounding this issue, especially in my state of Vermont. The following can be considered part two in a series, as I continue to think through the politics of indigeneity, identity (including its malleability), territoriality and claims to land, and trauma and historical grievance. I see all of these as issues that will be central to the kinds of conflicts this world will see more of as climate change deepens and its associated impacts spread.
I’ll be giving an online public talk called “The Invasion of Ukraine as a Turning Point?” for the University of California Santa Barbara this Tuesday at 4 pm Pacific Standard Time (7 pm Eastern US/Canada time, 11 pm GMT). It hinges on the idea that the Russian invasion, like other unexpected “hyper-events” (such as the Covid-19 pandemic or the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster), may provide a historical “inflection point” at which rearrangements of agency — that is, rearrangement of the structural forces and capacities by which human potentials are shaped and constrained — could occur. There’s of course no guarantee that they will occur, or that the rearrangements will be for the better and not for the worse. But it’s good to know what kinds of rearrangements might be possible, so that we could better act on them.
The invasion of Ukraine has shifted media attention away from many other things, Covid and climate among them. But the climate implications of the war have not gone unnoticed.
To start with the obvious: Russia is a petrostate. As Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air analyst Lauri Myllyvirta writes,
More than a third of the Russian federal budget is funded from oil and gas revenues, half of which come from Europe. The dependence gives Putin not only a steady flow of cash but also leverage. […]
Putin deliberately prepared to exploit this reliance in the runup to the attack, with Russian energy giant Gazprom holding back gas deliveries to Europe and emptying the gas storage it operates in Germany at the start of this winter.
With Russian gas, oil, and coal sales fueling its military, there is good reason to consider this a “fossil fuel war,” as Ukrainian climate scientist and IPCC member Svitlana Krakovska has called it, that, if it continues, “will destroy our civilization.” It is, at the very least, a war that’s “fueled by the world’s addiction to oil,” as Nicole Goodkind puts it.
Here are some thoughts on the humanitarian, historical, moral, and environmental implications of the crisis of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They were prompted by questions asked of me by a public radio interviewer. I’m still working on the answers (and the interview has not aired, as far as I can tell). Comments welcome.
1. Migration has always been with us. It is what makes humans human. It’s the flip side of settlement, or co-settlement (since there are always others to live and settle with), which is what we still need to get better at.
2. The crisis is not one, but many. What we call a “migrant crisis” could, if reframed, be called a political crisis; a crisis of the nation state, of borders, and of territorial sovereignty; an economic crisis, where there aren’t enough resources to go around, or where their distribution is unfair; or a moral crisis. Each of these reframes can offer suggestions for action: if it’s economic, some form of (entrepreneurially “friendly”) wealth redistribution; if political and national, a “rescaling” of decision-making away from the national to regional and transnational levels; and if moral, an emphasis on moral and inspirational leadership that cross-cuts the inequities at play in a bordered world (such as the basic class difference between those who travel freely and fluidly and those for whom borders are impassable).
In a more ultimate sense, it is an environmental crisis, where what’s at stake is people’s relationship to specific places — places we call nations, countries, territories, homelands — and where those relationships get uprooted by events.
3. Migration crises will only get worse; we need to get better at dealing with them. Refugee/migration crises arise where there are wars or other disasters, with their usual combination of human and “natural” causes. These events displace people internally and externally. Ukraine’s displaced, for instance, are in the millions internally and now nearing three million externally. Such disasters can be expected not only to continue but to increase, as climate change and associated global risks deepen and multiply, which we know they will. Moreover, territorial borders are hardly eternal; they, like nation-states, need maintaining and are ultimately fragile. Dealing with migrations will therefore be an issue for all of us.
