Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
that place. That’s the murderous double bind of anti-Black violence in the policing of crisis.
D: I also think it’s really important that we challenge environmentalism’s history and ongoing complicity with racism (and outright white supremacy)—[in which it argues] for closed borders, population control, and sterilization, for example. We’ve recently had prominent members of the Green Party of England and Wales arguing for reductions in migration in the name of the environment and a “sustainable economy.”5 There was a Paul Kingsnorth essay in The Guardian a couple of months ago that’s abhorrent; it repeats so many of these tropes.6
BASE Magazine: Most of us know very little about climate science, and whilst a great many people work very hard to translate an overwhelming amount of data and fieldwork into accessible writing, the point where trends and patterns meet the daily effects of climate change can feel elusive. Is there more that could be done to orientate the energies of existing struggles and how far into the future should we be looking? To what extent, to take just a single example, should a housing movement engaged in a project to defend access to housing across London take into consideration that it could soon find itself underwater?
D: We often understand climate change as leading to a spectacular future event and this is often understood visually: imaginaries of ruined, flooded, and depopulated cities are really common. But I think this is flawed: it suggests climate change is heading towards a singular “event” that is going to happen rather than something that is already happening, often in less visually perceptible forms. It becomes harder to grow certain crops, for example, and food becomes more expensive. That drives both migration and conflict. Climate change has undoubtedly played a role in the Syrian Civil War.7
So, it’s wrong on an empirical level to figure climate change as this thing that will happen in the future, but I think it’s also unhelpful politically, because that kind of future threat I don’t think works as a sufficiently motivating force to affect things in the present. I think, like you say, it can be disempowering. That parsing of climate change as a spectacular future event affects how we behave politically as well, leading to a kind of fatalism whereby people just accept these things. I actually think they empower a certain white, male, heterosexual subject too: they can project themselves into that catastrophe thinking they can start anew—the sort of “cozy catastrophism” that the novelist John Wyndham was (perhaps a little unfairly) accused of. You know—“Oh well, all the poor people have died, but we can have a jolly nice time with our new community on the Isle of Wight.”
Public mistrust of experts is also a huge problem because the people we usually hear talking about climate change in the media fall into this category. I think a lot of that hostility is entirely understandable, but rather than get rid of “expertise” in favor of a broad cynical fatalism, we need to think how we can expand the category of expertise and popularize it. We need to amplify the voices of those who live and struggle where climate change meets everyday life: migrants who’ve moved because they can’t afford to buy food; people who’ve worked the land and seen how changes in climate affect crop growth. They, too, are experts.
BASE Magazine: If these kind of analyses of disasters rooted in a distant future can instead give rise to a paralysis and fatalism, whereby with a long enough timescale, all activities become regarded as irrelevant and inconsequential, how then can these feelings be combatted or even harnessed?
D: It’s not necessarily the timescale that’s the problem here, or that talking about the future is inherently wrong, but the function of thinking about the future. There is a difference between prediction and extrapolation. Beyond identifying broad trends that are highly likely and factoring them into our thinking as appropriate, I think prediction is really damaging: firstly because we know not to trust it, and secondly because it doesn’t leave room for agency. We all know that past futurologies, optimistic and pessimistic, religious, apocalyptic have all been terrible. They’re lots of fun, with the capacity to fascinate—we’ve all enjoyed images from the sixties of the year 2000 full of flying cars—and people have long clung to predictions about the imminent collapse of the global population. But they’re just wrong and I think damaging to any attempt to challenge climate change.
I think extrapolation is different; it’s the mode of a lot of science fiction. Here, I’m reminded of the claim made by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha in their introduction to Octavia’s Brood—a collection of short stories from people of color involved in social justice movements in North America/Turtle Island—that all organizing is science fiction.8 Perhaps we could think about dystopian fiction here. It’s had quite a bit of press recently, but the way much of this is framed is unhelpful, I think. Dystopian fiction is positioned as something that can help us “understand” the present in a narrowly empirical way (which denies agency), and the novels celebrated—Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale—are limited even in that sense because they disavow the role that race, in particular, plays in structuring our present. And, in the first three of these, the “victim” is understood to be the abstract individual rather than collective subjects co-constituted by race, class, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability.9
So, instead, I think we need to engage with dystopian fiction that extrapolates from the white supremacist, able-bodied, colonial, heteropatriarchy that structures our world—here I’m thinking of writers like Octavia Butler, Stephen Graham Jones, and Marge Piercy. This isn’t just a descriptive process—extrapolation doesn’t simply describe our world or even where it’s going, but at its best gives us the opportunity to intervene in that through collective struggle. It tells readers that acting in the present can make a difference to the future. The science fiction scholar Tom Moylan talks about what he calls “critical dystopias,” and I think they’re particularly useful here, because they present collective organization and struggle within the dystopian society being depicted as well. Even if things continue to get worse, this won’t be the end; there is always room for collective struggle.10
Having said that, I am a little skeptical about the power of literature, partly because we don’t generally read it together anymore—unless you’re part of a reading group or reading at a university, you probably read fiction as an isolated individual. I think the popularity of Octavia’s Brood is interesting: it’s got a large social media following, has been used by reading groups, and seems to have opened up a space for collective discussion about the future and how acting now can alter it.11 It doesn’t necessarily have to be literary fiction that plays this role: “design fiction” is a potentially powerful tool too, for example.
BASE Magazine: In an older issue of The Occupied Times, we asked Silvia Federici about surviving apocalypse(s). She told us:
The prospect of annihilation is a relative one. For many communities in the US—Black communities whose children are murdered by the police in the street, Indigenous communities like the Navajo that have to coexist with uranium mining, communities where unemployment is skyrocketing and the list goes on—apocalypse is now. In this context, we struggle for justice by refusing to separate the struggle against the destruction of the environment from the struggle against prisons, war, exploitation. You cannot worry about climate change if your life’s in danger every day, as is the case for so many people in this country.12
What do you recognize in these descriptions as possible points of engagement to building our capabilities to survive?
A: I think it’s very interesting how Federici responds to that, and I think part it is in the way that you worded the question: “The consequences of climate change are forcing humanity to contemplate its own destruction in ways it hasn’t since the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War.” I think what that comes back to is what we were saying earlier about these images of universal catastrophe. Because that question very much sums up the way climate change is depicted in terms of this global, universal threat to the species and a particular framing of the human, but I think it’s very important to then pose the questions that Black studies has insisted on: Who is the human? Who gets to be human? Sylvia Wynter’s