Good afternoon, beloved —
So I’m acutely conscious that I've been MIA these past few months, and have not been doing a particularly good job of upholding my commitment to you, for which I apologize unreservedly. This book is the most difficult project I’ve ever undertaken, I’m giving it everything I have and then some, and it’s left me utterly flattened and without resources when it comes to writing even one word that doesn't directly drive it toward completion.
Compounding my struggles is that, in following my writing plan, I keep generating passages — long ones — that ultimately come to feel as though they don't particularly advance the book’s central arguments. My editor Leo refers to these passages as “throat clearing,” and while I don’t always and invariably agree with him about what constitutes throat clearing and what is intended to set up something I’ll be circling back around to develop further, this book is already going to be long enough as it is. I can’t fight to hold on to every last word. Some material necessarily winds up on the cutting room floor, even material I originally thought of as being fairly central to the points I’m trying to make.
The passage you're about to read, which I offer to you as a way of making up for my long delinquency, is one of those offcuts. I figure you might just enjoy it anyway, as a taster of what is to come and maybe even as a line of thought in its own right. It's about a succession of interpretive frames our culture has thrown up over the past half-century or so, each of them a lense through which we were supposed to understand our interaction with (and impact on) the "natural world." You could think of it it as a periodization and genealogy of these paradigms.
As it happens, I don't actually think of this material as being tangential to the basic theme of the book — which, remember, is about developing the practices of mutual care and collective power that might help see us through the dark times ahead — and for all I know, some of it still might find its way back into the final draft. Seeing as we've put a red pencil through it in toto, though, at least for now, it hasn't been edited as such. As I look it over now, it feels a little stiff and overformal to me, like I hadn't quite yet found the proper voice for these ideas. I think there's nevertheless some good stuff in here: some stuff that maybe hasn't been said quite this explicitly before, and benefits from being laid out in this way. As ever, I hope you get something out of it. Let me know how it lands?
§ The unnerving fragility of the complex systems that underwrite everyday life may, finally, have become the stuff of ordinary consciousness in our time — underscored, now, every time rolling blackouts are imposed, a water-use restriction is announced or a supply chain failure again empties the grocery shelves. But the understanding that we live on the upper floors of a teetering house of cards is not especially novel. A sentinel twitching warning us that something in our way of organizing the world was dangerously off has resided in our collective awareness for half a century or longer.
Over that time, popular culture has thrown up a succession of framings through which we might understand activity at what the Norwegian geographer Inger Birkeland calls “the nature-culture interface.” Each of these — from “ecology,” “sustainability,” “resilience” and “climate justice” through the frame just now coming into the ascendant, “deep adaptation” — proposes a fundamental paradigm through which all of our “experiences, practices, policies, ideas and knowledge” relating to our encounter with the pre- or non-human world are mediated. And as widely diffused and broadly internalized as these paradigms are, they inevitably wind up shaping the space of social possibility that is available to us, from policy commitments and allocations of public resource to the ways in which we choose to express (or, indeed, suppress) our own beliefs and emotions. What becomes clear above all, in reviewing the succession of conceptual lenses through which our relationship to the Earth system has been refracted over time, is that there is a strong connection between such ideas, their cultural expression and the development or dissipation of demand for fundamental change.
Such frames do not, of course, emerge from nowhere. It isn’t necessarily the case, as a cynic might have it, that they are selected and amplified depending on their ability to serve the interest of one or another faction among the powerful; sometimes a slogan, a trope or a way of thinking about the world rises up from below more or less organically, and is propelled to prominence because it has genuinely caught some facet of the public mood. But it is always crucial to ask what kind of ideological work these chunks of expression may be doing, as well as whose interests they advance. It remains necessary, in other words, to do the work of discourse analysis.
This is true of an epoch’s movies and novels, every bit as much as it is of its signature academic papers, philosophical texts or acts of legislation. What does the language we use allow us to see? What, conversely, does it obscure from view? Most importantly of all, what possibilities for action does it suggest, and which does it tend to occlude?
“Ecology” is the name I give to the first of a series of interpretive frames that have been produced, with increasing self-awareness, since the dawn of the era of mass telecommunications, by way of which the broad public was encouraged to understand interactions between humanity and the world that preceded our arrival on the scene. In supplanting an earlier, Abrahamic ethos of human dominion over nature, ecology simply held that our species had reached a point at which our choices were capable of damaging the complex, nonlinear web of geological, oceanic and atmospheric relations that all of life was embedded in. Another way of putting it, perhaps more to the point: rather than the world being a case of us acting on a passive external environment, and all the things in it, with ecology we discovered that we were a part of something open, dynamic and alive.
As a coherent body of thought, ecology first came to prominence globally in the latter half of the twentieth century, in a time when the long-term consequences of the preceding hundred years of industrialization were beginning to make themselves inescapably plain, and the destructive impact of human activity on the biosphere had finally become too difficult to deny, dismiss or ignore. In North America, a groundswell of ecological activism followed the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s urgent 1962 missive about the ecocidal effects of synthetic pesticides, spurring the founding of advocacy groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and reaching an initial culmination in the inaugural Earth Day of 1970; similar currents swept Western Europe, Japan and Australasia, no doubt buoyed to some considerable extent by the value placed on the “natural” and “organic” in the era’s globalized counterculture.
It was in the latter region that the first political parties explicitly organized in response to ecological concerns appeared, predating the more famous German Greens by almost a decade: the United Tasmania Group, which stood candidates in the Australian state elections of April 1972, and the Values Party of New Zealand, which fielded a slate in the national elections of November. These, to be sure, were minor parties, and they made little enough headway at the time. But the concerns motivating them were shared across a wider spectrum of political actors, if only as a matter of pragmatic self-preservation. Even otherwise conservative governments of the period appeared capable of responding to the reality of ecological breakdown with some sense of urgency, as suggested by the extraordinary session of the Japanese Diet convened in November 1970 to pass an act of legislation called the Basic Law for Environmental Pollution Control, or the establishment of the United States Environmental Protection Agency by executive order of President Richard Nixon in December of that same year.
Though much of this ferment of activity concerned the relatively local effects of point-source pollution, an understanding of the potential for anthropogenic environmental devastation at planetary scale was in the air more broadly, sufficiently well established in the public mind that it could furnish a trope for the era’s mass culture. John Brunner’s novel of 1972, The Sheep Look Up, culminates in the fiery collapse of civilization on the North American continent, driven by the accelerating convergence of multiple, interlocking environmental catastrophes, while filmic dystopias like Silent Running (1972) and Soylent Green (1973) routinely depicted an Earth utterly befouled by a humanity that had unthinkingly laid waste to the forests, driven the major land species to extinction, and transformed the oceans into reeking, anoxic biological deserts. The jazzy two-minute montage that begins the latter film has never been bettered as a capsule depiction of the damage done to the planet by settler-colonial rapacity, extractive capitalism and tentacular urbanization. (So much for escapism.)
Underwriting pop culture’s ecological turn was a steady stream of academic, institutional and scientific findings that appeared throughout the 1970s, suggesting that human activity on Earth was already threatening to surpass the thresholds at which it could be safely sustained. The Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth — like Silent Spring, unexpectedly a multimillion-seller — used what was then the best available computer modeling to explore the consequences of unchecked economic growth on a planet with finite resources, concluding that the “most probable result” of continued business as usual would be “a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” occurring somewhere around 2020. And though ecological consciousness throughout this period was still largely synonymous with the effort to curtail industrial pollution, it was already specifically understood that there were links between energy use, the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and climate change: measurements made by the American oceanographer Charles Keeling, published in 1960, had already confirmed that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were steadily rising, while a report prepared for the management committee of gas and oil giant Exxon Corporation in July 1977 made the connection between this rise and the continued burning of fossil hydrocarbons explicit.
By the end of 1970s, then, all of the facts necessary to understand what was transpiring in the atmosphere had been assembled, and warnings about the baleful consequences of inaction transmitted from the most pervasive and emotionally compelling means of dissemination the culture had to offer; “the system,” in words later applied to another catastrophe foretold by disregarded Cassandras, “was blinking red.” Though it would undoubtedly have required massive — indeed, quite thoroughly unprecedented — transformations of the global economy, these warnings could have been acted upon. Unfortunately for all of us, what happened next prevented any such thing from coming to pass.
In retrospect, ecology was a frame appropriate to what was already then a fading epoch of mass politics, large-scale public investment and communal aspiration. Its imaginary, where environmental repair was concerned, was every bit as bound up in collective, government-led endeavor as an Apollo moonshot, and it could not survive contact with the individualizing wavefront that first broke over the Western democracies with the triumph of Margaret Thatcher in the British elections of 1979. The broad popular appeal of ecology as an organizing principle was first blunted and then broken by the neoliberal thrust that followed, its defeat driven home at the symbolic level by President Ronald Reagan’s entirely gratuitous 1986 decision to dismantle the (still fully functional) solar panels installed on the White House roof by his predecessor Jimmy Carter.
By the time an awareness of human impact on the ecosphere reemerged as a matter of broad political concern, sometime in the early 1990s, it did so in terms appropriate to an era of individual endeavor. This took the form of a popular discourse around “sustainability.” Long familiar as the stuff of brightly-branded corporate social responsibility initiatives, NGO white papers, “green” product design, municipal recycling drives, best-practice certifications and any number of philanthropic or academic funding opportunities, sustainability was a doctrine that aimed to preserve the mighty consumer engine of late capitalism (and, implicitly, its politically sedative effects) by tinkering at the margins of its world-heating repercussions. Its key rhetorical innovation was the personal “carbon footprint,” a darkly brilliant bit of business on the part of fossil-fuel behemoth BP and its advertising agency Ogilvy that transferred responsibility for mitigating climate catastrophe from the institutions and large-scale structures that had largely caused it to each of us as individuals. With the collective ability to limit increasing carbon emissions reframed as a matter of individual choice and behavior, in practice sustainability could do no more to ameliorate rising atmospheric concentrations than shave a few points off the rate of change of the rate of change.
As anodyne and pointless as this might have been, however, it soon became clear that even this modest goal would remain beyond reach. And this was because sustainability harbored at its very core an outright lie: the global achievement of everything we recognize as modernity was predicated upon the relatively rapid drawdown of a store of fossil energy that was in practical terms irreplaceable, and there was not a single thing about it that ever could have been sustained indefinitely. As Buckminster Fuller had pointed out as far back as the mid-1960s, modernity was a one-time shot, an all-or-nothing gamble on riding the high energy density of resources laid down millions of years in the past to a point at which planetary civilization would be capable of organizing itself around renewable sources of power. And while plainly acknowledging this state of affairs was out of the question for most of those deeply invested in it — it was entirely too scary, for one thing, but it also would have cut far too close to challenging the logic of perpetual growth on which the late-capitalist bounty depended — somewhere in the interval between Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy it became clear that a rhetoric of sustainability was no longer credible.
There was, as well, a general tendency in the sustainability discourse to avoid responding to, or even acknowledging, the steadily worsening tenor of events, even as the well-intentioned op-ed warnings issued by climate scientists got ever more hair-raisingly urgent, and indicators of atmospheric health blew through one critical boundary after another. The name of one nonprofit of the sustainability phase, 350.org, is heartbreakingly emblematic of the conceptual stasis involved. The figure denoted the final threshold concentration of CO2 that evidently could not be breached if any hope for the stability of the atmosphere were to be preserved, measured in parts per million; the average reading for August 2022 was 417.19. In the face of onrushing events, sustainability itself could manifestly no longer be sustained.
By this time, however, an entire sector of the economy had grown up around it, both as a generator of potent alibis for business as usual and an employment scheme with a certain economic salience in its own right. Rather than anyone moving to retire this semantic niche, then, which would necessarily mean standing down all the churn of discursive and economic activity it supported, a precession of buzzwords took place. While it still occasionally crops up as a topic of discussion among those individuals and institutions that are more than usually behind the curve, even now — witness the colorful Sustainable Development Goals lapel pins not so long ago adopted en masse by hapless Japanese salarymen — throughout the 2010s sustainability was progressively effaced as an object of thought by a new term.
In recent years, the conventional institutional response to destabilizing climatological events has more generally been articulated in terms of “resilience,” defined as a system’s capacity to retain its structure and function after having been exposed to some exogenous shock.
On a close reading, the deployment of this rhetoric can be understood as a tacit admission that the project of sustainability had indeed failed. Resilience is to say that while we can no longer forestall the train of climate impacts bearing down on us as a consequence of our previous choices, perhaps we can at least engineer our systems so that they recover from each successive setback in as timely and complete a manner as possible.
But this presents a certain problem. So long as we limit ourselves strictly to a consideration of ecological or physical systems — the web of life in a marshland environment, say, or the robustness of a long-distance communications network — resilience is a perfectly useful, even a vital concept. The trouble is that very, very few of those who use this terminology in the post-sustainability context observe any such care with their language, far more often using it to describe instead a desirable property of complex social structures. Every time someone does this, therefore, they wind up conflating the ability of natural or technical systems to rebound from shock with that of the economic and political arrangements (and therefore the human communities) that are coupled with them, in a way that tends to reduce thinking, feeling people with desires and interests to passive recipients and modulators of physical force.
This elision of human agency evidently stuck in the craw of geographers Danny MacKinnon and Kate Driscoll Derickson, who in 2013 published a paper arguing that the discourse of resilience — then just emerging from academia, and now of course more or less inescapable across the public and private sectors both — was just as intellectually bankrupt as the discourse of sustainability it was intended to replace. If somewhat obvious, the central question MacKinnon and Derickson posed of the new rhetoric was nonetheless one nobody else seems to have thought to ask before them, at least not in public: if being “resilient” is to bounce back, just what is it we’re supposed to be bouncing back to? If the order of things is currently unjust, that is, wouldn’t attempts to restore the status quo ante following some disruptive event tend to stabilize that injustice, if not set it in stone? And isn’t it then adding insult to injury to ask that already-desperate communities shoulder the costs and burdens of this stabilizing work, all to conserve a system and a way of being in the world that had never for so much as a single moment worked in their interest?
MacKinnon and Derickson wound up proposing, therefore, that resilience itself ought to be tossed on the scrapheap, preferably to be supplanted entirely by a rather less totalizing approach they called “resourcefulness,” more attuned to the needs and capacities of communities under pressure. And here the ear perks up, because of all the responses to climate system breakdown we’ve considered, resourcefulness seems to allude most directly to a capacity that one might nurture and develop, both personally and communally.
Beyond a few bullet-pointed desiderata, though, and possibly out of an entirely justifiable concern that the term not be reified and marketed in the same way that sustainability and resilience were before it, MacKinnon and Derickson don’t say much about what this quality might consist of, how one might recognize it in others or develop it in oneself. In fact, having established their fundamental interest in situations where “communities have the capacity to engage in genuinely deliberative democratic dialogue to develop contestable alternative agendas and work in ways that meaningfully challenge existing power relations,” they never go on to flesh out the idea of resourcefulness in any detail to speak of. As an intellectual proposition and a mode of action intended to help people reckon with the reality of climate system breakdown, it remains unbalanced — provocative, certainly suggestive of a fair amount of promise, but oddly and even woefully incomplete, like a sentence fragment left hanging in the air.
Perhaps it wasn’t MacKinnon and Derickson’s responsibility to spell things out at any greater length, though. Sometimes the right diagnosis is contribution enough. But if it is up to us to develop their notion further, the very first question anyone sensible would want to ask is: resourcefulness in service of precisely what?
One answer might be furnished by the worldwide effort to highlight the asymmetry of the harms caused by climate system breakdown, and demand accountability from those responsible for producing them. All but exclusively spearheaded by activists from minority, indigenous or otherwise marginalized backgrounds, this is a movement founded in the grief and rage of those for whom the foreclosure of hope is not an abstraction but a lived truth. It is known as climate justice.
What the movement for climate justice insists we attend to isn’t simply that the destructive downstream effects of global heating are disproportionately visited on low-income communities, from the slums of Dhaka to the plains of North Dakota. Nor, for that matter, that the needs, the perspectives, and the psychological and physical health of such communities are routinely bypassed in official planning for resilience — sacrificed, just as MacKinnon and Derickson had predicted, in the name of preserving a way of life that has generally been inimical to them. What it demands, instead, is corrective action: that those who have profited most from the long burn of hydrocarbon capital furnish a proportionately greater share of the budget for relief and recovery from climate disasters, and that the poor and the powerless are centered in whatever plans are made for long-term repair.
In focusing attention on the starkly differential production of ecological harms, climate-justice thought encourages us to ask why some places, and some people, suffer more than others from the consequences of atmospheric heating. Answering such questions demands, in turn, that we treat the distribution of this suffering as something other than implacable transhistorical circumstance, and unweave the entangled genealogies of imperial conquest, colonial development, resource extraction and human exploitation that have led us to this moment. For many of us, this will mean unlearning much of the history we were taught in school. For some smaller number, including myself, it will raise uncomfortably specific questions about the circumstances of our own relative privilege. Once they have been made plain to us, we can no longer overlook, deny or excuse the connections between the endowment of the universities which granted us our degrees, say, or the investments made by the pension funds we’re counting upon to buffer us in our old age, and the entities currently pumping the Niger Delta dry and setting Amazonia to the torch. Whether and how we act on that knowledge is then up to us.
This is urgent, morally necessary work. But here we are a very long way from the fluttering green Ecology flags and Blue Marble buttons of that first, hopeful Earth Day. As a way of seeing the world, climate justice compels us to reckon with a set of bitter facts, elided by all the frames that preceded it: that we are not “all in this together.” That the agony presently being experienced by a great many human beings on Earth was actively produced by the same historical processes that generated wealth, power, ease and comfort for a far smaller number of others. And that any attempt to contest this distribution of harms and goods will be countered with all the force the wealthy and powerful can muster. Almost as bitter, as well, is the culminating recognition that whatever victories the movement for climate justice is able to win now will necessarily have the character of rearguard, defensive action. Wherever activists prevail in holding extractive industries and their shareholders accountable for the damage they’ve caused, even should they win meaningful redress, that damage is done. The gas and oil have been burnt. The carbon molecules locked in them, however many millions of years in the past, have been liberated to the atmosphere. The sun heats the cloud tops, the convection cells form, the storms roll across the land. The demand for equity, however righteous and however fiercely pursued, will not in itself be sufficient to stop these circumstances from transforming the possibilities for all life on our planet.
And it is this set of facts that the “sustainability leadership” professor Jem Bendell tried to come to terms with, in a widely-distributed 2018 essay called “Deep Adaptation” that gives our final frame its name. In its original version, Bendell aimed to “provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near term social collapse due to climate change.”
In order to do so, he had to push past the limits of accepted discourse in his professional community, and even to some degree those of ordinary polite conversation. Among public-policy intellectuals, available responses to climate disruption have traditionally been framed in terms of two competing approaches: mitigation, in which action is taken to limit carbon emissions in the hope of forestalling further escalations of global heating, and adaptation, in which the institutions of society redesign themselves to accommodate the new reality as best they can. What Bendell argued wasn’t merely that the hour for any plausible attempt at mitigation had already passed, but that even the conventional processes of adaptation being discussed among his peers were desperately, even ludicrously inadequate to the magnitude of the coming catastrophe — that virtually all of the activity ostensibly being undertaken to preserve existing ways of living on the Earth amounted to a self-indulgent carnival of posturing, displacement and denial. Above all, what nobody in his circles seemed to want to reckon with was the prospect of near-term societal collapse.
It was, effectively, already too late at the time of writing to prevent the collective near future from being one of terrible suffering. Even harder to accept, this suffering would take place not in some distant, conflict-torn quarter of the globe, but right at home: “[W]hen I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t [sic] have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.” And worst of all — whether through denial, fear of becoming unemployable, or the professed desire to avoid spreading a sense of gloom, defeat and hopelessness — few among those who did understand what was happening would talk about it in public, depriving people of their last, best chance to prepare for what was already in the process of breaking over them. The time had come, Bendell implied, for those in full possession of the facts to face down their own terror of annihilation, brave the potentially career-ending disapproval of their peers, and start laying out the lines of the grim reality unfolding before us all.
It may be that his way of presenting this case was unduly universalizing, flattening the real distinctions between the primary beneficiaries of the fossil-capitalist order and its victims in precisely the way climate justice thinkers feared most. But for Bendell, the only responsible message to convey was that anyone’s survival, if indeed any such thing was still possible, would have to involve an agonizing process of reappraisal and retrenchment, a process that he called “deep” adaptation. This was an approach to being comprised of three complementary but distinct aspects. The first was a practice of “resilience,” articulated in relatively conventional and unreflexive terms; to this he joined “relinquishment,” or the renunciation of behaviors, activities, habits, roles and (perhaps most importantly) mindsets associated with the continuity of business as usual, and “restoration,” which largely amounted to the rediscovery of whatever pre-industrial folkways might retain value, meaning or utility in the advancing chaos. In essence, “Resilience asks us ‘how do we keep what we really want to keep?’ Relinquishment asks us ‘what do we need to let go of in order to not make matters worse?’ Restoration asks us ‘what can we bring back to help us’” survive the dark days ahead? This framework was considerably more complete, practically and emotionally, than any previous rhetoric of response to climate change, not to mention more intellectually honest, and whatever individuals or communities were able to internalize all three of these orientations might indeed consider themselves well on the way to being adapted to the violent circumstances of our strange new world.
Bendell is not a climate scientist, and predictably enough, his at-times inelegantly worded proposal was subjected to withering critique, from multiple quarters. And it’s true that there are any number of aspects of his analysis a reasonable interlocutor might reasonably take exception to. Where the paper shines, though, is in foregrounding the affective stakes of systemic collapse, and especially in exploring some of the psychosocial and institutional dynamics that so often prevent us from acknowledging — let alone making meaningful preparation for — the coming to pass of this thing we have so greatly feared. For all its limitations, “Deep Adaptation” remains a landmark in popular ecological thought, because of its insistence that we sit with the terror, the howling grief and the monstrous injustice of the circumstances we’ve collectively brought into being.
For many of the very reasons Bendell discusses, though, adaptation, whether deep or otherwise, does not at present appear to be on the public agenda, at best showing up in occasional plans to shore up an urban drainage system here or endow a network of neighborhood cooling centers there. Even the indifferent attempts at mitigation governments have so far committed to are only intermittently centered in mainstream awareness, despite the best efforts of mass movements like Extinction Rebellion and the Greta Thunberg-inspired School Strike for Climate to keep them in focus. And all the while, believing themselves hemmed in by the acute needs of their people, parties in power around the world continue to lean into coal-fired energy generation. We find ourselves in an odd state of abeyance, in which each successive drought, flood, crop failure or wave of wildfires, however disruptive it may be, is still nevertheless treated in the media as a discrete event disconnected from each of the others, as well as from the underlying activities we know to be driving all of them. Cravenly, in defiance of all sense, we have not modified our ways of life to account for these conditions, rethought the ways in which we organize production, provision and consumption, or really in any way consequentially attempted to prevent the worsening of a state of affairs that we have been warned about since the 1970s and which is now well and truly upon us. We continue to stumble blindly onward, toward an abyss whose contours become clearer and more visible with every sensor reading, every news item and every passing week.
What was the last moment in history at which it would have been possible for us to have made other choices as a species, and for things thereafter to have worked out differently? No doubt each one of us would draw the line in a different place. Some have always seen the end of the human sojourn on Earth determined by its very beginnings, folded up in them like the extra dimensions of string theory. From this point of view, it was already too late by the time someone first noticed how much better foodcrop seeds grew in alluvial soil. Or perhaps the death knell sounded far earlier still, the moment a spark of self-awareness first leapt across the circuits of a hominin mind.
Others place the fatal moment in 1492, or 1945, or argue that a different path remained open to us as late as 2001; it may even be that there are some who continue to believe in the availability of alternative evolutionary trajectories for human society. But the very fact that there has been a succession in the governing metaphors and epistemic frames we use to guide our interpretation of events clarifies what it is that we as a society really believe to be true, however liminally we may hold this knowledge. Ecology, sustainability, resilience and even climate justice are all stories about the world and the nature/culture interface that are invested with some belief that human societies can organize themselves at scale to manage our use of the planet’s resources responsibly, and prevent the worst harms from befalling us. The stories we tell each other now are implicitly ones without any such hope.
What is left, out past the place where mitigation fails and adaptation stumbles? The present evidence suggests that two broad modes of response to climate system breakdown remain available. Neither of them is a consciously articulated rhetorical frame in quite the same way as the others we’ve discussed, but both of them shape our collective understanding of the moment we are in — and both have already begun to drive behavior at scale. One is the desperate, last-ditch effort to exert total control over human activity, so that our collective impact on the climate system can be constrained by force — and the other, the perennial instinct to identify a scapegoat who can in some way be made responsible for stealing the future, and exact revenge upon them.
§ At the moment I'm reading Robyn C. Spencer’s excellent, deeply-sourced history of the Black Panthers, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland; listening to Johnny Flynn and Robert Macfarlane’s astonishing album Lost in the Cedar Wood, which somehow fuses the matter of Albion to the Mesopotamian lore you probably last read about in your copy of Deities & Demigods, and which I can best describe as “folk horror without the horror”; and watching The Last of Us, along with everyone else.
Until next dispatch, which I swear will arrive more swiftly than this one did: please do remember to take care of yourself and those who need you, and to let yourself be taken care of. You have, as ever,
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 121 of Saturday, 4 February 2023, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊