Smoky Solidarities: Wildfire Haze, Climatic Risk, and the Depletion of Urgency


Ferg Maxwell, Toronto Metropolitan University

Smoke is mobile; guided by wind and air-conditioning technologies, it extends across social, physical, and aesthetic boundaries. Images of smoke dispersed by recent climate-induced wildfires populate coverage of anthropogenic climate change and operate as visual signifier of how its real and potential harms undermine conventional distinctions between nature and culture, wild and cultivated space. Studies of environmental risk have argued these images of ecological destruction offer a resource for inspiring public urgency vis-à-vis efforts to mitigate climate change. But increasingly long, intense fire seasons and their smoky exhaust mediate wildfire’s capacity to register as an urgent event. Wildfire smoke mediates the landscape image, a popular aesthetic genre which has helped furnish Canadian settler-colonial capitalism with an external zone of nature filled with untouched natural resources. Under wildfire smoke, these spaces become cloaked with the byproducts of the carbon-intensive resource extraction in which they are implicated. As such, wildfire landscapes reveal climate change as an atmospheric impasse: an extended crisis enveloping experience of settler-colonial capitalist reproduction without hope of its transcendence. Within this impasse, (literally) explosive events of environmental destruction increasingly take on the form of a governing norm of daily life. The socially and spatially diverse subjects of wildfire risk must negotiate with smoke as a simultaneously human and non-human agency. What demands do they and their smoky interlocutors make through the mediate form of the landscape images framing news discourse on climate change? Might the relations materialized in these landscapes suggest the possibility of alternative arrangements of human and non-human matter? Drawing on critical theories of risk, aesthetics, and affect as theoretical frameworks for attending to the political possibilities immanent to the experience of extended crisis, I track the appearance of landscapes marked by wildfire smoke and haze across coverage of wildfire events in Canadian news media since the intense fire season of 2017. Drawing on this archive, I argue that wildfire images which enframe risk must be read as an emergent political aesthetic concerned with materializing the precarious contingencies which make up the everyday experience of risk under settler-colonial capitalism. The enframing of wildfire risk holds the potential to path strange solidarities in a situation where urgency no longer holds the status of exceptional affective experience.

This paper will be presented at the following session: