(ENV4) Risky solidarities at the planetary threshold

As the global capitalist system rebrands itself along ‘green’ lines, industry’s destabilizing effects on planetary conditions are becoming increasingly difficult to monitor and ascertain. For one, green modernization efforts have been accompanied by the introduction of countless means of obscuring socio-ecological risks: environmental risk assessments are being paired with NDAs, extractive industries are relocating to regions that are virtually impossible to monitor, and global oil giants are investing in the clean energy technology and infrastructure that were supposed to challenge their place in the global economy. Therefore, as socio-ecological risk becomes an increasingly common topic of political deliberation among groups as diverse as school-age campaigners and Indigenous land defenders, state and corporate interests are finding novel ways of mediating the visibility of risk while making the severity of the planetary crisis unthinkable and the false promises of green modernization unquestionable. To deal with these ‘high risk’ planetary conditions, what is needed is a politics at the center of which is a notion of risk imagined as the crossing of thresholds or tipping points beyond which lies a great unknown of agential and planetary conditions. Such a notion of risk must attend to the immense scale of potential harms immanent to climate change at the same time as it advances a reflexivity in relation to the culturally and technologically embedded processes through which it is visualized and valorized. This panel investigates the social implications and social movements which might arise from this double approach to climatic risk: what kinds of solidarities does it make possible, and how are they forged and sustained affectively, symbolically, and materially? Tags: Environment

Organizers: Mauricio Collao Quevedo, York University, Ferg Maxwell, Toronto Metropolitan University

Presentations

Ferg Maxwell, Toronto Metropolitan University

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

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.

Mauricio F. Collao Quevedo, York University

The Geologic Turn: Geologizing the Empirical Basis of Environmental Thought

For two decades, critical theory and environmental thought have been undergoing a ‘geological turn’ whereby the geologic dimensions of planetary conditions are repeatedly conjured to think through the magnitude and historical significance of the planetary crisis. For this reason, the Social Sciences and Humanities have engaged extensively with the topic of the Anthropocene as a new and geologically verifiable site of historical struggle. However, much of this work has been informed by Earth System Science’s (ESS) formulation of the Anthropocene as its empirical basis, which engages selectively with geological research that focuses on immediately perceivable rates of change and human impact on the geologic record (e.g., carbon mineralization and sequestration, methane emissions from thawing permafrost regions, changing coastlines, etc.) – in turn leaving out important insights about the planet’s deep past through which the Earth’s capacity for self-differentiation can be properly grasped. This paper explores the institutionalization of ESS’s Anthropocene through the policy-oriented work of the IPCC in its latest report, AR6. More specifically, I problematize ESS and the IPCC’s commitment to a risk-obscuring systems mode of thinking that simplifies planetary processes for the purposes of policymaking while constraining our ability to think through the true magnitude of planetary transformations currently underway. As a corrective, I propose a deeper engagement with ‘classical’ geology, arguing that the discipline provides more valuable empirical resources for the Social Sciences and Humanities to think through the magnitude of planetary changes entailed by the onset of the Anthropocene, the risk that these transformative processes pose to our planetary future, and the possibility of collective survival at this geo-historical conjuncture.

Suleyman Demi, Algoma University

Mitigating Contemporary Climate Crisis: Lessons from Indigenous Food Systems in Ghana

Food systems constitute “an interdependent web of activities that include the production, processing, distribution and disposal of food waste” (Sumner, 2012, p.327). In this study, Indigenous food systems refer to the original food systems of a specific location usually but not exclusively occupied by Indigenous people. Indigenous food systems in Africa are negatively impacted by climate change. Globally, Africa is expected to experience the most severe effects of climate change due to elevated temperatures, and frequent drought and crop yield is expected to decrease by half due to the vagaries of the weather (Boko et al 2007; Emrullahu, 2022). In Ghana, numerous studies have been conducted to assess the effects of climate change on food crop and livestock production (Adiku, 2013; Tetteh et al., 2022), but scanty information exists on how climate changes affect Indigenous food systems and smallholder farming households, a phenomenon this study seeks to investigate. Hence, the study addresses three questions: 1) what environmental challenges are facing smallholder farmers in Ghana? 2) How do the challenges affect Indigenous food systems in local communities? and 3) what sustainable practices do smallholders adopt to mitigate those challenges? The study is grounded in two theoretical frameworks: political ecology to provide critiques of unsustainable practices inherent in the industrial food system and Indigenous knowledge to provide an alternative food system. This multi-sited mixed methods study collected data using one-on-one in-depth interviews, focus group discussion, participant observation, workshops and secondary sources of information. The intent is to triangulate the varied perspectives. 56 smallholder farmers (26 women and 30 men) and 8 agriculture-related professionals were selected for an in-depth interview. Additionally, a total of 56 smallholders participated in focus group discussions out of which 17 were among smallholders engaged in in-depth interview. In sum, 103 individuals participated in the study drawn from twelve (12) communities. The criteria for selecting individual participants included: years of farming experience and knowledge of Indigenous Food Systems in Ghana. The data obtained from one-on-one interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation and workshops were transcribed verbatim and the hardcopy printed for coding. The qualitative data analysis was broadly categorized into three steps: 1) the reduction or compression of the data, 2) the exploration of the data, and 3) the integration of the exploration and interpretation of the data (Attride-Stirling, 2001). Preliminary results of the study show farmers face the following environmental challenges: drastic changes in rainfall patterns result in fewer rains, erratic rainfall, delay in onset of rain and unexpected excessive rainfall; frequent incidences of prolonged drought resulting in drying up of rivers and dams that serve as sources of drinking water for smallholder farming households; frequent bush fires due to dry condition created by prolonged drought. Consequences of the environmental challenges include: acute water shortages depriving smallholder farmers especially woman farmers of engaging in any income-generating activities, causing farmers to spend the bulk of their time hunting for water instead of engaging in farming activities, affecting children’s school attendance and performance, prevents sustainable farming practices such as composting and animal rearing. Due to fewer rains and prolonged droughts, farmers cultivate only crops that mature in less than three months leading to the extinction of Indigenous food crops (i.e., yam, millets, sorghum, African rice, Cajanos canja, cocoyam, taro, mushrooms, Indigenous leafy vegetables) affecting households’ food and nutritional security. Strategies farmers use to mitigate changes in the environment include the adoption of new varieties of crops which mature in three months and the diversion from yam as a cash crop to pepper. Also, smallholders plant crops at different times on the same or different field with the hope that one will coincide with the actual rainfall season, ploughing failed crops back into the soil, engaging in farm diversification by rearing livestock to serve as a buffer in an event of crop failure and use organic manure to improve the fertility of the soil.