Imre Szeman campaigns for a revolution in energy use and environmental communication

Imre Szeman is University Research Chair of Environmental Communication and Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. He’s also co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, a member of the International Panel on Behavior Change, and a fellow of the Canadian International Council. Over the years, his writing has made an enormous impact on my thinking, so I was thrilled to hear that Imre had decided to enter politics in this year’s snap election. He explains in this interview that he made the decision to embrace the challenge of campaigning because he was offered a rare opportunity: to serve as the Green Party of Canada's senior Climate Critic and write radical, innovative climate policy, to test the “translatability” of political and ecological theory in ways that he hadn’t had a chance to before. I ask him about his sense that any radical plan for energy transition has to have a Plan B, a game plan that doesn’t just dismantle, but rebuilds by attending to the needs of communities. This is different from what Szeman calls the “trope of hope,” a tendency that actually, he feels, ignores the “reality on the ground.” And part of that reality, crucially, is the fact of communication itself, and Imre notes that it hasn’t gotten any easier to “communicate about the environment” in a way that “encourages action.” And while he admits he doesn’t have any easy answers, he really stresses that we need to ask questions about “what generates effective communication.” Like, for example, is referencing the colossal, hard-to-cognize problem of the environment a better bet than trying to appeal to small local collectivities? What does technology, or what Szeman calls “technologically-inflected revolutionary politics,” communicate, if anything, about action and the need for “revolutionary social change”? Does technology in any way actually convey the way we move politically into a post-fossil-fuel future? And if it doesn’t, is that a fatal flaw of technologically-inflected revolutionary politics? We spend a lot of time considering the questions, but we also talk about the thought experiments in Kim Stanley Robinson’s sprawling opus of a climate fiction novel The Ministry for the Future. Imre expresses his admiration for how Robinson deals directly with the messiness of the political, rather than moving past the conflicts and contradictions toward a too-convenient conclusion that replaces our chaotic system with a better one. While the mess “can be dispiriting to look at,” Szeman insists that this is what he wants to understand. And he’s not alone: as he notes, there has never been a moment where the impacts of colonialism were “more visible.” The environment is, in a sense, being invoked as a “new political actor,” or an active agent in “revolutionary politics.” This fact of a rising consciousness of a “larger network” or “system” that exceeds capitalism, that totally transcends human desires, means that it has never been clearer that the world is inescapably interconnected.