Alder Keleman Saxena sees how climate impacts & neoliberalism exacerbate each other

Alder Keleman Saxena is an environmental anthropologist whose research looks at the links between agricultural biodiversity and food culture, especially in relation to nutritional health in the Bolivian Andes. Her collaboration with Anna Tsing, Feifei Zhou and Jennifer Deger for the online Feral Atlas project is an absolute gift to anyone concerned with ecology, but specifically from the perspective of reckoning with the impact of human activity on the planet. The book that came out of that digital adventure is called Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature, a riveting book that sets us up with a variety of different ways of approaching the destruction of nature and its disastrous consequences. Alder’s chapter in the Field Guide is focuses on a patch that is very familiar to her: Flagstaff, Arizona, and the erratic ways that market capitalism is changing the demographic make-up of Flagstaff at a moment of increasing climate peril. This conversation about climate migration into Flagstaff takes us into the topic of housing, capitalism and climate impacts, the problem of how to communicate and contextualize climate disasters, and the question of how something like a field guide can encourage us to actually dwell with the idea that human beings are both a “geological force” and a “world-ripping” one.