Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria whose research and solidarity work focuses on community development and environmental justice. When we last spoke on the pod, we looked at her writing broadly, but this time around we’re marking the release of her fantastic new book Hot Mess: Mothering Through a Code Red Climate Emergency, from Fernwood Publishing. Hot Mess is a remarkable book, giving readers a nuanced effort to navigate a temporality of disaster, whether the slow disaster of air pollution or the searing trauma of wildfire, while working to manifest the kinds of caring relations that could safeguard the future. It’s not an impersonal text, in the sense that it’s not afraid to let in the emotional avalanche that the lived experience of crisis implies. What happens in and after the moment an emergency is declared? How is the decision made and an emergency response sustained? Sarah’s book isn’t concerned with these questions in the abstract, it offers a detailed account of exactly how and why emergencies are declared, and with what effects. The main crisis, and it is really many crises, that Wiebe takes on in Hot Mess is, of course, the all-encompassing climate crisis. Focusing on the feeling of raising a child in the content of an approaching climate breakdown, Hot Mess lets the reader try to come to terms with the reality that “climate change,” Wiebe tells us, “affects all stages of gestation for mothers.” We talk about her fieldwork for the book, her defiance of certain norms of academic comportment (especially during her difficult pregnancy), and the question of which medium could potentially function the most effectively for communicating the uncanny impressions left by climate impacts.

Ava Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician based in Toronto. She’s made multiple appearances at Just For Laughs and The Halifax Comedy Festival, and recorded stand-up sets for CBC Gem, Crave TV, and CTV. She has a weekly podcast of her own called PodGis, which is a great place to get a taste of her high energy, clever comedy. Val released her debut special, So Brave, earlier in the year. The special coincided with what Val called her 3-year “hormoniversary,” or the third year she’d been taking hormones as part of an ongoing “mid-life crisis,” in her words: that “crisis” is, of course, the joyful but uncertain journey of trying to align one’s core gender identity with one’s outward gender presentation. In this conversation, we talk about how the trans community, and more specifically trans comedians, can equip themselves to contest and defy the hateful, ignorant transphobia that is surging alongside the rise of right populism. We also talk about why the theme of bravery has some connotations that aren’t particularly flattering, and the level of bravery required to stand on a stage and demand the attention of people who are there to laugh, but who also arrive, presumably, with some openness to the kind of comedic storytelling that challenges the audience as much as it amuses them. Val and I discuss what it means, in that moment of performance, to balance entertaining a crowd with being true to your sense of self and aware of your own vulnerability. I really respect Val’s radical honesty, which I told her the first time we spoke for the podcast. Now, with the special out, we were able to dig into the way she writes and structures the material, the relationship she has with the audience, and with comedy as a profession. I hope the conversation, like Val’s special, offers an access point for people that may not know about how awesome and original contemporary comedy in Canada can be, and especially for people that don’t yet have a sense of the ethics and politics of comedy that is deeply queer.

Andreas Malm works in The Department of Human Geography at Lund University. He’s a scholar of human ecology and environmental history and has written several books, including The Progress of this Storm, Fossil Capital, How to Blow Up A Pipeline and White Skin, Black Fuel. Wim Carton works in the same department as a human geographer. The main focus of his research is the relationship between society and nature and how society-nature relations are informed and changed by ecological crisis. Right now he’s writing about culture, political economy and climate action, with a special emphasis on the promises of carbon removal. In this conversation we talk about their new book Overshoot (https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/products/3131-overshoot), the first of two books about the state of the climate crisis and the question of whether cutting emissions from fossil fuels is a purely technical or primarily political challenge. The second book will be called The Long Heat, which is a title that gives a name to the era that we are now entering, where powerful state and corporate interests continue to block even meagre climate action, making loss, damage, suffering and, basically, mass sacrifice seem inevitable, even somehow normal. Now, after the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US president, it’s clear that “the days of thinking that the US will ever be a reliable partner on addressing global warming are over,' in the words of New York Times reporter Coral Davenport. It’s hard to maintain hope in this moment, and that question of hope is something that comes up a surprising amount in Overshoot. Malm and Carton are suspicious of the palliative rhetoric of hope in the climate movement and how it tends to inoculate more active feelings of anger, frustration or grief. That said, they are a lot more suspicious of the rhetoric of hopelessness presented by those who are resigned to 1.5, 2, or 3 degrees of global heating. Overshoot is based on the notion that, since there is no reasonable hope of cutting emissions in time, we have to plan, now, to hurtle past our climate targets and pray that technology, adaptation and a little bit of luck will let us, after we’ve blown our carbon budget, bring things back within the realm of safety. The deferral of the burden is clear, but Carton and Malm break it down in a way that explains more fully how overshoot allows fossil capital to endlessly defer stranding its assets, to completely avoid any real disruption. This means that, as Wim puts it, resource radicals and ecosocialists who see a massive transformation as the only way forward have to bet, now, on the possibility of “rupture” as a response to business as usual. As this episode drops, representatives at COP29 will be debating whether or not to pick up their dismal efforts where they left off at COP28, when fossil fuels were finally identified as the root cause of the climate crisis after decades of dicking around. This absurd situation is captured nicely by Wim: “nothing really happens and we're constantly adding more and more carbon to the atmosphere.” which means that, by definition, “we're actually… going to exceed these targets.” Whether we’re ready for it or not blowing past the targets will come with extremely severe risks. Malm says the “only way to avoid the [situation] spinning completely out of control is to go after the drivers of these disasters, and that is the constant, ongoing investment and reinvestment in fossil fuels that is happening everywhere.”

Jennifer Wickham is a filmmaker and a member of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en people. In 2012, she moved home to defend her clan’s territory against multiple pipeline projects, and especially the aggression of Coastal GasLink. Her work on the documentary film Yintah is the main focus of our conversation. Yintah is about the Wet’suwet’en fight for sovereignty, and like some other documentaries that depict that fight, there is, in the film, a powerful dream of freedom for Indigenous people and an end to the war against nature. Yintah is now on Netflix (https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/8192...) after striking a deal with the streamer that will see it reach a broader audience. I was thinking about what it means to distribute a film like Yintah, which challenges the legitimacy of the Canadian state and Canadian law, on a platform like Netflix. The goal is strategic, of course: leverage the sites of power that are currently available. But the strategy is maybe more self-reflexive than it seems: in this interview, Jennifer talks about her conviction that people who identify as allies with the Indigenous nations that are resisting neocolonialism aren’t always conscious of what that declaration of solidarity means. From Wickham’s perspective, a more powerful and lasting movement of settler allyship would involve a more authentic commitment to collective survival and a sense of the sacrifices that entails. This film is beyond sobering. It exposes the continuum of tyranny imposed by the RCMP on Indigenous peoples. It demonstrates how corporate greed and the collusion of the state are creating a kind of asymmetrical war over the land itself, and energy, at a time when we understand better than ever that the only way to address the climate emergency is to leave oil and gas in the ground. Don’t develop it. Stop killing the Earth and the people who are most connected to it. I do have to acknowledge my own complicity as a white settler in Canada, and how even wanting to be correct on these issues, the desire to express solidarity in the right or best way, can work against decolonization because it gives us a sense that, at the discursive level anyway, we get it. Actions speak louder than words, and the direct action represented in Yintah is a source of inspiration for anyone that feels the battle against fossil capital is sisyphean.

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.

Robert Neubauer studies the media strategies of Canadian environmental and pro-resource extraction social movements, with a focus on populist discourse and public mobilization around proposed energy infrastructure. He is currently a Post-doctoral Researcher and Limited Term Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Victoria, where he teaches on contemporary media studies and climate politics. In this episode, Robert and I chat about how an effective communication strategy for rallying the public in support of climate action really needs to validate the public’s concerns about things like affordability and health care, while also emphasizing the urgency of the climate crisis. The way we do that, he says, is to create an effective political “container.” I get the sense that the phrase “a big tent” applies here. I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that expanding the tent, when it comes to transformative changes to infrastructure and to our lifestyles, implies the need to communicate the everyday benefits of climate action, while also being realistic with audiences about the severity of the risks we face. If we fall short in our efforts to convince folks that a radical reset is required – so, if we can’t figure out a way to undermine the cultural importance of the automobile, for example – then we’re in even more serious trouble than the science tells us we are. That’s because a creeping fatalism is forcing a lot of people to court the idea that it’s too late. Neubauer says that nihilism is potentially more dangerous than far right populism. Robert unpacks the idea of petro-populism here, which is still a concept that I struggle with a bit. I find Neubauer’s way of bringing this idea into conversation with the notion of “cultural capital” really helpful. Robert uses this famous idea from Pierre Bourdieu’s work to talk about how petro-populism expresses itself and how it has secured such a prominent place culturally and politically. Neubauer gives us a way of critiquing the propaganda of petro-populists like Ezra Levant, whose ability to manipulate a sense of pride and feelings of national belonging have proven to be remarkably effective. In response to the pull of nostalgia and easy answers, the Left can’t focus on its standard techniques of shaming and allyship. Robert feels like these are now simplistic strategies that go nowhere. Resisting the stunting effects of facile forms of solidarity or public shaming is all about accepting real responsibility for the work of decolonization. The constraints of a carbon-intensive society make it hard to imagine any alternative to the way things are, but things are changing nonetheless. As companies with skin in the carbon game realize they need to aggressively brand fossil fuels as an integral part of our lives to maintain their normalized status, the climate movement is positioning itself to counter with a totally different relationship to energy.

Alice Mah is Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow. Prior to this, she was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry.” Her work focuses on toxic pollution and environmental justice. She writes about social and ecological transformations and is always trying to develop anti-colonial ecological futures. Cara Daggett is an associate professor of political science in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research explores the politics of energy and the environment. One of the things she brings to this conversation is her shrewd sense of the overlap between human well-being, science, technology, and the more-than-human world. Cara is known for bringing feminist approaches to power to bear on understanding the ways that global heating emerged, and how it can be combated. Her book The Birth of Energy (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-birth-of-energy) has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the acceleration of everything and an ideal of productivity were normalized: the underlying logics that inform today’s uses of energy. In this conversation, Cara and I ask Alice about her recent book, Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (https://www.dukeupress.edu/petrochemical-planet), which is an incomparable study of the petrochemicals industry at a time of planetary collapse. One of the toughest-to-crack aspects of this ultra-toxic industry is the fact that it is basically impossible to simply replace petrochemicals in the global economy. There is basically no way to produce them without fossil fuels and virtually no method of decarbonizing the shadowy production practices involved. And the petrochemicals industry is the #1 industrial consumer of fossil fuels globally. Whether it overcomes that feeling of being overwhelmed or not, Alice and Cara think that the way forward is what they call “multi-scalar” and “multi-temporal” action. If we’re going to save some portion of the Earth we’ve ravaged, it will mean being able to think and feel and act outside of the very short-term timeframes we’re accustomed to in a system that incentivizes and rewards corporate plunder. Can we imagine forms of “multi-temporal resistance” and start “building things” on different timescales? For the Earth to heal from extractivism, we’ll have to. This will require a much deeper sense of duration and what Alice describes as an “extension of empathy” across eons.

Allie Rougeot is a climate justice activist and program manager at Environmental Defence Canada where she advocates for a just energy transition. As a speaker and facilitator, Allie talks to people about the escalating climate crisis and the solutions we can use to fight the emergency. In this conversation, we discuss the path she took to doing this work. Allie says it really started with working in support of refugees and in defense of human rights. The way this influences her approach to climate action is fascinating. It has given her unique insights on the challenge of crafting popular climate policies, ensuring that they’re equitable and fair, and a powerful sense that, because “climate change will create a threat to everything that makes our lives possible,” we are called to resuscitate our struggling democracies in the interest of forcing the system to actually support social life. I resonated most with her feelings of anger as she searches for climate justice. The way Allie puts it is that she is “driven by anger, more even than hope,” and this is because of the “knowing” destruction and suffering being perpetuated by the fossil fuel industry. In her words: “mass suffering was [and is] enabled by… a handful of people that will not bear the consequences.” There’s an emphasis throughout this conversation on how we can incorporate knowledge of the way the project of colonization sought to extract resources and annex Indigenous land. We see the continuation of this plunder today with the environmental obscenity of the Alberta tar sands and the tailings ponds, which represent the largest impoundment of toxic waste on the planet. This sprawling sea of poison is unequivocally an act of environmental racism. Rather than allowing these realities to overwhelm us, though, Allie says that we need to take our feelings of anger and urgency and use them as a turning point. Unfettered energy consumption is creating planet-wrecking carbon bombs and adverse health effects. This needs to be linked, now, with a rejection of extractivism as a worldview.

Dr. Ingrid Waldron should not need an introduction. The leading voice on environmental racism in Canada and author of There’s Something in the Water, Waldron has built a reputation for being unusually skilled at working with and within community and at reading the social landscape for fluctuations in the way that power works. She is the HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program at McMaster University and both the founder and director of The ENRICH Project, which has been a crucial source of organizational strength, culminating now in a series of funding announcements and some serious policy changes as Environmental Justice Bill C-226 is debated in Canada’s parliament. Ingrid’s commitment to public engagement and to publicizing the fact of environmental racism has made a huge impact in Nova Scotia, but it’s also been an inspiration to people globally, in part because of the success of a 2019 Netflix adaptation of There’s Something in the Water. Waldron’s radical definition of environmental racism is, as far as I’m concerned, the most precise one: she describes it in terms of the “white supremacist use of space” and explains how the “white supremacist use of space manifests in the disproportionate placement of polluting industries in Indigenous and Black communities.” From that powerful definition, Ingrid develops an argument that leaves a mark by detailing how the fact of environmental racism is rooted in “boundary-making practices that create social hierarchies” and why environmental racism is related to “other structurally induced racial and gendered forms of state violence.” This all has a history, and that history matters because it manifests itself as a combination of ecological destruction and social violence. We talk about how “racial capitalism” influences, and in some cases even determines, the politics of places like Nova Scotia and Flint, Michigan, which have seen intergenerational struggles over how polluting industries get sighted. We also discuss Indigenous sovereignty and the wisdom of Indigenous land and water protectors for thinking more expansively about health, wellness and treatment of the body’s ills. While the language of holistic medicine has been wholly co-opted, Waldron looks to reclaim and recover the concept, reminding us that “This includes all of the medicines the land provides, as well as social relationships with family members and the wider community.”

Catherine Abreu is a world-renowned climate campaigner whose work focuses on creating coalitions to take real action on climate change. She is the founder and executive director of Destination Zero, which—to quote their website—”partners with networks and other non-profits seeking to expand their work on climate justice, with a particular focus on accelerating the global transition away from fossil fuel dependence.” Catherine was appointed as one of the advisors to Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body in early 2021. She also serves on the strategic advisory committee for the Global Gas and Oil Network and the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Destination Zero has been foundational to the creation of the important Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, as well. In this conversation we talk about Abreu’s experience of COP28, the health of our democracies and whether they’re up to the task of accomplishing the massive and mandatory shift to clean energy. We look at the culpability of Canada in the climate crisis and the level of responsibility that culpability therefore requires as we move into a future that is likely to be environmentally very unpredictable and dangerous. How can the climate movement gain more traction? How have we kept fighting in spite of so many setbacks and blockades produced by private industry and governments? Part of it, I think, is a sense that the struggle is just and it is urgent. As some of us wait on incremental change to repair -relations to the Earth, others--like Catherine--keep pushing for an ecologically rational disruption of the system that could create a series of chain reactions and ultimately the kind of lasting change we’ve been told is absolutely necessary to protect the world from anthropogenic climate change.