Pretty Heady Stuff

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on queer ecologies and decolonial theory and praxis. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017) and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), among several other texts. She is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge that reflects on the space between land and sea, as well as other creative writing projects. In this conversation she talks about solidarity. Solidarity in and among the Global South, against empire and extraction, and for a world to come. There’s a great deal of hope in this interview, but it’s the kind of hope that resonates with me because it says that, in Gómez-Barris’ words, “Knowledge production can also be solidarity” if it is “multivocal” and focused on exposing dispossession. Looking for this kind of solidarity, she finds something generative in the “third space of shadow terms between above and below.” For her, this is generative because it moves away from the “binarized language forms we typically use” and returns to things that have been largely submerged by oppressive forces. I think the focus on multiplicity and plurality is potentially helpful for those that are locked in different sorts of colonial spaces where it’s typically seen as sort of unrealistic or unimportant. Gomez-Barris says, instead, it’s actually this sort of experimentation that is going to liberate the globe. We devote time at the end of our conversation to the question of Gaza. Gómez-Barris makes clear that there is a proliferating resistance to that escalating settler colonial violence that demands to be reckoned with. People who are already aware of Gomez-Barris’ writing will know that she is really precise about the world-ending force of extractivism. What she says is that “the extractive zone” ultimately reduces “life to capitalist resource conversion” and trains us to “reduce life to systems.” That is not a thing that is natural, and it’s not a thing we need to accept.

Matt Wolf is a filmmaker from New York whose critically acclaimed documentary films have been shown across the globe. (https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-matt-wolf) Wild Combination does a deep dive into the life and music of Arthur Russell, Teenage is a study of early youth culture and the birth of the very idea of teenagers, Recorder is an invaluable portrait of the activist and archivist Marion Stokes, who secretly recorded broadcast television continuously,24 hours a day, for 30 years. Spaceship Earth is a film about Biosphere 2, the experiment from the early 90s where 8 people lived inside a fully contained biome cut off, or seemingly cut off, from the rest of the world. He also recently worked on an incredible film called The Stroll as a producer; that film explores the history of New York’s Meatpacking District from the perspective of the transgender sex workers who lived and worked there. Wolf has a way of effortlessly expanding the parameters of documentary. I say “effortlessly,” but if you listen to this conversation you can tell that there is a great deal of effort put into making sure that viewers of Matt’s films feel an emotional connection to what they’re watching, while also being presented with a set of subtle questions about art, the biosphere, the ways that media manufacture social reality, and many other subjects. More and more, though, he’s looking for ways to work creatively within the conventions of documentary filmmaking, rather than working to “explode” those defining characteristics. All of this comes through on the screen. There are a few threads in this conversation that are worth underlining. Wolf is deeply interested in exploring the lives of people who take enormous risks with what they are attempting to create, risks that might not pay off in the long run or that influence their capacity to relate to the rest of the world. The way he puts it is that his films are concerned with subjects that weren’t entirely able “to translate the full scope of what they were doing to others.” That makes their work difficult and rewarding, and deserving of “reappraisal.” For example, Wolf made his documentary Wild Combination, on the life and work and impact of the cult cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell, at age 25. This is particularly surprising when you actually sit down with the film; you’d assume that this is a director at the top of his game; but, in reality, Matt says that, at the time, he was studying this artist, Arthur Russell, as a way of actually learning how to be an artist himself. I really appreciated how open Matt was in this conversation about his attachment to the specific “texture of the past,” as he put it, and his desire to tell stories in a way that doesn’t intrude on the viewer’s interpretation of the material. He explains how Spaceship Earth, his brilliant study of the Biosphere 2 project, was described by some as being a somewhat uncritical film. That lack of critical scrutiny, though, is kind of what makes the film so captivating: Wolf sits back and engages with the folks in his films generously, or, in a sense, unassumingly. I think that generosity pays off in certain ways. It makes the films he creates into acts of reappraisal that encourage connection.

Sara Ahmed, a leading voice in feminist theory and author of influential works like 'The Feminist Killjoy Handbook,' dives into the radical potential of the feminist killjoy. She explores the complexities of language in activism, the intersection of personal narratives and broader societal issues, and the troubling rise of anti-trans legislation. Ahmed emphasizes the importance of solidarity among marginalized groups and challenges the simplistic views of cancel culture, advocating for deeper accountability in cultural conversations.

Kyla Tienhaara is an Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Studies and the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University. She’s the author of Green Keynesianism and the Global Financial Crisis and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook on the Green New Deal, which is a book that I find absolutely essential for thinking about the potential social benefits of decarbonizing the economy and rethinking growth in our time of climate breakdown. She’s also one of the few researchers looking closely at the function of Investor State Dispute Settlement as an international legal apparatus that largely protects investors from the pushback they might receive from states. There’s no way I could quickly summarize what this work deciphers, in terms of this obscure global legal structure, which not a lot of people I’ve spoken with have any knowledge about. They might understand in the abstract that there is a system of global capitalism that is protected by the codification of laws that largely protect profits and private investment over the safety or autonomy of communities, but this is the actual system that serves that. And Kyla is uniquely insightful about how it works and what it is set up to prevent. I wanted to underscore, at the top here, that we engage, in this conversation, with the concepts of utopianism and pragmatism in climate action. That’s no a disclaimer so much as an invitation to ask yourself where you sit in relation to this idea that abolishing fossil energy is utopian. Or to kind of request that you sit with the question of whether it is too much to ask that the economy be democratized or energy be regarded as a source of social wealth rather than a source of capital. It’s maybe worth thinking, too, about why it is the case that there is legally-binding international law that protects fossil fuel companies from reprisal, but no binding law to protect the planet from the forces that are exacerbating our mounting climate emergency. What history precedes this moment where it is primarily rich countries that benefit from existing laws and international treaties, while poor countries get poorer? And what mechanisms or modes of resistance exist so that we can funnel our collective outrage at these legally sanctioned systems of upholding inequality into something real?

Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written four books, including Geoengineering: the Gamble and Climate Shock. Before joining Columbia and serving as faculty director of the Climate Knowledge Initiative, Gernot taught at NYU and Harvard. In this conversation I kept coming back to this hope that climate action could be, in some ways, uncomplicated. If the primary goal is to stop greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible in order to deal with this as a genuine emergency, it should be simple. But, within the existing system of global capitalism that we have, though, how is that going to happen? Can it happen? I’ve been trying to think about this by having conversations with people like Gernot, people like Kyla Tienhaara, Seth Klein, Mark Paul and others to try to get to the bottom of it. It’s tough, but these interviews, which I’ll release in the coming weeks, have been helpful. We’re at a point where, according to economists like Robert Pollin, at least 1-2 per cent of global GDP will need to be spent pretty much immediately on investments in renewable infrastructure to radically reduce emissions. Global GDP is about $80 trillion. How does that amount of globally coordinated investment happen under capitalism? It’s a huge shift in the nature of the whole economy. One of the reasons I wanted to return to Wagner’s writing is that I’ve been helped a lot by his explanation of the social cost of carbon, and especially by the way he writes about considerations of equity and justice in determining the social cost of carbon. It radically increases the social costs, or damages created, by emissions if we factor in issues of equity. The number skyrockets, validating any and all investments in climate mitigation and adaptation. How could that sort of information become more central to decision-making and policy-making? We definitely get into the weeds here. I’m still processing the discussion we have about “green growth” vs. the “Green New Deal” vs. degrowth. I still can’t say where I land on the question of whether decarbonization needs to happen in a textbook degrowth way. It’s hard to balance expediency and strategy here, and yet, increasingly, the debate about economic transformation to fight climate change hinges on our receptivity to growth or degrowth. What I like is that there is room here for the debate. We need to rapidly phase-out fossil fuels. That much is certain. In fact, we need to fully ban fossil fuels. How that decision gets made and what form action takes—at what speed and with what consequences—is still an open question.

Casey Williams is a Lecturer in the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University. His research examines the social and cultural dimensions of climate change and energy transition, especially the problem of “climate impasse” and the concept and possibility of a “just transition.” His writing on climate, energy and labor has appeared in The New York Times, The LA Review of Books, Radical Philosophy, Jacobin, Dissent, and elsewhere. Rhys Williams is a Lecturer at University of Glasgow who works on the intersection between fantasy, narrative and energy. His work also looks to get a better grasp on the relationship between ecology and infrastructure. He’s a member of the Petrocultures Research Group and the After Oil Collective. He also organizes the Energy and Ecology Group in Glasgow. Right now a lot of his focus is on energy, infrastructure, food, and water. You can read some of that work in Open Library of Humanities and South Atlantic Quarterly.  I think one of the most important takeaways for me in this conversation was this idea that we need to leave more space for real deliberation in our politics, and that this actually means that we need to accept the fact of friction. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but what we call, in this conversation, “frictionful engagements” aren’t really the norm in political communication. What we tend to get is a situation where frictionlessness is tacitly preferred, and so, in Casey’s words, “Capital quietly takes the reins” and we’re left with mechanisms that are meant to do all the heavy lifting in political decision-making. Rhys and Casey see ways that these mechanisms, especially financial mechanisms in the climate debate, really function like a narrative technique – it’s the mechanism that has the agency, not us, and this is the narrative we’ve been largely sold: a kind of politics-without-politics. One of the other big things that I’d underline is Casey’s challenge to those that engage with the climate crisis and who are worried about communicating the risks: he says that there is actually a real political risk involved in treating specific disasters as “metonymic representatives of the climate crisis as a whole.” When we bundle a highly localized disaster into an accumulation of disasters that tell us a story about the agglomeration of impacts and the climate emergency as a whole, Casey says we risk effacing the specificity of the struggles occurring at the local level: struggles not just against the impacts of a transforming climate, but also struggles for social and economic autonomy against global capitalism. I hadn’t thought about it that way before and that sense of being responsible to the specificity of place is something I’ve definitely taken with me from this conversation. There’s a few other things I’d mention: we talk about the “degrowth imaginary” and questions of the scale at which infrastructure ceases to be life-giving. We talk a lot about technology as a thing that gets privileged in science fiction and in popular discourse as a “driver of historical change.” There’s quite a bit of discussion here about the social layers that get subsumed under technology as it gets fetishized in this way. Overall, too, there’s a concern here with how we have been slowly abstracted from nature as such. How we’ve sealed ourselves off from it by instrumentalizing all the life around us, or as much of it as we can control and colonize and commodify. So, in the face of the real need to address the crisis of a destabilized climate system, they talk about what we should include in the discussion that too quickly gets displaced.

Amanda Boetzkes is a professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics and art as these relate to ecology. I reached out to her because I’ve been trying to understand the problem of plastics for a long time. If you remember, I spoke to Heather Davis, Mark Simpson and Sarah King back in February about this intimidatingly large problem. I had been reading Amanda’s book Plastic Capitalism and couldn’t stop thinking about some of the challenges that it makes. We talk a lot about the ideas in that book, but also unpack some of the more recent writing she’s done. Incidentally, I’m excited about the project that she’s currently working on, which focuses on the different ways we can visualize different environments, and especially the environments of the circumpolar North. One of the most important observations Amanda makes in this conversation is that when art reveals something, it’s not necessarily “revealing something that’s hidden.” Often, what art does, she says, is drag us “deeper into the mud.” Instead of illuminating some obscured part of social reality or offering up epiphanies about society and our relationship to wild nature, art that engages with waste communicates that we are awash in waste but don’t know what to do with it; we have tons of plastic but not much plasticity; we’re bent on accumulating energy but don’t really value energy expenditure in any radical way. Most of it is mindless. If we don’t get to the bottom of why this is such a feature of the modern human condition, we aren’t likely to address the climate emergency. We’re more likely to just replace fossil fuels with some other energy input like solar and change nothing about our arrogant attitude towards the fuels we extract for energy. There is a lot in this conversation on the need to be more conscious and critical about energy consumption. After all, it is dangerous to be anything else. But what Boetzkes is asking is whether we are in denial, too, about the “irrevocable” damage we’ve already done to the biosphere. Art, ecology and ethics form a “big knot,” as she puts it, and what is implicated is nothing short of how we choose to live on the Earth. She leaves us with the idea that, while art “must be political,” science is undermined if it’s is too political. And yet, the examples she explores in her work question that assumption, or the opposition between art and science, in ways that help us rethink the distinctions that determine funding and influence our means of knowing the world before, during, and after oil.

Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa with a focus on community development and environmental sustainability. She is a Co-Founder of the Feminist Environmental Research Network and a prolific writer. Her books include Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada's Chemical Valley, Biopolitical Disaster, Creating Spaces of Engagement: Policy Justice and the Practical Craft of Deliberative Democracy, Life Against States of Emergency, and very soon the book Hot Mess: Becoming a Mother during a Code Red Climate Emergency, which is set to come out from Fernwood Press in the near future. I wanted to talk to Sarah about what she calls the “points of connection” between “emotive” or “narrative” forms of communication and the work of “policy transformation.” There’s a point in this conversation where she admits that she’s still searching for examples of this in her work, and is clearly thrilled when she can find it, but it’s difficult to locate because we expect any sort of policymaking or deliberative process to be this cold, calculating thing, a means through which we reach consensus by rationally looking at all the data. But what can we make out of moments where the data of human experience radically exceeds the sorts of colonial logics that make policy? Sarah has a lot of faith in the power of arts-based strategies of policy transformation and affirming life against states of emergency. Part of the point is to convert anxiety into anger, despair into dedication, and the typically transactive parts of treaty into something far more transformative or iterative. What I really appreciate about the way that Sarah thinks through difficult problems is that she’s a settler scholar who doesn’t think it is acceptable for communicators to reduce the lives of Indigenous peoples to crisis. She realizes that there is power and import involved in naming and declaring an emergency, but grasps how focusing exclusively on crisis misrepresents and misunderstands the autonomy and vitality of Indigenous communities. So, the point, in some ways, is to identify and critique all of the colonial constraints–the siloed bureaucracy, the stunting education, the rapacious greed–that limits the flourishing of such communities. She describes this conundrum in terms of the “paradox of emergency,” or the paradox of locating democracy and democratic values in the context of emergency. It’s hard, when a crisis hits, to think about politics, but crises are inherently political, and the forms of expression that are licit or legible at the inception and in the perpetuation of crisis matter because they get to determine our response.

Raja Swamy is a social anthropologist with an interest in the political economy and political ecology of natural disasters. In this conversation we unpack the ideas in his recent book Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs, and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami. This is a disaster that killed nearly 230,000 people. It’s trauamtic, but Raja takes us into that trauma in order to talk about what it meant in the wake of that disaster for states and multinational companies to see it as an opportunity to rebuild in a manner that prioritized profit and alignment with global financial regimes, rather than in a way that put the needs of already existing grassroot networks and forms of collective labour first. Swamy’s generous, generative answers to my questions about his work tell an extraordinary story of globalization and its effects in post-tsunami India. He explores how “gifts” in that context were, in many cases, really a sort of lure or bribe, designed to displace existing worlds through incentivizing the realization of a different, more exploitative one. What he calls the “glib neoliberal rhetoric of reconstruction” really disregarded, and continues to disregard—as we enter a period of intensifying climate impacts—the energy, self-sufficiency, insight and agency of the so-called “developing world” and those whose lives, livelihoods and lifeworlds stand to be most affected by climate change. What would it mean, Raja asks, to look people in these frontline positions as the best guides to the future we want? We’re talking about the use of disaster for the purpose of pushing through opportunistic development, the privatizing of land and the displacement of populations from the world they know. It feels inevitable, this orientation of development toward the dictates of the free market, but it isn’t. Raja poses the question of why it is assumed that, in the interest of gaining autonomy or economic well-being, people should be forced into a position of, really, underdevelopment and neglect under neoliberalism. It’s in this context that he says we should be thinking about how to change the way we talk about things like climate adaptation, this idea of building back better. As he pointedly says: “Better for whom?” As disasters become more frequent and the need to build and rebuild becomes more profound and more pressing, we should be asking what kind of world we want, and who we mean when we say “we.”

Brenna Walsh is the Energy Coordinator at the Ecology Action Center. She’s made a career out of bringing different communities together to strengthen and accelerate climate policy and action. Walsh is focused squarely on understanding what has worked and not worked in the past and on exploring new initiatives to build climate resistant communities. In this interview I aimed to get a deeper sense of the economic reasons behind the policy measure that’s usually referred to as a “carbon tax.” Brenna breaks down how that measure of carbon pricing is just one part of a whole array of emerging measures for addressing the climate crisis. We have Clean Fuel Regulations, a modest removal of some “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies at the federal level, among other policies and incentives. Brenna breaks it all down. I don’t want to spend too much time in this introduction giving an overview of the conversation actually, because the conversation itself is an overview of what we have in terms of tools for limiting carbon and some of the history of those tools. We start by talking about the conceptual and policy tool of the so-called “social cost of carbon,” and how that social cost is calculated in economic terms. The whole goal, though, is to figure out a means of building, really, a different system from the fossil fuel based one that we currently have. Walsh is interested in how to calculate the damages, but she’s more interested in bringing the diverse array of people that feel there is not enough being done into the conversation about crafting and supporting solutions. There are a few invaluable resources that Brenna cites that are included in these show notes. Overall, it’s a matter, though, of using these resources, and conversations like these, as a means of going further faster, of making a complex transition simpler, doable and more seamless for people at the grassroots level. RESOURCES: More Mobility, Less Mining: https://www.climateandcommunity.org/more-mobility-less-mining The State of Carbon Pricing in Canada: https://climateinstitute.ca/reports/the-state-of-carbon-pricing-in-canada/ Ecology Action Centre's Carbon Pricing FAQ: https://ecologyaction.ca/sites/default/files/2023-06/Carbon_tax_FAQ_2023.pdf