Climate Control: From Emergency to Emergence

Emily S. Rueb, “‘Freedom Gas,’ the Next American Export,” New York Times, May 29, 2019 →.

See →.

Wen Stephenson, “Against Climate Barbarism: A Conversation with Naomi Klein,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 30, 2019 →; and Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (Simon & Schuster, 2019).

See Jonathan Watts, “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN,” The Guardian, October 8, 2018 →.

See the evidence for these statistics as backed up by leading scientists in the following: William E. Rees, “Yes, the Climate Crisis May Wipe out Six Billion People,” The Tyee, September 18, 2019 →; Robert Hunziker, “Earth 4C Hotter,” Counterpunch, August 23, 2019 →; Gaia Vince, “The heat is on over the climate crisis. Only radical measures will work,” The Guardian, May 18, 2019 →. Recent scientific research estimates conservatively that more than 250,000 deaths occur annually already owing to climate change, including exacerbated conditions of malaria, diarrhea, heat stress, and malnutrition, as reported here: Jen Christensen, “250,000 deaths a year from climate change is a ‘conservative estimate,’ research says,” CNN, January 16, 2019 →.

See →. Also see →.

Bill McKibben, “A World at War,” The New Republic, August 15, 2016 →.

Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October, vol. 51 (Winter 1989): 3–18.

See →.

Kyle P. Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (2018).

See Agence France-Presse, “Iceland holds funeral for first glacier lost to climate change,” The Guardian, August 18, 2019 →.

See Tess Riley, “Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says,” The Guardian, February 14, 2018 →; and the cartographic project of Influence Map, which details who owns the world’s major fossil fuel companies and which financial and media firms are defending their interests →.

XR USA’s Fourth Demand reads: “We demand a just transition that prioritizes the most vulnerable people and indigenous sovereignty; establishes reparations and remediation led by and for Black people, Indigenous people, people of color and poor communities for years of environmental injustice, establishes legal rights for ecosystems to thrive and regenerate in perpetuity, and repairs the effects of ongoing ecocide to prevent extinction of human and all species, in order to maintain a livable, just planet for all.” See →.

See Out of the Woods, “Extinction Rebellion: Not the Struggle we Need,” Libcom.org (blog), July 19 2019 →; and Leah Cowan, “Are Extinction Rebellion whitewashing climate justice?,” gal-dem, April 18, 2019 →.

See Cory Morningstar, “The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg—for Consent: The Political Economy of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” 2019 → (though Morningstar mistakenly collapses the radical message of Thunberg into the neoliberal discourse of NGOs surrounding her). Also see the critique of environmentalist NGOs in Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Allen Lane, 2014).

Massimiliano Tomba, Insurgent Universality. An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2019). Tomba explains that “insurgent universality” extends beyond the contemporary limits of single-issue identity politics, and “refers to the excess of equality and freedom over the juridical frame of universal human rights,” whereby the rebellious disrupt and reject an existing political and economic order. Here I’m suggesting that XR might yet hold the potential to extend further that radical political claim toward a more-than-human assembly.

As reported by the BBC, “US and Brazil agree to Amazon development,” September 14, 2019 →.

See Thea Riofrancos, “Plan, Mood, Battlefield – Reflections on the Green New Deal,” Viewpoint, May 16, 2019 →.

In this regard, my own positioning is not only as an academic, but also as a member of DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and its Ecosocialist Working Group in Santa Cruz. See →.

Wretched of the Earth, “An Open Letter to Extinction Rebellion,” Common Dreams, May 4, 2019 →. Some articulations of XR are smarter than the UK-based officially stated agenda. See for instance the article about XR as more than a climate protest, connecting to hundreds of years of European colonialism, by XR member Stuart Basden, “Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the Climate,” Medium, January 10, 2019 →.

On such dangers, see Nicholas Beuret, “A Green New Deal Between Whom and For What?,” Viewpoint, October 24, 2019 →.

See Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Semiotext(e), 2009).

On this convergence, see Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2016); Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “Michael Brown,” boundary 2 42, no. 4 (November 2015); and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016). Also see T. J. Demos, “Ecology-as-Intrasectionality,” Panorama (Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art), Spring 2019 →.

“In both its physical design and its application throughout history, tear gas is for the control of economically, politically, and socially vulnerable populations, enforced by mentalities and behaviors of constantly reworked white supremacy … Riot control is, and has always been, the business of protecting the wealth of a tiny minority.” See Anna Feigenbaum, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today (Verso, 2017).

Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017), 149.

See Richard Lightbown, “The Devastating Consequences of Israeli Weapons Testing,” Global Research, March 13, 2011 →; and the report by Forensic Architecture on “The Use of White Phosphorus in Urban Environments,” December 11, 2012 →.

The mission statement of Extinction Rebellion Israel includes the following: “We and our children have to deal with unimaginable terror as a result of floods, fires, extreme weather, loss of crops and the inevitable collapse of society as a whole. We didn’t prepare ourselves to deal with the dangers already here. The time for denial has passed. We know the truth about climate change. Time to act” →.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Game Over,” e-flux journal, no. 100 (May 2019) →.

Ana Teixeira Pinto, “Artwashing—On NRx and the Alt Right,” Texte zur Kunst, July 4, 2017.

See Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: A Short History of Humanitarian Violence (Verso, 2017).

For more on this, including sensitive discussion of how decolonization first and foremost entails the return of land and sovereignty to indigenous peoples, but, and to that end, also entails the emancipation of imagination, aesthetics, and culture from capital, see MTL Collective, “From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation? A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of Contemporary Art,” October 165 (Summer 2018), 206.

For its list of collaborators, see Decolonize This Place, “The Crisis of the Whitney,” May 19, 2019 →.

Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket Books, 2015); and DTP: “Among the lessons of the Kanders crisis has been the limitations of liberal versions of ‘identity politics.’ Why would we imagine that anyone’s racial or ethnic background necessarily aligns that person with justice, or assume any unity between those who share a skin color? As the saying goes, ‘All my skin folk ain’t kinfolk’ … Our work in mobilizing against Kanders and beyond has focused not on demographic diversity but on solidarity between struggles. Solidarity is not a box to be checked—it is difficult and painstaking work that requires us to ask: what debts do we owe to each other? What are we willing to sacrifice? How do we become political accomplices?” Decolonize This Place, “After Kanders, Decolonization Is the Way Forward,” Hyperallergic, July 30, 2019 →.

Feigenbaum, Tear Gas, 1–14.

Zachary Small, “Warren Kanders Resigns From Whitney Museum Board After Months of Controversy and Protest,” Hyperallergic, July 25, 2019 →; and Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett, “The Tear Gas Biennial,” Artforum, July 17, 2019 →.

See Hrag Vartanian, Zachary Small, and Jasmine Weber, “Whitney Museum Staffers Demand Answers After Vice Chair’s Relationship to Tear Gas Manufacturer Is Revealed,” Hyperallergic, November 30, 2018 →.

Among my references are: Wendy Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism,” Eurozine, August 30, 2017 →; Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); and Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2005).

MTL Collective, “From Institutional Critique to Institutional Liberation?,” 194; and DTP, “The Crisis of the Whitney is Just the Beginning,” February 25, 2019 →.

See Nick Estes, “A Red Deal,” Jacobin, August 6, 2019 →; and Robert Pollin, “De-Growth vs a Green New Deal,” New Left Review, August 1, 2018 →.

Wretched of the Earth, “Open Letter to Extinction Rebellion.”

See Subhankar Banerjee, “Long Environmentalism: After the Listening Session,” in Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos, eds. Salma Monani and Joni Adamson (Routledge, 2017), 62–81.

For one such vision, see Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (Verso, 2019).