The climate crisis is among the most impactful and quickly accelerating crises we are facing on the planet today. Continuous over-exploitation of natural resources, poor waste management and over consumption has caused global warming and contaminated landscapes. Despite the magnitude of the potential consequences that rising temperatures would have for all life on earth, especially for already vulnerable inhabitants, there is a general lack of urgency when it comes to restructuring society in order to overcome this crisis and ensure a sustainable future. Against all warnings about the devastating impact of carbon dioxide emissions, continuous investments are being made into energy sources that are fossil fuel based. 

In order to understand this contradiction, namely the simultaneity of a growing amount of data highlighting concerns about changing climate and the continuous investment in fossil fuels, it is worth taking a step back and having a look at the scale of our embeddedness in these resources, not only in our infrastructures but consequently in our private daily routines and cultural practices. With the emancipatory processes of the enlightenment in the West, at its height in the 17th and 18th century, the Human established himself as a ‘rational’ being, believing in growth through progress and knowledge (1). Simultaneously, he separated himself from belonging to Nature, as this Nature was established as an antithesis, the Other, and an important identity building tool, to the Human. In this anthropocentric model, nature became an object of curiosity, and examination, tamed and domesticated with the rise of the natural sciences and could as such become a backdrop for a new self-identity in Western modernity (Mills 2005) (2). 

The world as we know it has been built on the over-exploitation of natural resources such as fossil fuels and cannot be imagined without them. However, this fossil-fuel driven reality is often hidden in plain sight, as oil remains largely invisible in our daily lives. The discourse of the anthropogenic climate crisis is difficult to engage with for similar reasons, as to be alive is now to perpetuate damage to the planet with the simplest gestures of our everyday lives. Yet, their implications, their potential impact on the natural environments crucial for human and non-human life on earth cannot be felt immediately and are largely missing from our shared social awareness. This might also be due to the lack of tangibility, as the available models to talk about the climate crisis, infographics, photographs and diagrams, often feel far removed. Immediate effects like wildfires and floods might be experienced as states of emergency but operate in a different time frame and scale than a planetary crisis. ‘Climate change’ remains largely abstract and unintelligible (Emmelhainz 2015). And at the same time, it is hauntingly normal and inescapable, as we might find ourselves in this involuntary double-position of at once being perpetrators, (in the West) enjoying the comforts and wealth which comes with fossil fuel infrastructures, and yet also exploited subject in a capitalist system that involves “the resourcing of everything on earth, most certainly including people, and everything that lives and crawls and dies and everything that is in the rocks and under the rocks” (Haraway 259) (3). 

The alienation from natural environments, the nebulous structures of global flows of capital, the missing discursive and emotional tools to understand and confront the scale of the impending climate crisis and the lack of agency in the individual to make the changes that would be necessary to intervene in seemingly inevitable mass destruction lead to an impasse: the chilling knowledge that something is going terribly wrong without the means to escape the destructive system we are deeply situated within (Fisher 2010) (4).

(1) I use the pronoun he/him in this context to empathize the imbalance in place in these processes. This concept of the Human was the white, Western Male with systematic exploitative structures in place to refuse the same rights to the non-Male, non-White other.

(2) In Great Britain it was a combination of the abuse of slave labor in the global south, the invention of the steam engine and importantly coal mining that enabled ‘scientific progress’ and ‘emancipation’.

(3) Donna Haraway aligns herself with a growing group of scholars who feels it is more appropriate to call the ‘Anthropocene’ the ‘Capitalocene’ as it is not the act of a species (especially since the agency in active destruction is distributed disproportionately over different social classes and monetary resources) but of the mechanisms of capitalism (259). See also Jason W. Moore, 2016. 

(4) There seem to exist two parallel storylines about nature within mechanisms of capitalism: the natural environment as a plain for expanding capital, but also a fetizisation of a fantasy of an ‘untouched’ nature or wilderness which can be turned into commodities. Both are seen as “not only infinitely consumable, but infinitely replaceable” (Mortimer-Sandilands 337)

Works cited:

Emmelhainz, Irmgard. “Images do not show: The desire to see in the Anthropocene”. Art in the Anthropocene. Edited by Heather Davis and Entienne Turpin, Open Humanities Press, 2015, pp. 131.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2010.

Haraway, Donna, and Martha Kenney. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhocene .” Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, edited by Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Open Humanities Press, 2015, pp. 255–271

Mills, Sara. Gender and Colonial Space. Manchester University Press, 2005.

Moore, Jason W. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM, 2016.

Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona. “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies.” Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Bruce Erickson and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Indiana University Press, 2010, pp. 331–358. 

It’s hard to think about the climate