At the time of writing this,
The climate clock looks forebodingly out on Union Square, New York City with what feels like equal parts protection, disappointment, and alarm. Created by artists and authors Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd in 2020, the Metronome Climate Clock seeks to drive urgency surrounding the climate crisis, with similar clocks popping up from London to Nairobi, as well as on the desks of activists like Greta Thunberg. The same numbers count down in synchrony on the face of each timepiece around the world. Many look up briefly at how much time we have left before it is too late, before the damage we have done to our planet is completely irreversible, and then avert their gaze once again. Cognitive dissonance can play a role in the development of moral injury for those living in bigger, industrialized cities, with the urgency of the climate crisis often felt without the lived effects of a warmer planet.
Michel Foucault asserted in Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (1984) that “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time.” Perhaps this still holds true today. If we can re-negotiate what we talk about when we talk about climate change—the space it inhabits rather than the time—does the big question then become more answerable? Can we invent or imagine ourselves out of becoming a burning planet, a world ablaze where we lack the tools to deal with what’s left? Even innovative solutions championed by organizations or strict environmental policies pale in comparison to the fossil fuel economy which brings in $3 billion a day, the likes of which often leave it up to us to create the tools. Yet, sometimes we falter, particularly because the “us” in question often refers to ordinary individuals tasked with saving the planet by redesigning the minutiae of our daily lives to reduce our resource expenditure. This again lets oil giants and other exploitative bodies largely off the hook, especially when they exercise political and cultural control through flat, short-sighted environmental campaigns that amount to little actual change. Though individual action can be positive, the possibility of real change necessitates the assistance of institutional actors to reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions produced by big oil, gas, and coal.
Industries are not the only perpetrators of this dilemma of responsibility. When political and media institutions discuss climate change, conversations predominantly err on how it threatens to completely upend and transform everything that is. The loss of what was once considered normal. Yet, when we talk about what is and what was, we are also inherently talking about what we view as “ours.”
Yes, “our” shared planet creates a communal call to action and sense of responsibility, but also “our” borders, “our” cities, “our” resources differ depending on who is speaking. Who exerts ownership over these things matters. When politicians address (or deny) the climate crisis, they employ the first person plural to ignite a sense of collectivism, when in reality many are seeking to protect the interests of a select few such as the institutional investors of the fossil fuel and industrial agricultural industries that simultaneously bankroll border militarization, distorting the perception of what belongs to who. This possessive element of climate discourse can be attributed to the risk-based, alarmist framing of climate change which diminishes international action and coalition in favor of colonial, hierarchical positions of power and in response, morality.
This sense of ownership creates two dominant modes of discourse, the maximalist and the technocratic, that surround much of the political narratives revolving around climate change, both essentially asking “what do we do with the space we have left?”
The first, the maximalist debate, deals with the specter of climate displacement. Numbers upwards of 200 million have been projected to become “climate refugees” due to our ongoing war with nature. This number was first quoted in 1995 by Norman Myers in Environmental Exodus which has gone on to become a defining paper in environmental literature. Yet, as scholars and thinkers have pointed out in the years since, this prediction lacks nuance and consistent methodology, leading to a securitization framing of climate change that concerns itself greatly with controlling the mobility of those most vulnerable to climate change. The instigators respond by asserting ownership and control of their borders.
The technocratic climate discourse is instead primarily concerned with technological advancement in large cities and towns to reimagine societies as low-carbon or carbon-neutral. A further dialogue has developed surrounding the resilience and adaptability of localities in borderlands and climate-affected areas and how these communities will adjust to the changing world. Terms like sustainable and green along with the prefix eco have permanently entered the lexicon as signifiers of salvation.
Foucault was interested in what comes into being at the crux of natural and unnatural—what was violently forced somewhere and what flourished in the very same place. It is in these spaces that emplacement is born.
Here, the present and the future converge in a reality that encompasses other realities—yet, not all spaces are heterotopic. Foucault identifies heterotopias by their malleability, conjunctive nature, and divergence from traditional temporal structures. They additionally recruit a system of opening and closing—borders, so to speak–that distinguish them from other surrounding spaces. In respect to climate discourses, heterotopias function as spaces of illusion to reveal the illusory nature of all other spaces or to compensate for the misgivings of other spaces. Importantly, the existence of a “topia” of any sort denotes communal presence and participation, as imagined and real societies necessitate mutual cooperation.
The first heterotypic embodiment refers to what ethnographer Jason Cons coins as “heterodystopias.” Stemming from his work in the India-Bangladesh borderlands, Cons notes a rise in the adaptive, resilience framing of those areas that are most susceptible to the casualties of climate change, such as loss of land and livelihood.
Development efforts are shifted to create an anticipatory, dystopian enactment of space that contains and forcibly emplaces those within the region, usually as a response to the facts and figures that discredit borders and ownership of place. Not only do emplacements of containment tend to follow the same lines of colonial legacies and extractive capitalism, but they serve to subvert and distort the utopian ideal of climate-friendly and climate-resilient communities through means of restriction. They also participate in shifting responsibility of navigating the devastating effects of a warmer planet from those who contribute the most, institutions and governing bodies, to those who contribute marginally but face the greatest impact. Vulnerability becomes extracted and commodified, itself an act of violence against those already wronged by industries and systems. For the climate-affected in Bangladesh, the strength and persistence narrative of adaptability adds insult to injury when considering the active local resistance against the Global Coal Management-proposed Phulbari open-pit coal mine project, successfully preventing the degradation of agricultural land and displacement of thousands. This resistance is contested by exploitative companies while resilience narratives like those explored in the coffee table book A Tale from Climate Ground Zero, which documents the effects of climate change and Bangladesh’s responsive innovations are promoted. We can see industry titans evoke heterodystopic tendencies in other places as well, such as in those marketing initiatives that emplace the individual in cyclical patterns of guilt and virtue depending on the size of their carbon footprint.
The second embodiment reveals itself through utopian climate-centric initiatives, often in carbon-emitting, capitalist urban cities. The City of London’s low carbon heat network or Solarcity Berlin are examples of how heterotopias themselves can open up into multiplicities. These climate projects actively challenge and subvert the city’s current state of being and offer the possibility of another future through this kind of emplacement. They serve as reference points and pathways that threaten to upset the current social order.
Yet, they exist and reify themselves in the face of the very thing they seek to change.
So, what can we do with the space we have left? Is the answer in creating a network of resilient or adaptive communities that relate to and challenge one another through replicating patterns of ownership, control, and access? A heterotopological inquiry into climate narratives and responses provides not answers to this question but new ways of imagining what this space looks like when what is to come collides with the present. It disrupts alarmist framing that causes the body politic to lean further into securitization of people and bodies as opposed to creatively imagining and caring for what is here. Not three years down the line, but now.
