Fall Series 2021
Climate Utopias for the Anthropocene: Politics, technoscience, and the imaginary work of green societal transitions
After our rich ‘Winter Series on Dystopian Worlds’, we are devoting our fall series to the theme of ‘Climate Utopias’. We invite themes related, but not limited, to:
Utopias and grassroots initiatives rooted in indigenous, spiritual & post-human/ more-than-human ecologies
“Nature-based” or “natural” climate solutions (often socially constructed as more beneficial, sustainable and democratic versus what is considered to be technological, ‘artificial’ or unnatural. This framing has political implications, see this review paper by Osaka et al. 2021)
Degrowth and decolonial solutions, Green New Deals and other socio-economic utopias/ imaginaries and narratives (e.g. degrowth.nl)
Technoscientific fixes, examples and critique (including geo-engineering, climate smart/ resilient agriculture, renewable energy and other forms of decarbonising the energy system etc.)
Net zero trajectories & decolonised approaches
Extra-terrestrial utopias and the ethics of space
Discourse analysis and reflections on the notion of climate utopias (or lack thereof)
Activist utopias and critique
Climate utopias in popular media and culture
Post-apocalyptic stories and ethnographic accounts of rebuilding societies in the aftermath of natural disasters
Histories of utopian thinking
Alternatives to capitalist modernities etc.
Background and rationale
Mars
While China’s Zhurong Mars Rover is exploring the plains of Utopia Planitia (“Nowhere Land Plain”, northern Mars) and the wealthiest men on the planet are testing their toys in the battle for the new space race, millions of people are facing starvation in Madagascar and other parts of Africa due to extreme drought (or flood) conditions. Elsewhere, record temperatures are prompting people to image alternative lifeworlds, and heavy rainfall, neglected climate predictions and ignored weather forecasts resulting in tragic flood fatalities have taken Europe by surprise. As philosophers of science and theologians have known for a long time, scientific and technological advances are rarely imbued with more wisdom, which is partly a result of and testimony to the artificial and unfortunate cultural separation of the sciences and the humanities.
Why we need to change the way we talk about space
This technological and moral inertia to address global inequality while accelerating climate change seems to be an apt metaphor for the state of our global political economy. The Cold War struggle that was symbolically played out in a technoscientific race to the moon has given way to a boasting game between ‘space barons’ (Christian Davenport 2018) and their high-tech empires to colonise the cosmos. Global space narratives are increasingly owned and defined by megalomanic entrepreneurs who justify excessive CO2 emissions to experience the so-called ‘overview effect’ (Lucianne Walkowicz). This feeling of awe that was once described by astronauts who saw the beauty and interdependence of planet Earth from afar – and later sparked a global environmental consciousness (through iconic photographs for example) – has now become its antithesis: the colonising urge to transcend planetary boundaries has superseded the desire to protect the Earth. The new space race is cast in the technoscientific language to rescue human civilization from its own destruction in case we need a planet B, thereby obscuring the fact that conquering space is moreabout the exploration and expansion of industrial utopias (and childhood dreams) on extra-terrestrial plains and playgrounds.
Utopia reconsidered
One would almost forget that traveling to space has been largely a part of history only in the human imagination, a utopia that belonged to us all (Marjolein van Heemstra). One would also almost forget that neoliberalism once began as a radical utopian imagination –first conspired by a group of elite thinkers who gathered in the mountain village of Mont Pelèrin in Switzerland, 1947 (the think tank of self-proclaimed neo-liberal thinkers called themselves the Mont Pelèrin Society,including philosopher Friedrich Hayek and economist Milton Friedman, see Rutger Bregman). They were all too aware that you should never let a good crisis go to waste: have your utopia ready. Now it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, as the famous adage goes (see also a contribution from an IPCC author in our Dystopian series, Fernández Carril). Even Europe’s Green New Deal appears to be predicated on more of the same ideal of growth, only to be decoupled from resource extraction: a greenwashed model of unlimited growth (for a critique of green growth, see e.g. Hickel and Kallis 2020, 2021). Has utopian thinking lost its transformative edge and become more of what Popper called ‘piecemeal engineering’? Has utopia become domesticated by the status quo? (Moyle et al. 2019).
The concept of Utopia continues to change throughout time. In its original sense it referred to a good and/or non-existent place (eu/outopos) and involves thinking, dreaming and imagining new worlds. As Anna Bugasjkahas put it:
“Utopianism is the expression of hope and optimism as to the future of the world, and allows to speculate and to “dream up” better communities, providing new points of view on the given reality, which stimulate action to change and improvement” (2021).
Different and better worlds (indeed also dystopian ones) begin by dreaming of radical and transformative alternatives that may appear impossible. In dystopian times, our last contributions focused on how climate change as crisis is framed and the political work that affords and forecloses certain scenarios. In this series, we wish to explore what is happening on the other side of the spectrum: how climate utopias and greener societal transitions are imagined and performed; what kind of technoscientific trajectories are proposed as desirable, feasible and equitable and what is foreclosed in such imaginaries and practices? Crucially, as green utopian solutions and interventions are often imagined during crisis and in faraway places (think of conservation of ‘wild nature’ in Africa, or greening far-away deserts as if they are devoid of people and politics (see Weather Makers, a Dutch firm wanting to regreen the Sinai peninsula); or, where to place all these necessary wind turbines and solar panels); whose utopias are being imagined, how can they be decolonial and what is the role of solidarity in such discourses?
We invite contributions in a variety of formats, including visual narratives, audio, ethnographic vignettes and blog versions of existing academic papers. Send your contributions to us by 30 September, 2021. Written essays should be between 400 – 1500 words. We also welcome resources as background reading for our archive on utopia.
If you’re looking for some inspiration to get started, have a look at our suggestions of utopia-related resources.