Environmentalism has a politics of policy and activism, but it’s also a contested space of emotion and imagination. These papers bring together different ideas around environmentalism and imagined alternatives to the harm and violence that is being enacted upon the world. This harm is conceived as a failure to appreciate the beauty and fragility of life systems, and..?

Charlotte Weatherill:

Vulnerability to climate change has been formalised in the governance institutions as a measurable phenomenon that can be used to rank and index the expected distribution of climate harms. However, this project has only reinforced the geographical imaginations of global risk, which are founded upon value of life and fantasies of invulnerability, considered from the centres of colonial power.

In this paper I discuss three fantasies of invulnerability that structure climate politics: the fantasy of modernity, the fantasy of mastery and the fantasy of continentalism. I argue that these fantasies of invulnerability structure climate politics, to the detriment of the climate action and solidarity that is needed for a politics of liberation, anti-colonialism and a liveable planet.

Sophie-Grace.Chappell

We all have epiphanies, whatever we may call them: wow-moments, experiences of wonder and awe and joy. Epiphanic experience is a central source of our knowledge of the beauty, goodness, and mystery of the world around us.

Today we face an environmental crisis around us, and an existential crisis within. The planet, our only home, is being desecrated and destroyed by our bad choices. And our own hearts, the source of those bad choices, are often as barren, lifeless, and polluted as the planet is becoming.

Epiphanies can help us here. We should make room for them, by learning to be still and to listen and to watch, and by learning to act out of the reverent stillness that is our best response to what epiphanies reveal to us: the constant, inexhaustible, always-surprising beauty of the world.

Maria Nita

Funeral Rituals for the Climate Crisis

We find in the protest art and performance of the climate movement a multitude of symbols for species extinction connected to religious rituals, and specifically funerary rites - such as vigils or funerary processions. The Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement, formally established in 2018, has ‘death’ as a core theme. Skulls, hour glasses, funeral clothes and coffins are an important part of XR material culture. I will argue here that a ritual model drawing on funerary rites can help us understand this material culture and the wider cultural engagement with the climate crisis.