This isn't just a matter of effective persuasion.

forcefully situates Indigenous tribes as people of the Holocene who are in an inevitable de-cline, thereby projecting onto them a fantasy of finitud

a historic one that is still unfolding. “

climate crisis is an intensification of the already operative epistemologicaland environmental perturbations of colonial territorialization and resource extraction.

epistemology

The “symbolic” value of his photograph does not lie in the question of whether or not itdemonstrates an exceptional variance in scientific terms; it represents the immediacy andurgency of a global ecological reality.

This kind of access was how Eliasson wasthinking about it - the encounter with Ice Watch |is in a way a dialogue with ice blocks, not a one-way human conversation in a mirror that happens |to be made of ice. We've been having that kind of |conversation with nonhuman things for thousandsof years

ransitioning to caringabout nonhumans in a more conscious way,

Reductionism

NeoplatonicChristian idea

Ifyousay‘Idon't careaboutthisissue,’itmeansthatyoucareaboutthis issueenoughtosaythat.

Thisisbecausebeautyjusthap-pens,without our ego cookingitup.Theexperienceof beautyitselfisanentity thatisn't‘me’.Thismeansthat theexperience hasanintrinsicweirdnesstoit.Thisiswhyotherpeople’stastemightcomeacrossasbizarreorkitschy

We can start to break through this difficultimpasse by noting that what is called environment isjust lifeforms and their extended genomic expres-sions: think ofspider’s webs and beaver’s dams. Whenyou think this way, you are already thinking aboutwholes and parts in a different way.

Wemayfeelbadabout workerssuffer-ing,butprofitsmustbemaintained, corporationsmustgoonexistingforthesakeofexisting.

Sofar,such an approach hasnotbeenworkingoutso wellforthechimpanzee-ormostothernonhumancreatureseither

Individualrights are based on property rights, so that being inpossession ofyourselfis one criterion for having them,for example. But if everything has rights, nothingcan be property, so nothing can have rights. I

environment (or ecosys-tem) and a lifeform (individual animal)

It’s fraught with ambi-guities, because sharks can eat you and viruses cankill you and it would be a good idea to protect ourhuman selves from viruses and sharks

Jainism

Both have to dowith a concept that I'm going to call tuning. I thinkwe are already being ecological - we just aren’t con-sciously aware of it. And those of us who say they’rebeing ecological might be saying it in a mode thatdoesn’t have anything in particular to do with coex-isting nonviolently with nonhuman beings, whichis roughly what I take ecological ethics and polit-ics to mean. T

Well, so you're already relating to a nonhumanbeing for no particular reason. You're already beingecological.”

Attheendofecologyconferences,yousooftenhearsomeonesaying, ‘Butwhatarewegoingto do?”Andthishastodowithguiltaboutsit-tingonchairsforafewdays thinkingandtalking

you are operating within the languageof good and evil, guilt and redemption.

You think I need to change mymindset, now, then I can really start making a difference.

AlfredWegener’stheoryofcontinentaldrift,whichpositedupheavals ofsuddenandunimaginableviolence,wasfordecades discountedandderided.

Inthinking aboutthemismatch betweenmypersonalconcernsandthe contentofmypublishedwork,Ihavecometobe convincedthatthe discrepancyisnottheresultofpersonalpredilections:itarisesout ofthe peculiarforms ofresistance thatclimatechangepresentstowhatisnowregardedasseriousfiction

And if the urgency of a subject wereindeed a criterion of its seriousness, then, consideringwhat climate change actually portends for the future ofthe earth, it should surely follow that this would be theprincipal preoccupation of writers the world over — andthis, I think, is very far from being the case.

becausetotreatthemasmagical orsurrealwouldbetorobthemofpreciselythe quality thatmakes themso urgentlycompelling— whichisthattheyare actuallyhappeningonthis earth, at thistime.

Tothecontrary, these highlyimprobable occurrencesareoverwhelmingly,urgently,astoundinglyreal.

manypeopledid not takeshelterbecause‘they refused to believe thathurricaneswerepossible in Brazil

the essentialimprobability of the phenomenon led them to underesti-‘mate the threat and thus delay emergency measures.

thewriterwillhavetoworkhardtomakeitappearpersuasive

Thevictoryofgradualistviewsinsciencewassimilarlywonbycharacterizingcatastrophismasun-modern.

incredulity

ly bourgeo

primacy

Orinother words:fillersareanattemptat rationalizing thenovelistic universe: turn-/ingitinto aworld of fewsurprises,feweradventures,and nomiraclesatall.

banishing of theimprobableandtheinsertionofthe everyday.

robability and the modern novel are in fact twins,born at about the same time, among the same people,under a shared star that destined them to work as vesselsfor the containment of the same kind of experience.

probability isa ‘manner of conceiving the world constituted withoutour being aware of it.

Ihavereturnedtothemoftenovertheyears,hopingtoputthemtousein a novel,but onlytomeetwithfailureateveryattempt.g

Sounfamiliarwasthisphenomenonthatthe papersliterallydid notknowwhattocallit:at a lossforwordsthey resorted to‘cyclone’and‘funnel-shaped whirlwind.”

why contemporaryculture finds it so hard to deal with climate change

Anthropocene

et, it is a striking fact that whennovelists do choose to write about climate change it isalmost always outside of fiction.

Whenthe subjectof climatechangeoccursinthesepub-lications,itisalmost alwaysin relation to nonfiction;

Thatclimatechangecastsamuchsmallershadowwithinthelandscape ofliterary fictionthanitdoeseveninthe publicarenaisnot hardtoestablish.

I would not be able to speak of these encountersas instances of recognition if some prior awareness ofwhat [ was witnessing had not already been implantedin me,

the air too can come to life with sudden anddeadly violence - as it did in the Congo in 198

r. The knowledge that results from recogni-tion, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery ofsomething new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoningwith a potentiality that lies within oneself.