Climate Change and Apocalypse (June 29th & 30th 2017)

9.00 – 9.30 Registration and coffee

9.30 – 9.40 Welcome

9.40 – 10.40 Keynote Speaker: David Livingstone, School of Geography, Archaeology & Palaeoecology, Queen's University Belfast:

"Our Past and Our Future:  Is the Weather to Blame?" 

10.40 – 11.00 Coffee break

11.00 – 11.30 Rupert Read, Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and Chair of Green House.

 “Seeding a civilisation to succeed this one”

We live in absurd times. We are almost committed now to catastrophic climate change (once over 3 degrees, feedbacks will probably take us to 6 remorselessly). And yet, especially after Trump’s election, we are less likely than ever to head off such climate change.

This civilisation is almost certainly finished.

And so: we need to start to build ‘lifeboats’. We need to seed what might be a viable successor-civilisation from out of the brilliance, squalor and ruins of this one. 

We need somehow to do this while being all-too-aware of the very strong likelihood that the new civilisation will have to pass through an unholy baptism of fire: the fire of global-overheat, and the fire of the wars and extreme turbulence that will accompany it.

If there is to be a civilisation to succeed this one, it will have to survive - without being turned yet more vicious - a time that is likely quite literally to test humanity more severely by far than we have ever been tested before. How does one build lifeboats that are not so viciously exclusive that they undermine their own worth?

Perhaps the task then is not even as easy (sic!) as building just one new civilisation. Perhaps we need to plan on two, in sequence: perhaps the real task is to build a ‘lifeboat-civilisation’, a decent and yet realistic-pragmatic ethic that can carry some of us through the storms of our children and grandchildren, and that can carry within it the seeds of a future successor civilisation that might exist and truly flourish in a less awfully-pressed time that we might one day be able to recover to.

We may have to make some pretty awful compromises even to be able to seed that future civilisation at all. 

11.30 – 12.00 Michael Svoboda, The George Washington University, Washington, DC:

“Cine-atheisia: Hollywood’s Godless Climaticlysms.”

When Al Gore talks about the roots of his environmental activism, he often recounts the story of his son’s near-fatal accident. In Earth in the Balance and in the book version of An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), this story includes prominent professions of faith: Al and Tipper fervently prayed that their son would recover. But in the film version of AIT, prayer is never mentioned; it is Gore’s connection with nature that grounds his being not his faith or family. The film’s director, Davis Guggenheim, excised religion from Gore’s activism. In a similar but much more widely viewed way, this paper will argue, directors of fiction films have artificially removed religion from the climate-changed futures they envision. Working with a set of sixteen apocalyptic and dystopic films identified in a comprehensive overview of cli-fi films he published last January, the author will show that religion rarely plays a role in these screen worlds, and when it does, religion is as likely to be a sign of madness or menace as a source of solace. Nevertheless, religious themes—redemption and forgiveness, hard-heartedness and damnation—are played out on the human plane, as some characters reconnect with each other and find the strength to carry on, while others, selfishly seeking their own security, cut themselves off from aid and support. After reviewing the most frequent variations on these themes, the paper will then discuss possible explanations for these observed results. Has religion been excluded as part of a deliberate marketing strategy? Or are these new end-of-the-world films simply constrained by the genres they imitate: action, adventure, disaster? (But then why was religion removed from these genres?) The paper will conclude by offering a preliminary answer to a hypothetical question: How might the incorporation of religion change these films? 

12.00- 1.00 Lunch

1.00 – 1.30 Stefan Skrimshire, School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds (recorded):

“What’s bad about Doomsday?”

Climate change reporting tells us that we are to expect ever rising rates of species extinction and biodiversity loss as features of our world. But it is assumed that the prospect of human extinction that really has the power to motivate behavioural and political changes. In this talk I want to critique the assumption that a ‘doomsday’ scenario for humanity does the sort of moral work that we think it might –especially as derived from literary and cinematic end-time epics (such as The Children of Men) in which, faced with an imminent end to the ‘human project’, social life is is rendered meaningless and suicidal. 

By contrast, Christian apocalyptic theology operates according to a radically alternative logic. It attempts a form of ethical critique (of the present) through a description of living in the end times. I’ll suggest how this temporal innovation - of revealing life as lived ‘as if’ doomsday had already occurred is influencing moral and political framing of the ethics of climate change.

1.30 –2.00 Paul Reid - Bowen, Senior Lecturer in Religions, Philosophies and Ethics Bath Spa University:

“The Cthulhucene Now! An Apocalyptic Myth for an Age of Climatic Horror.”

While entities such as aliens, demons and monsters are frequently evoked in literature, myth and popular culture, the troubling proposal advanced in this paper is that they are already here, dwelling alongside us. Whether algorithm-driven financial markets, autonomous media networks, machinic energy assemblages, sociopathic corporations, or older and stranger emergent entities, such as capitalism, nation states and Gaia, there are multitudes of other-than-human intelligences perturbing and transforming the world according to logics that are largely indifferent to human interests and control. We inhabit an age of monstrous agencies and powers, an age which might most fittingly be labelled, in reference to the horror fiction/mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, the Cthulhucene. How, though, does this relate to our civilization that is on track to deliver a 4°C+ rise in global average temperature within as little as a century? My suggestion is that the unfolding climate catastrophe is, in part, due to a failure of philosophical and religious imagination. Our cognitive abilities have proved woefully inadequate to the task of engaging with the wickedly complex, ecosystemic problems of our time. In agreement with Alex Evans it is arguable that we are suffering from a ‘myth gap’, and as Paul Kingsnorth has recently noted, the well worn narratives of a battle or war to save the Earth may not be serving our best interests. What is required is a new apocalyptic myth appropriate to the demands of our more-than-human, monstrous times. Rather than fixating on foes with all-to-human frailties, motives and vices, the challenges facing us may require that we mimic the investigators of Lovecraftian horror fiction, searching for ways to survive against exotic entities whose intentions and powers are barely comprehensible. Minimally, as Isabelle Stengers has observed, these agencies have to be recognised, lest we be devoured or overpowered by them.

2.00 – 2.30 Benjamin Huskinson, Queen’s University Belfast:

“Everything is Fine: Climate Change Denial and the Preceding Apocalypse.”

This paper explores apocalypse as revelation in the context of climate change. Despite overwhelming scholarly evidence for the recent drastic deviation in climactic patterns since the industrial age, in both politics and popular culture there exists a narrative that opposes the need for drastic (re)action. Climactic catastrophe in popular culture is set against the wider backdrop of the “end of days” genre, which casts the reality of climate change in the same light as asteroids, zombies, computer uprisings, and the supernatural. This paper argues that contrary to the frame provided by popular culture, that the dangers of climate change rest in the future, the apocalypse as revelation of major climactic deviation has already occurred, and public discourse would do well to adjust to this deviation, shifting perspective of a climactic apocalypse from a future-oriented event to one that has already happened.

2.30 – 3.00 Shailen Popat, University of Oxford:

“Climate and Apocalypse - a Repeated End; a Repeated Beginning”

This paper views the apocalypse through the lens of the Hindu philosophical concept of eternal cyclic time.  From this perspective, there is no singular point of commencement of time, and no end to it, but rather a circular continuum, that is, a cyclic concept of time.  The hijacked and much maligned Hindu swastika, actually depicts a cycle of 4 equal segments representing four ages of humanity, namely Satyug, Tretayug, Dwapuryug and Kaliyug.  The features of each age differ, as does the confluence of each age.  It is argued that the current apocalypse is a feature of the confluence of Kaliyug and Satyug and thus although undoubtedly calamitous, is not an end.  Humanity will continue and rebuild a civilisation from scratch harbouring in Satyug.

3.00 – 3.30 break

3.30 – 4.00 Zeke Baker (Presenter) / John Hall, University of California, Davis:

"Antinomies of Apocalypse: Hermeneutic Phenomenology and the Temporal Deconstruction of Climatic Imaginaries" (recorded)

This essay addresses the issue of how apocalyptic climates are figured scientifically. Employing a hermeneutic phenomenology of time (Hall 2009, 2016), the analysis considers three broad dialectical moments of efforts at containment of apocalyptic climate futures. First is a dialectic between climate knowledge and colonization. Using the case of the territorial expansion of the United States in the 1800-1850 period, we show how apocalyptic constructions of climates were contained through a providential discourse that linked state formation and climate knowledge in a way that made futures ‘legible.’ Second is an ecological and epistemological dialectic between capitalism and climate. Through analysis of the economic colonization of land and labor in 1870-1930 period in the US, we trace how a temporal ambivalence ‘stabilized’ climate as a scientific and economic category while also upheaving the socio-ecological relationship to climate. The third is a dialectic between science and dystopia, marked by a central antinomy between positivist assumptions about science as a ‘value-free’ domain and human society as potentially threatened by the apocalyptic spectre of climate change. By analyzing recently shifting relations between climate experts, the politics of climate adaptation, and US security operations regarding global warming, we show how dystopian imaginaries are partially contained through these relations. Despite configuring global climate and social impacts as systems to be strategically managed and operated on, however, apocalyptic futures persist as possible temporal registers of political intervention. The essay concludes by evaluating how a hermeneutic phenomenology provides entry-points into understanding the temporal logics of action across various social domains and especially within the state-science relationship.

4.00 – 4.30 Earl Harper, University of Bristol:

“Which Apocalypse do We Want?: An Exploration of the Post-Politics of Climate Change Apocalyptic Urbanism.”

The literature on secular apocalypses is currently in the throes of a debate over the usefulness of the apocalypse to contemporary thought in the face of social and environmental crises. Williams (2011) asserts that the apocalypse is a useful way of thinking because it helps the apocalyptic subject to understand post-/ultra-politics relationships at play within society. Žižek (2011) argues that the apocalypse, whilst perhaps useful, is also a potential source of discord as people move to live out their dark desires under the imminent possibility of a world where the social structures that bind subjects to order and rules are removed. However, the question of the usefulness of apocalypse is very rarely applied to cities. This paper will examine the forms of representation of an apocalypse that are present in contemporary urban landscapes, and more specifically, the forms of control these exert on the people who pass through the spaces. Through a visual semiotic analysis of urbanscapes in London, UK, the work will ask whether urban spaces are currently creating a new form of urban millenarianism, or creating a post-political space, and most importantly, whether those two concepts are mutually exclusive of one another. The paper will explore whether collective human agency in the face of an imagined or real climatic apocalypse is hindered by the kinds of large-scale urban eco-redevelopments that can be seen in the urbanscape of contemporary Euro-American cities, by replacing questions of whether with how to progress with a sustainable model of capitalist urbanism. The paper will argue that the evacuation of Rancière’s politics from the Lacanian Symbolic order is happening through these projects, creating a postpolitical moment and locking urbanites into a deepening inequality. The conclusion being that in avoiding an apocalypse of nature, we may be creating an apocalypse of character. 

4.30 Mike Hulme, Head of Department & Professor of Climate and Culture, Department of Geography, School of Global Affairs, Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy, King’s College London: Discussant comments

5.00 Close

6.00 Drinks at the Swan Hotel

7.00 Delegates dinner in the River Room at the Swan Hotel

9.00 – 9.30 Registration and Coffee

9.30 – 9.40 Welcome

9.40 – 10.40 Keynote Speaker: Michael Ruse, Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida:

“The Gaia Hypothesis: Is It Really Such a Silly Idea?”

10.40 – 11.00 break

11.00 – 11.30 Ryan Bird, University of Oklahoma:

“Sonic Attunement as a Remedy to Apocalyptic Climate Change Exhaustion”

Conventional approaches to addressing anthropogenic climate change underutilize insights from the humanities and creative arts, yielding a discourse insufficient for the seriousness of this global issue. In particular, the scale of climate change is hard for most people to perceive relative to the disruptive potential it has upon our world. Framing climate change as an apocalypse has proven capable of raising awareness of climate change as an issue, but fails in effecting change when the apocalypse never seems to materialize.

Etymologically related but critically distanced from the Kantian and Romantic notions of Stimmung, attunement enables orientation towards tension and dissonance. In this sense, one attunes to phenomena which are strange, uncertain, or otherwise incapable of direct relation to humans—an encounter with something outside normal human perception, such as climate change. Sound is a medium through which such attunement can occur, making it an agent toward effective change. The politics accompanying sound create a fertile if transitory landscape for attunement, yet its dependence upon performance and distribution to reach audiences creates problems as a medium for communicating about issues such as climate change. Its benefits have not been properly applied despite its potential.

In my paper, I examine several contemporary songs concerning climate change by the music artists Radiohead and ANOHNI. In examining their thematic content through discourse analysis   and other performance-based aspects about the songs, I hope to better understand the relationship between climate change and apocalypse as embodied through music. Furthermore, I examine how this relationship might be altered to enhance attunement and message dissemination, which consequently affects change through this process.

11.30 – 12.00 Graham Harvey, The Open University:

“Between trauma and justice: Indigenous knowledges of Climate Change.”

The anthropogenic end of the world has already happened and continues to happen daily. This being so, world-(re)making is a primary activity of Indigenous communities, scientists and activists globally. Indigenous peoples —  and their larger-than-human kin-based ecologies — have faced and continue to face the apocalypse of climate change in ways that mark the Anthropocene as more than a technological problem. It requires attention to justice. This presentation employs the work of two Indigenous scholars, and my research alongside two rivers in Indigenous communities, to consider the apocalypse of climate change and Indigenous responses. Larry Gross’ Anishinaabe Ways of Knowing and Being (2014) examines the stresses caused by the trauma of settler colonialism. It unfolds perspectives on how customary practices or traditional cultures aid Indigenous people to deal with such traumas. Kyle Whyte’s work “focuses on the problems and possibilities Indigenous peoples face regarding climate change, environmental justice, and food sovereignty” (http://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu/#intro). Forced displacement and ecocidal over-exploitation are associated prongs of settler colonialism. Thus it is no poetic exaggeration to state that Indigenous people have already experienced anthropogenic climate change at its extreme — and continue to do so. Nonetheless, Indigenous people are finding significant resources in their world-making traditions for facing the continuing and escalating impacts. These revelatory endeavors require an unsettling of “most-colonial” business-as-usual in which environmental justice for Indigenous people and the wider-than-human community must take priority.

12.00 – 1.00 Lunch

1.00 – 1.30 Katharina Gerstenberger, University of Utah:

“Anxiety in the Anthropocene:  Climate Change in Literary Fiction.” 

Climate change is a “wicked problem” in more than one way: there is, of course, the science, but there are also the politics that influence the science, the communication about the challenges we face, and the psychology.  In 2008, the American Psychological Association (APA) set up a task force to conduct research on climate anxiety.  The results suggest that a growing number of people suffer from fears about our changing climate, leading to depression and even suicide.  Wide-spread worry about large scale threats to the environment is not new.  A comparable phenomenon is the anxiety about nuclear war in the post-war period.  Also similar is the discourse about dying forests in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, which, ironically has now become a favorite example for those trying to refute concern over environmental degradation as hysteria.  My presentation focuses on the representation of climate change and anxiety in works of literature.  Fiction is uniquely equipped to explore human distress.  I will draw on Indian writer and essayist Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), a work in which Ghosh reflects on the ability of fiction, in particular the novel, to put into words the threat of a warming globe and the anxieties it induces.  The sacred, Ghosh suggests, and the ways in which it allows us to imagine the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, can play an important role in the efforts to curb climate change as well as for the renewal of literature. I will also draw on Bulgarian-German writer Ilija Trojanow’s The Lamentations of Zeno (2011), his novel about a glaciologist driven to suicide in response to ice melt. The challenge that must be addressed is to understand climate anxieties in ways that are constructive for the individual and the planet. 

1.30 – 2.00 Richard Irvine, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge:

“Dust: on climate fatalism.”

The focus of this paper is our contemporary fascination with ruin, and the growing sense of ruination as historical inevitability. The background to this is what I term a 'convergence of catastrophisms'. Over the past two centuries we have seen a divergence of two narrative frames of time; one describing gradual and continuous processes over deep time, the other, cataclysmic events in time as shaping forces in history. Uniformitarianism aligned with a sense of the earth's continuity, Catastrophism aligned with rupture, and in this came to be associated largely with religious perspectives that emphasised rupture and 'end-time' thinking with regards to time. Yet the recognition of the role of mass extinction events in earth history, and debates surrounding the Anthropocene (a geological epoch of our own making) and the sixth mass extinction event, constitute, if not a return of the repressed, then certainly a revived 'neocatastrophism' within the earth sciences. In this way, models of geological time come into alignment with other catastrophic registers. The anticipation of ruin leaving its mark in time becomes a shared narrative frame where the 'end times' are not purely a narration of Biblical understanding, but are manifest in apparently 'secular' domains too, such as fears of techno-apocalypse and, of course, environmental crisis. What I want to explore here are the social effects of such end-time thinking, and how prophecies of ruin can prevent humans from taking responsibility for our active role in environmental harm: indeed, how our fascination with ruin even seems to titillate us with the fantasy of a world-without-us.

2.00 – 2.30 Tristan Sturm (Presenter), Queen’s University Belfast and Nicholas Lustig, University of Buffalo:  

“Competing Environmental Apocalypses: Post-Politics and the Possibility of a Radical Apocalyptics.”

Drawing on the post-political literature, contemporary environmental apocalyptic discourses are being mobilized by a populist politics to legitimize and stabilize the anti-democratic consensus of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. This article examines three environmental apocalyptic discourses: Evangelical, secular eco-activists and scientists, and radical social theorists. In our examination of these three apocalyptic discourses we find a greater degree of heterogeneity, competition, and polarization than the characterization of “post-political” would suggest. We also find the post-politicization that occurs in each of these discourses differs from the others in discursive strategy and political intent. Most importantly for us, we find evidence in each of these three apocalyptic discourses of authors or groups of authors crafting systematic critiques of capitalism, championing causes of radical socio-environmental justice, and collectively contributing to the emergence of a paradigm of radical apocalyptic discourse and politics. We conclude by proposing the eco-precariat as a possible name for this emancipatory subject and with a brief summary of what we consider are the main principles of a radical environmental apocalypticism.

2.30 – 3.00 Ariel Hessayon, Senior Lecturer & Deputy Head of Department of History Goldsmiths, University of London:

“The linkage between extreme weather events and Parker's thesis of a general crisis.”

That early moderns were living through what we now call a ‘Little Ice Age’ is indisputable.  The term itself was coined by the US glaciologist Francois Matthes in the late 1930s and is associated with temperature drops of several degrees below the modern optimum.

Once deeply unfashionable, climate change has increasingly become a valid subject for historical study.  Indeed there have been quite a few works dealing with its cultural, social, economic and religious impact during the early modern period, notably by Wolfgang Behringer and Geoffrey Parker.

In this paper I want to explore the linkage between extreme weather events and Parker's thesis of a general crisis, specifically with reference to early modern England. By extension I will also deal with manifestations of apocalyptic thought precipitated by extreme weather events during the period.  These included prolonged periods of drought leading to harvest failure and famine, and the freezing of rivers which paralysed trade and communication networks as well as stymying military campaigns.  Contemporaries interpreted these events as the judgement of a vengeful God punishing them for their sins.  Accordingly, they scapegoated outsiders; moderated their behaviour; preached sermons exhorting repentance; and prepared for the coming apocalypse.  At the same time they also adapted - most significantly through changes in clothing, hairstyles and architectural design; not to mention local and national legislation designed to stockpile provisions in times of food and medical emergencies.

3.00 – 3.30 break

3.30 – 4.00 Senayon Olaoluwa, University of Ibadan, Nigeria:

‘"It's Climate Change...That Is Everywhere": Post-transitional Ecology and Migration in Gordimer's No Time like the Present’ (recorded)

By constructing South Africa's post-transitional condition as locatable within a discourse of ecology, this paper contends that the multiple challenges of the present addressed in Nadine Gordimer's No Time like the Present (2012)  can be accommodated in the representation of black leadership. It argues further that the compromised environmental condition and the anxiety over climate change as a culmination of inveterate capitalist history, find amplification in the materiality of "street dirt".  The paper affirms a linkage between the metaphor of the "street dirt", black dispossession and the general disillusionment of the post-transitional era and its capacity to instigate dislocation, a view that is dramatized in the migration of the Reeds, the mixed protagonist family. It further reads the anxiety over climate change in the text as illustrating the actuality of "ecophobia".  It argues that ecophobia in the context of the novel is sustained not just by a baseless expression of hatred for the natural world, but also by the construction of the natural world as an apocalyptic category with grave consequences for dislocation. It is the position of the paper that central to the ecological anxieties is the multiple intersections of historical and contemporary dynamics such as colonialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism. The paper concludes that the migration of the family explodes the myth about the popular representation of post-transitional emigration as exclusive to white South Africans, as the involvement of Jabu and the children indicates that the emigration turn also has implications for blacks.

4.00 – 4.30 Tom Albrecht, Queen’s University Belfast:

“Interdependencies of Christian eschatology and global environmental change in American Evangelicalism: An analysis of eschatological discourses.”

Eschatologies, the visions of the future and particularly of “the end of times”, are one important element of Christianity and especially present in American Evangelicalism. Keeping the large influence of American Evangelicalism on the American culture and politics in mind, eschatologies have the ability to shape American attitudes, including the perception of the environment as well as environmental relevant actions.

However, religious narratives such as eschatology not only influence environmental attitudes as many scholars have discussed, but conversely the rising presence of environmentalism in the public discourse can change understandings, beliefs and performances of Christian eschatology. Especially since the end of the Cold War environmental discourses have become a part of the larger assemblage of American Evangelical eschatological narratives and through that, a part of Christian religion itself.

A large number of American Evangelical authors have started to interpret environmental change as signs of “the end of times” and put an emphasis on environmental change in fictional and non-fictional millennialist literature. Moreover, internet blogs like for instance raptureready.com see environmental degradation as a precursor for the Rapture and even use environmental hazards as indicators to form a Rapture Index.

The research on eschatology and environmental change has largely been concerned with how these beliefs and practices have influenced adherent’s engagement with the social world. Contrasting this, this paper will discuss at the relationship of environmental change and Christian eschatologies as two mutually affecting discourses.

4.30 Discussant comments.

5.00 Finish.