I remember when I first learned about climate change in the first grade — greenhouse gasses cause a warming planet, which, in turn, melt the Arctic and leave our beloved polar bears to fend for themselves as their homes wither away. At the time, I truly thought the world was ending. My anxieties existed out of an affinity toward polar bears, as one and the same living creatures, although I felt myself safe and unscathed by our warming planet and depleting ozone layer.
Now that I am older, such a simple cause-and-effect relationship somehow seems so complicated, with mega-corporations and government lobbyists now standing in the way of sustainable living. Climate change was no longer an accidental symptom of human society treatable with riding the bus more frequently or switching to reusable straws, but rather a political, economic, racialized and gendered issue first-grade me never had a chance against.
I still feel like the world is ending, and that is not an uncommon sentiment. However, as a Binghamton University student from New York City, climate change has not yet affected me and, presumably, many of my peers in life-altering ways. And yet, this does not mean we should not care. In April 2022, over 750,000 Somalis were displaced as a result of climate-driven droughts with the World Bank predicting that more than 140 million people will internally migrate within Sub-Saharan, South Asia and Latin America by 2050. These instances of suffering should be enough to be in favor of ambitious climate policies and practices. Still, all too often, the argument that climate change will “affect us all” is propagated by activists to persuade their peers, government officials and billionaires, like Jeff Bezos, to care — and not necessarily for the right reasons.
The notion that climate change will affect us all and, therefore, will require all of our attention not only operates within a fundamentally utilitarian framework that privileges some lives over others, namely climate refugees who have already been forced to pay attention, but also utilizes the language of crisis to preserve a system that will inevitably lead lives of insecurity, here or elsewhere, in the media or not.
Alexandra Kollontai’s 1923 essay, “Make Way for Winged Eros: A Letter to Working Youth” has been incredibly influential to personal beliefs. Kollontai interrogates the role of love, comradeship and solidarity within leftist politics and ultimately argues for a praxis determined and motivated by love. Any other catalyst would fail to account for intersections in identities and further alienate ourselves from one another. For example, a blanket Marxist approach to politics may neglect the abolishment of “property” in heteronormative relationships and an advocacy centering housing as a human right may neglect the systemic displacement of indigenous folk. In both examples, morality comes into play and may serve as the motivation behind individuals’ activism. However, and to Kollontai’s point, without the force of genuine love for humans, different and alike, activism quickly becomes stale and even performative.
When considering the rise of performative activism on social media, where platforms provide plenty of space to state a cause but fail to transform rhetoric into action, many critiques go beyond its self-serving project. On the one hand, reposting an infographic helps create the illusion of caring without actually carrying the emotional and moral burden of caring. Even further though, performative activism runs the risk of viewing systemic problems as single, isolated issues insofar as the nuances, or lack thereof, can be captured in a single post.
Kollontai’s proposition for a leftist politics based on love, comradeship and solidarity is especially important in the context of our current climate crisis — a solution which focuses on saving the most amount of lives as possible comes a little too late as climate change has already devastated many lives, disproportionately those of women and the low and middle-class. Seventy percent of those in low and middle-income countries are born female, whose vulnerability to climate change is exacerbated by lack of health needs, especially maternal care, poor air quality and especially in domestic quarters and lack of economic ownership, which is a daunting issue post natural disasters and extreme weather events.
Scientific American describes climate anxiety as an “overwhelmingly white phenomenon” as “Climate change and its effects — pandemics, pollution, natural disasters — are not universally or uniformly felt — the people and communities suffering most are disproportionately Black, Indigenous and people of color.” Sure, framing the impact of climate change to be as expansive and of the greatest magnitude possible is effective at mobilizing as many people as possible. However, climate change is not just a utilitarian issue. It is a problem worthy of concern before “all of us” feel its effects, because many — especially those that are non-white — are facing displacement, starvation, poverty, etc. due to our warming planet already. Oftentimes, this utilitarian rhetoric lands as “just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or to get ‘back to normal.’”
While rhetoric may seem like the least of our concerns with a deteriorating planet, it’s actually the key to a sustainable solution — a solution that does simply mean preserving economic and gender inequalities so that “all of us,” namely white people, may continue to live comfortably. When we describe our current deteriorating climate as a sort of “crisis,” we must also ask ourselves what type of world is not in a perpetual state of crisis. The language of crisis overlooks the fact that insecurity, a warming climate, displacement and racial and economic inequalities are inevitable in a capitalist world, which produces crises experimentally to justify structural changes that reinforce the rule of capital. This is also known as the shock doctrine, a term coined by cultural critic Naomi Klein, who breaks down how capitalism exploited catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War to further neoliberalism. Will we be permanently reliant on the mass-produced, micro-plastic-full products as well as the sustainability promises of large corporations to cope with our warming planet? With our lack of clean water, shelter or even fresh food?
A climate “crisis” applies to everyone and necessitates changes on the level of government and market. However, we need to be wary of the rhetoric we use to describe climate change — the language must reflect the systemic ways in which among “all of us,” some are at more risk or are already affected by the climate. It’s valid that climate change worries us, as it should — nothing ever beats the end of the world. And when the end of the world is staring at us right in eye, we must ask ourselves, when was life ever “normal?”
Julie Ha is a junior double-majoring in English and comparative literature and is Pipe Dream’s Assistant Opinions Editor.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece which represents the views of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the Staff Editorial.