Strewn through the web of considerations, readings, narratives, and analyses that make up the recent sixth assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a discernible (though faint) current of hope in the face of overwhelming loss: a suggestion that despite the cosmic odds of galvanizing international action in the direction of climate justice, despite the confidence scientists now have that most of us will witness increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons, shorter cold seasons, rising sea levels, and more flooding events, in our lifetimes, there is still something humans can do to cut down emissions to net zero and potentially save the planet. “The climate time-bomb is ticking,” the UN Secretary General António Guterres said in response to the report, “but IPCC’s report is a how-to guide to defuse it.”
Hope thrives at all costs.
And yet, trouble lurks in how we are meeting this moment. If we limited climate response-ability to the convenience of reducing emissions, then the cinematic metaphor of rushing in with military gear to defuse a ticking bomb might feel apt. However, if we reconsidered the hidden legacies of the modern, the burden of freedom, the luxuries of civilization, the troubling subterranean worlds that dwell beneath the highways of the public, the bones of the racialized Atlantic, and the unregulated cobalt mines that subsidize modern aspirations for “net zero”, we might notice that we are already living within the material afterlife of a temporality-bomb that has long detonated: the widening radii of the blast just hasn’t reached everyone yet. We are the explosion; the Human is the flattening of realms, the death of worlds.
Join us on Thursday, May 4, 2023 (9:00 AM - 10:30 AM PST / 12:00 AM - 1:30 PM ET / 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM CET) for our next event in the ongoing series The Edges in the Middle, where OBI Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe will meet with celebrated Canadian author, professor, and social activist Naomi Klein; and, Dr. Yuria Celidwen, a scholar of Indigenous Nahua and Maya descent from the highlands of Chiapas (Mexico), Senior Fellow of OBI, and thinker whose work straddles the intersections between Indigenous studies, cultural psychology, and contemplative science. Together, we will explore the untrod path with feet unshod; we will construct a stranger thesis that calls into question – if only for a moment – the anthropocentricity of hope in becoming-responsive to explosive transformations. We will investigate the agency of grief, the invitation nestled within the idea that to stand a chance, we might need to fall.
Click here to register for free.
Note: Forum members will have exclusive access to engage with Bayo virtually after the conversation takes place in a private Zoom room. More details on this coming soon.
